Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament | TDOT (16 vols.)

The Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (TDOT) is one of the most extensive and important works on the Old Testament ever produced. A requirement for sound scholarship on the Hebrew Bible, it remains as fundamental to Old Testament studies as its New Testament counterpart Theological Dictionary of the New Testament | TDNT does to New Testament studies.

Beginning with 'ābh ('āb), “father,” and continuing all the way through the Hebrew alphabet, TDOT provides extensive research and analysis of every Hebrew and Aramaic word group in the Old Testament. Leading scholars from a variety of Christian traditions and all across the globe contributed articles on individual words that explain the word’s semantic range, present its morphology, and identify its meaning in the Old Testament. Contributors employ philology as well as form-critical and traditio-historical methods to provide explanation for religious statements found in the original Hebrew.

To avoid artificially restricting the focus of the articles, TDOT considers larger groups of words that are related linguistically or semantically. Lexical work includes detailed surveys of a word’s occurrences, not only in biblical material but also in other ancient Near Eastern writings. Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, Ethiopic, Ugaritic, and Northwest Semitic sources receive detailed attention, as do Qumran’s texts and the Septuagint.

Also included is Volume XVI, which concludes the monumental, critically acclaimed Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament with an Aramaic dictionary. This latest and last TDOT volume incorporates nearly the complete lexicon of Biblical Aramaic as well as a major portion of the theologically, culturally, and historically relevant terms in other ancient Aramaic writings. Each article provides information on the term’s meaning and usage, is fully annotated, and contains a bibliography with cross-references to the entire TDOT series. Further enhancing Volume XVI are an introductory overview of the history of Aramaic and a comparative grammatical outline of ancient Aramaic at the end of the book.