Mounce's Complete Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words

by William D. Mounce, Miles V. Van Pelt (Editor), D. Matthew Smith (Editor)

For years, Vine’s Expository Dictionary has been the standard word study tool for pastors and laypeople, selling millions of copies. But sixty-plus years of scholarship have shed extensive new light on the use of biblical Greek and Hebrew, creating the need for a new, more accurate, more thorough dictionary of Bible words. William Mounce, whose Greek grammar has been used by more than 100,000 college and seminary students, is the editor of this new dictionary, which will become the layperson’s gold standard for biblical word studies. Mounce’s is ideal for the reader with limited or no knowledge of Greek or Hebrew who wants greater insight into the meanings of biblical words to enhance Bible study. It is also the perfect reference for busy pastors needing to quickly get at the heart of a word’s meaning without wading through more technical studies. What makes Mounce’s superior to Vine’s?

Genres: Reference, Theology, Christianity, Christian, Dictionaries, Nonfiction, Biblical Studies

1344 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

William D. Mounce (PhD, Aberdeen University) lives as a writer in Camas, Washington. He is the Vice President of Educational Development at BibleGateway.com and the president of Biblical Training, a nonprofit organization offering the finest in evangelical teaching to the world. See BillMounce.com for more information. Formerly he was the preaching pastor at a church in Spokane, a professor of New Testament and director of the Greek program at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and a professor of New Testament at Azusa Pacific University. He is the author of the bestselling New Testament Greek resources, Basics of Biblical Greek, and served as the New Testament chair of the English Standard Version translation of the Bible.

Reviews

[Mark Jr. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Vine's Expository Dictionary has been a staple book on laypeople's Bible reference shelves for decades. But the sciences of linguistics and interpretation have made advances over time, and a new work using those advances—and expressly created to replace Vine's—is now available from Zondervan. William Mounce's name is well recognized in American evangelicalism because his Greek textbooks are among the most popular available, so Zondervan approached him about producing this work. The new Vine's, then, is called Mounce's Complete Expository Dictionary of Old & New Testament Words.

Readers should be sure to read carefully through Mounce's valuable introduction and his word-study instructions. He mentions some common interpretive fallacies that Bible interpreters must avoid.

Though he wrote the introductory material, busy professor Bill Mounce does not have time to write dictionaries, so he guided a large group of his Ph.D. students in completing the work. These advanced degree candidates have done a good job making their work accessible to those not trained in the biblical languages. That was the whole point of Vine's, and is the point of Mounce's as well.

The main dictionary is organized by English words. Underneath each English word is generally a definition and brief discussion of the Hebrew and Greek words which most commonly underlie it (often just one word from each language). That brief discussion often merely surveys the usage of the word, quoting examples from the Bible text and helping readers build up their own understanding of individual words. The work also includes a dictionary organized by Hebrew words, then a dictionary organized by Greek words. Goodrick-Kohlenberger and Strong's numbers are provided throughout for easy cross reference. The typesetting is neat and the pages are thin like those of many Bibles, taking away from what would have given Mounce's an imposing heft.

I have been disappointed in the linguistic sophistication of a number of the entries; Mounce's work showed up as a negative example in my dissertation more than once, I believe. I wonder if all of Mounce's students really absorbed the truths in his introduction. All the same, this is better than Vine's.

This review—minus the last paragraph—originally appeared in the Christian Library Journal.

[Daniel Supimpa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been working on the revision of a Portuguese translation of the book, so it took a while to read the whole tome.

Interesting project, very similar in outlook and purpose to the now-classic Vine’s Dictionary. It is helpful for general biblical theological themes and lists of useful biblical references. Nonetheless, the quality of entries (writing style, theological connections, typos, etc.) varies a lot (from excellent to average/weak). How then can one evaluate this? Usually by being aware and reading more specific literature for each entry (which, ironically, would make Mounce’s Dictionary somehow unnecessary).