Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 46:2 (Fall 1984)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

WTJ 46:2 (Fall 1984) p. 396

Book Reviews

Michael Zohary: Plants of the Bible: A Complete Handbook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. 223. $16.95.

The subtitle is misleading. Upon reading it, one expects a complete listing of plants in the Bible, followed by extensive discussions of philology, botany, previous research, and more. Zohary may indeed mention “all the plants” (see the title page), but the discussion is very meagre. He devotes a page or two at most to each of the 128 plants which he believes are mentioned in the Bible (he includes personal names [Adah and Zillah] and geographical names [Azekah) which he asserts are botanical terms). Actually, to say that Zohary devotes a page to each plant is also misleading. A typical page has almost as much blank white space as print and a good portion of a typical page is occupied by a picture. The pictures are pretty and occasionally useful, but they are the reason the price is so high.

When I first read the advertisements about this book, I expected that it would be a significant reference book for my research. Flowers, trees, grasses, thorns, and so on are mentioned throughout the Scriptures (especially in the Song of Songs). Most biblical scholars are not botanists and certainly it is notoriously difficult to translate plant names. Unfortunately, Zohary’s book will not help in such research. Many problems plague this book. Perhaps the main one is that, if it is true that most biblical scholars are not botanists, the botanist who wrote this book is no biblical scholar. While he begins each section with one or two Scripture passages, he never integrates. This means (1) he rarely informs us why he chose to identify a particular Hebrew word with a modern English equivalent and (2) he rarely informs us why our discovery of the right plant for the right Hebrew or Greek word is significant for our understanding of the texts. Furthermore, when Zohary does deal with topics of biblical research, he more than once shows that he is outside of his field. He is misleading when he states, “More than one thousand years of oral transmission preceded the setting down of the text of the Hebrew Bible” (p. 12). On the same page he argues that the two most helpful cognate languages for comparative philology are Aramaic and Arabic, informing us that “Accadian” is “the mother of them both” and not mentioning Ugaritic. He

WTJ 46:2 (Fall 1984) p. 397

writes about Sumeria (p. 183—a cross between Sumer and Samaria, I imagine) and mentions that Jacob, Rachel, and Leah lived in Mesopotamia (p. 188).

No one scholar can handle botany and the Bible at the level needed to make a significant contribution to our understanding of ancient Hebrew plant terminology. The best route to take in t...