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Smith's Bible Dictionary
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Smith's Bible Dictionary, originally named A Dictionary of the Bible, is a 19th-century Bible dictionary containing upwards of four thousand entries that became named after its editor, William Smith. Its popularity was such that condensed dictionaries appropriated the title, "Smith's Bible Dictionary".
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The original dictionary was published as a three-volume set in 1863, in London and Boston, USA. This was followed by A Concise Dictionary of the Bible (1865), intended for the general reader and students, and A Smaller Dictionary of the Bible (1866), for use in schools. A Comprehensive Dictionary of the Bible (1868), was published simultaneously in London and New York, and a four-volume Dictionary of the Bible (1871), was published in Boston, amongst other things incorporating the appendices of the first edition into the main body of the text.
In the UK, a corresponding second edition of the first volume in two parts, edited by Smith and J. M. Fuller, was published in 1893.
The original publications are now in the public domain; some derivative, commercial versions are still in copyright.
Noted contributors to the dictionary include Harold Browne, bishop of Ely; Charles J. Ellicott, bishop of Gloucester and Bristol; and the Cambridge scholars J. B. Lightfoot, William W. Selwyn, and Brooke Foss Westcott, who would later become bishop of Durham.
One of the American contributors was George Edward Post, a medical doctor and botanist (of the American University of Beirut (AUB)).[1]