Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary

Roswell Dwight Hitchcock (1817–1887) was Washburn Professor of Church History at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and from 1880 until his death its president. His New and Complete Analysis of the Holy Bible (about 1869) was a large topical arrangement of Scripture, and appended to it was a dictionary of the proper names of the Bible with their meanings. That dictionary is the module included in SwordSearcher.

It does one thing: it tells you what a Bible name means. There are 2,619 entries, each a name followed by its meaning in a word or two. For example:

• Abel: vanity; breath; vapor
• Barnabas: son of the prophet, or of consolation
• Immanuel: God with us
• Jerusalem: vision of peace
• Nathanael: the gift of God

Names matter in Scripture. God renamed Abram and Jacob, Hannah and Elizabeth named their sons for what God had done, and the angel told Joseph what to call the child and why. A reader who does not know that Isaac means "laughter" or that Bethel means "house of God" misses part of the passage. Hitchcock's dictionary puts that information a click away.

Two cautions. The meanings are brief, sometimes offer more than one possibility without saying which is likeliest, and do not distinguish between different people who share a name. And a few of Hitchcock's derivations would not be accepted by scholars today. For a closer look at a Hebrew or Greek name, the Strong's lexicons give the root words, and the fuller Bible dictionaries (Easton, Smith, Fausset) discuss the more important names at length.

Any name can be looked up directly by title in the Book panel, and the whole list can be searched by word, so you can find every name whose meaning includes "God" or "peace." Unlike the larger dictionaries, this module has no verse index, so its entries do not appear in the Verse Guide.