Breaking the cycle of familiar photographs (often outdated and misleading) that have circulated from textbooks to dictionaries for more than a generation, The New Westminster Dictionary of the Bible includes scores of fresh illustrations and maps, many of them prepared especially for this edition. All were chosen to convey information about Bible lands and times which is both authentic and relevant.

Photographs of scenery of the Holy Land provide an emotional as well as intellectual understanding of the Biblical period. Not included here are the usual "touristlike" photographs of religious sites which are chiefly misleading reconstructions. Shown, instead, is the geog raphy of the land. Little has changed during the twenty or thirty intervening centuries in the barrenness of the Judean wildemess, the starkness of Masada, the height of Carmel, or the topography of the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan River.

Photographs of artifacts and inscriptions demonstrate what indi viduals of the Biblical period made and said, show "daily life" themes contemporary not to us but to the ancient world. Scenes from steles and tombs reveal-within the stylized art forms of the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Hebrews-the hopes and threats as well as the habits of life millennia before our own.

More than threescore maps, including the famous sixteen full-color maps from The Westminster Historical Atlas to the Bible, give immediate orientation of major Near Easter sites and geographic features.