Old Testament Studies

The Fortress Commentary on the Bible

IMG_0055.JPGBack in late October I received a copy of the recently published Fortress Commentary on the Bible, (2014) published in two volumes, and I want to finally offer some thoughts on this massive work. I’ll make some observations about the project generally, but my comments will mostly focus on the OT volume (over 1000 pages). Apologies for the vague quote citation – I am working from a Kindle version of the book.

The interesting aspect of this opportunity was that at the SBL/AAR conference in San Diego the publisher held a reception for reviewers, which I attended. A recording of the SBL/AAR roundtable about the Commentary can be found here.

A Commentary on the Bible

Any time a project of this scale is undertaken there are kudos to be doled out. And that is true in this case as well. I was impressed with the scope of these volumes right off the bat. That the OT volume also includes the Apocrypha is, in my opinion, certainly increases the value of this set. Although not canonical, the Apocryphal writings form a significant part of the literary and religious world of the Second Temple period (including the thought-world of the New Testament) that is indispensable to scriptural interpretation. If thoroughness is the goal when it comes to understanding Scripture, this feature of the Fortress set is a step in the right direction.

Reception History, Plurality and Relevance

Due to its significant length, I have not read the OT volume cover to cover, but only select portions to get an idea of the book’s prevailing concerns. The most prominent of these is reception history, as the OT volume in large part discusses interpretive history of a given book. Many times in reception-historical scholarship no hermeneutical stance is made explicit, but rather a straight-forward account of interpretive options is presented. This is not the case with the Fortress volume. At the outset, the editors note that the Commentary is aimed at helping students of the Bible gain respect for “the antiquity and cultural remoteness of the biblical texts and to grapple for themselves with the variety of their possible meanings” (Introduction, emphasis mine). One of the goals of this project is thus to allow students to become “responsible interpreters, aware of their own social locations in relationships of privilege and power” (ibid).

Interestingly, the Fortress Commentary is unlike other reception-historical works in at least one other way, namely that each contributor is pressed into practical service. That is to say, there is a distinct focus on the “texts’ relevance for today’s globalized world” (Introduction). I appreciate the desire to understand the cultural setting of the texts’ production and interpretive trajectory in order to discern Scripture’s application. Although there are other indispensable steps along the way to fruitful interpretation, these are no doubt important.

The Issue of Authority

Given the attention to scriptural relevance and application, this Commentary is evidently aimed at a faith-based audience. Yet as I read through portions of the OT volume, what struck me about this resource was its intentional avoidance of offering “a single answer – ‘what the text means’ – to the contemporary reader” (Introduction). Rather, the volume is more interested in highlighting “unique challenges and interpretive questions … to empower the reader to reach his or her own judgments about the text” (Ibid, also 25:40 in the audio). Again, I can appreciate the impulse behind this aspect of the Commentary. To be sure, Scripture is inexhaustible in terms of its applicational “payoff.” The circumstances of the Church will never deplete or outstrip Scripture’s ability to speak relevantly. And as we apply Scripture we must read and interpret responsibly, with care for the text and our neighbor, which calls for a real degree of humility in making claims about Scripture’s meaning.

However, it seems that the Fortress Commentary focuses upon interpretive plurality due more to postmodern impulses to avoid power claims. It is, I believe, also due to the reader-oriented hermeneutical stance operative throughout the volume. Now, there is legitimacy to the notion that readers can project their own culture and expectations onto a text, and that it is impossible to “escape” such an ideological situation as a knowing subject. But there are countermeasures, one of the most significant being, ironically, concord through interpretive history (there are others).

These issues are where in my view the Fortress Commentary will be of limited value to those whose hermeneutic is author- or text-oriented instead, taking the locus of meaning as more fixed and at least to some extent, determinable, if not exhaustively, as I mentioned. The Fortress Commentary also suffers from a distinct lack of acknowledgment of Scripture’s authority and unity in general. Rather, it is viewed as an “ark” of quasi-authoritative and potentially conflicting micronarratives, stitched together over time, each with its own “voice” that, like a partner in a dance, “complement each other’s work, even if tempers can flare sometimes when partners step on one another’s toes” (Reading the OT in Ancient and Contemporary Contexts).

Conclusion

I commend Fortress Press for producing this Commentary. It was no doubt a worthwhile project that will provide the academy a useful tool in understanding the “trajectory” of interpretation over the centuries and how that intersects with our global times. I do have certain concerns, however, with the hermeneutical methodology operative throughout the volume. Of course, these methodological issues flow from differing understandings of what (and how) Scripture is as the word of God. (For interesting comments from some of the editors in this respect, refer to min. 52, 55-57 in the audio, and 59-1:00:00).

Thanks to Fortress Press for providing a review copy, which has not influenced my opinions here.

What the Old Testament Authors Really Cared About

Although I posted this review a while back in a forgotten corner of my blog (Book Reviews), this book seemed worth drawing a bit more attention to. The partner volume to Kregel’s What the New Testament Authors Really Cared About: A Survey of Their Writings (2008) – which, for the record, has better cover art – this OT survey is a gem.

I say “survey” because this text is not exactly an introduction. That is to say, there is not much in-depth treatment of critical issues like dating, questions of textual growth, Israelite religious history (i.e. Religionswissenschaft), or even authorship. That last one may come as a surprise, considering the title of the book, but the volume’s introduction makes its purpose clear: to present “the essence of what is revealed in the Old Testament, with a conscious eye toward the fulfillment found in Jesus as clarified in the New Testament” (13).

Moreover, this is done explicitly “from a conservative, evangelical perspective” (23). As I note in my review, in the understanding of the contributors, the Old Testament is the progressive revelatory foundation of the New Testament, which itself behaves “like an answer key in the back of a math textbook” (14).

What I like most about this book is its practicality. Although it would not serve well as a text for an advanced college-level or graduate course (precisely because of its lack of detail in critical matters), I do think What the Old Testament Authors Really Cared About provides a helpful theological overview of the OT. DeRouchie has done an admirable job making the book usable for laymen, students and teachers alike with his KINGDOM acronym (see right). By breaking Old and New Testaments into distinct historical and thematic sections, the book makes the content of Scripture much more managable and cogently presented.

Enough Already: The Review

Without going on any further, you can read my review in full here, which was just published in the Westminster Theological Journal, vol. 46, no. 2 (Fall 2014).

.

The 2014 Conference Season: A Review

San Diego was Awesome

It probably goes without saying, but this year’s biblical studies conference location is the best I’ve yet experienced. This was only my third year participating in these events, but 70 degrees and sunny every day sure beats the dreary, sub-freezing temperatures I was met with in both Chicago (’12) and Baltimore (’13).

That being said, it was about a 20-hour journey there from Cambridge, all told, so it did not come without pain on my part. Nevertheless, I did have the opportunity to present at both the ETS and SBL conferences, as I wrote about here.

A Study in Contrast

It should go without saying that not everyone who participates in the one conference participates in the other. Indeed, ETS, being as it is evangelical (‘E’), is quite a bit smaller than SBL. The latter tends to throw conferences that are dumbfoundingly well-organized and impressive, fueled by the huge amounts of members and funding poured into the society year after year. On the other hand, ETS is – well – poor. As a result, ETS is rarely in the same venue as SBL for these conferences, and this year the difference was particularly humorous. Both sites were nice, don’t get me wrong. But that was due largely to the fact that they were both in sunny San Diego where palm trees grow like dandelions.

I’ll let you puzzle out which conference center was the venue for which society.

Option A:

Option B:

20141121_183027009_iOS

The Papers

Naturally, I benefited equally from both conferences, however. Just because ETS is poor does not mean it’s not worth your time. Just the opposite! It’s the perfect reason to become involved. The smaller group makes it actually a bit more fun than SBL, where one tends to float anonymously through seas of scholars of all stripes.

“‘There is No Spoon’: Text-Critical Question-Begging in the So-Called ‘Acrostic’ of Nahum 1

To briefly overview the topics I presented on, at ETS I discussed the acrostic of Nahum 1, which in truth is really only a partial acrostic. If you don’t know what an acrostic is, it only gets more obscure from here. The partial acrostic in the first eight verses of the book has a few “problematic” lines, which do not begin with the “right” letters. It is fairly common, therefore, for commentators to “fix” or “emend” the text in one way or another to “restore” it. To attempt to do so is fine as far as it goes. But the problem is that most commentators go too far.

One of the challenges of OT studies is the scant textual evidence at hand. Basically, we have the Masoretic text, the versions (the Latin Vulgate, the Septuagint, and other translations), and the Qumran scrolls. This makes arguments for changing the MT very challenging to make well. In short, in this paper I go through the common arguments for changing the MT to “restore” this acrostic on the basis of the LXX as a text-critical witness, and pick them apart one at a time. Mostly, the arguments are poorly founded or misuse the evidence, especially when the LXX version is understood in light of its translational character.

I am hoping to get this paper turned into a published article.

The Divergent Battle Language in LXX-Judges: ΠΟΛΕΜΕΩ and ΠΑΡΑΤΑΣΣΩ

This paper is directly related to my dissertation research. I have realized that the most straightforward way to explain what I am doing here at Cambridge is to say “Greek lexicography.” Now, that may not help some people, but it is accurate. And I am using the Greek texts of LXX-Judges as a “heuristic environment” of sorts. Basically this means I’m looking at the ways in which the two Greek translations of the one Hebrew book phrase things in different ways, and then investigating why that might be the case.

The way I do that is to dive into Greek documentary evidence for better understanding of the word or words in question. Believe it or not, there is a vast body of Greek writing out there that is mostly ignored by Greek scholars. The reason (simply put) is because it is koine Greek, and not the high-flying and academically respectable Classical Greek that has been so popular for, oh, two thousand years. There is a bit of an academic tradition of snubbing koine Greek, although a major reason for that is because we didn’t quite know that koine Greek was a thing until about a century ago. Until then, the Greek Bible was about the only existing koine document, which is why scholars though it was “Holy Ghost Greek” or a special Jewish-Greek dialect.

But when huge amounts of papyri and inscriptions written in the same kind of Greek were literally dug up about a century ago, all that changed, although there is still lots of work to be done. That’s where I fit in. My paper focused on the differing terminology used for “to battle” or “battle” in both translations. I found that in the B-text, the less common and seemingly unlikely words were chosen in most places. As I investigated the data, I uncovered what I believe is a previously unnoticed semantic change in the words in question: παρατάσσω and παράταξις. These words are used in ways similar to the B-text of Judges as in koine historical literature, and so I suggest that the B-text has literary or specialized terminology in it.

Other Points of Interest

There is too much else to say about these conferences. Suffice it to say that I truly enjoyed my involvement in the Institute for Biblical Research (or IBR, here), and the Scripture and Hermeneutics sub-group (through the Paidaia Centre, here). It was also a great pleasure to meet and talk with many senior scholars in various fields. I’ve said before that attending these conferences pays for itself in terms of the conversations that are available there. The feedback on one’s work and the chance to learn about initiatives and opportunities you did not and would not otherwise know about are invaluable.

I’m already looking forward to next year! As a teaser, there are rumblings of a new Septuagint section at the next ETS conference. But we will have to wait and see what happens.