Bible Books

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The Book of God: A Response to the Bible

Gabriel Josipovici
(New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. press, 1988) 350 pp., $29.95

Gabriel Josipovici apologizes for not having read exhaustively in the field of biblical studies (he is a professor of English at the University of Sussex in England), but let there be no doubt that he has indeed read extensively in the field and that he has made excellent use of the secondary literature. He has written this book for the intelligent layperson, but specialists will also benefit immensely from it. In fact, this reviewer can think of no other book that will give the reader a more profound understanding and deeper appreciation of the Bible—both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament—as a whole. It is not an introduction to the Bible, and yet the book runs the gamut of biblical literature. For example, there are only one or two pages on Job, but Josipovici’s insights on Job are fresh and provocative: The Job story not only probes the meaning of suffering, but the meaning of meaning itself. “The book of Job is about the impossibility of man’s ever understanding the causal links (the story), and yet his need to trust that God does indeed uphold the world, and that there is a story there of which we are a part” (p. 290).

Among the questions that the book raises and tries to answer are: Why do even those who are not Jews or Christians treat the Bible with an awe that is withheld from other books? What is the difference, from a literary point of view, between canonical and apocryphal literature? Why does the canonical order play such an important role in determining meaning? Is the Bible a book or an anthology? What is the difference in literary structure between the Hebrew and the Christian Bibles? What are the rhythms of biblical literature, and how can they be delineated—from Genesis 1 to the Joseph story to the description of the tabernacle to the Book of Judges? What are the varieties of speech—from the effects of oral tradition to the dynamics of prayer to prophetic oracles? How is biblical character depicted (focusing on Saul, David, Jesus and Paul)?

In his concluding chapters, Josipovici meditates profoundly on the differences between “Hebraic” biblical literature (including the Gospel of Mark!) and Christian biblical literature: The former is reluctant to move toward closure, leaving the reader searching for its pattern, whereas the latter centers on fulfillment. The great attraction of this book is that although it raises questions that have been raised before, it grapples with them from a literary, rather than a theological or historical, perspective.

The book is, as its title indicates, a response to the Bible, carried out by someone who has read broadly and with great insight. The results will enrich every reader.

The Gospel According to St. Matthew

W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, Jr.
(Edinburgh: T & T Clark [International Critical Commentary Series], 1988) 778 pp., $49.95

Voilà un commentaire! (What a commentary!) So begins a recent French review of this book. The exclamation is completely appropriate; this is a most impressive commentary on Matthew’s Gospel.

It is an extraordinary accomplishment by its co-authors. W. D. Davies is one of the most distinguished New Testament scholars working today, known especially for his meticulous books on the Sermon on the Mount and the relationship between Judaism and the New Testament.^a Now in his seventies, he has taught at Princeton, Union Theological Seminary and Duke. Dale Allison was one of Davies’ Ph.D. students at Duke, and is now an established scholar in his own right.

The sheer size of this volume is startling. Nearly 800 pages, it covers only the first seven chapters of Matthew. Two more planned volumes will treat Matthew 8–18 and 19–28. Though the authors identify their work as following in the tradition of full-scale commentaries on Matthew by W. C. Allen (1907), A. H. McNeile (1915) and R. H. Gundry (1982), it dwarfs its predecessors. Allen’s commentary (which this volume replaces in the classic International Critical Commentary series) has about 430 pages; Gundry’s, the largest, totals 670 pages. And those two texts cover the whole of Matthew’s Gospel, not just the first quarter. Even so, Davies and Allison indicate that they could have written much more: “Considerations of cost and exigencies of printing have required constraint,” and they “had to prefer leanness to fullness” (p. x).

The introduction, nearly 150 pages, covers the traditional questions of Matthew’s authorship and date (an anonymous Jewish-Christian writing most likely between 80 and 95 C.E.^b, structure (essentially 011triadic), literary characteristics, sources (Mark and Q) and place of composition (perhaps Antioch). A comprehensive treatment of Matthew’s theology is reserved for a future volume.

Within the commentary proper, Matthew 1–7 is divided into 16 sections, and each is then treated under five categories: form and structure, source criticism, exegesis, summary, and bibliography. Four extended excursuses explore the sources of Matthew’s stories of the birth of Jesus, the beatitudes (Matthew 5:3–12), the antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:21–48) and the Lord’s Prayer.

The size of this commentary permits extraordinary thoroughness and richness of detail. The question of authorship takes over 50 pages to examine. To the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew 1:2–17, the authors devote 30 pages and cite 43 bibliographic entries. Their treatment of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7) is over 300 pages long. Illuminating parallels to both canonical and non-canonical literature are regularly cited.

Though the commentary uses the Greek text of Matthew, serious readers without knowledge of Greek will nevertheless be able to follow most of the careful exposition. This work, however, will be of greatest use to seminarians, graduate students and scholars. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine someone writing anything on Matthew without consulting this volume, both because of its careful judgments and its copious bibliographies. Without doubt, this will be the standard scholarly commentary on Matthew well into the 21st century.

Selected Christian Hebraists

William McKane
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989) 256 pp., $49.50

This book is not about great Christian Hebrew scholars but about some individual Christians in history and their views toward the Hebrew Bible. In this sense, and only in this sense, are the selected persons to be considered Hebraists. In some instances they had a limited knowledge of the Hebrew language. Nevertheless, their attempts to get at the Hebrew in one way or another as a source for Old Testament study was primary in their work.

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An introductory survey of issues and persons opens the book. Then McKane gives an extended discussion of each of the following men: Origen (c. 185–254), who the author says attempted “to modify the Septuagint so as to produce a literal Greek translation of the Hebrew in which every element of the Hebrew text would have a corresponding element in the Greek translation” (p. 1); Jerome (c. 342–420), whose Latin translation (the Vulgate) made the Hebrew text more accessible to the Latin-speaking Church; Andrew of St. Victor, a 12th-century writer who pursued the literal sense of the Old Testament as opposed to the Christological interpretation, even though he apparently knew no Greek and little or no Hebrew; Protestant humanist William Fulke and traditional Catholic Gregory Martin, both of the 16th century, whose conflicting views regarding the source to be used for vernacular translations are contrasted; Richard Simon (1638–1712), who presented a combination of critical scholarship and Catholic conservatism in his view that vernacular translations of the Old Testament should be made on the basis of the Latin Vulgate rather than the Hebrew; and Alexander Geddes, an 18th-century Roman Catholic who drifted from the orthodox faith into a radical criticism of it while arguing that the Hebrew of the Old Testament should be the basis for vernacular translations.

McKane’s study informs about a subject that has received limited public exposure, namely, historical Christian views as to which text of the Hebrew Bible should be used and considered authoritative. However, the author’s style is wordy and at times difficult to follow. Furthermore, the writer was sometimes uninformed about the latest studies regarding his subject. His treatment of the Septuagint, given the bibliography he cites, is not up to date. He appears to know little about plene writing (writing with vowel letters) in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and his understanding of Samaritan Pentateuch studies is deficient. Finally, it is unclear as to why chapter 2, Andrew of St. Victor, is in a book entitled Selected Christian Hebraists. Andrew knew little or no Hebrew.

The Book of God: A Response to the Bible
Gabriel Josipovici
(New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. press, 1988) 350 pp., $29.95