Review: The Letter to Philemon in Anchor Bible Commentary Series by Joseph A. Fitzmyer

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I did enjoy this commentary. For readers who are unaware, Fitzmyer is a Roman Catholic but I did not find his tradition really coming out (for instance, his interaction of the word “saints” in Philemon is interpreted to refer to believers in general, not SAINTS, and he did not have any further discussion about that point of saints and SAINTS). In the past I have used various commentaries from this series and I think this volume is one of the better ones (there are some whacky ones in this series). I read this work primarily for my exegetical preparation for preaching, so in terms of it’s usefulness for the exegete I thought that this work was worthwhile in terms of the materials for the readers to interact with, though I feel that there was more that Fitzmyer could have said. By saying that this work is worthwhile, I do not mean that I agree with every interpretative decision made by the author, only that they were not outrageous or out of bounds where he landed. From time to time there were historical, lexical, grammatical and syntactical insights that I gained about the Greek text from reading Fitzmyer, that I didn’t not see on my own.

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Review: Obadiah in Anchor Bible Commentary Series by Paul R. Raabe

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I am reviewing this commentary from the perspectives of the need and desire of an expositor of the Scriptures. For anyone going through the book of Obadiah exegetically I would say that this is a must read commentary. Bound in these pages are really thorough syntactical and grammatical analysis. The author was not kidding when he said in the introduction that since Obadiah is a smaller book, this afford the opportunity for him to go more in-depth in his analysis of Obadiah. This works ended up being a thick work for a part of the Bible that’s only 21 verses! There are good lexical data given in this work. The author holds to the unity of the book of Obadiah which might seem somewhat unusual to run across something like this for this Bible commentary series, which dabble so heavily on historical critical method. The author is to be commended. I like the way Raabe note other interpretation then offers the reason for his interpretation by showing how a word or construct operates a certain way in another passage of Scripture. I wish more commentaries would argue for their position this way! Furthermore, I appreciated the extended discussion as an excursus on the topic of the metaphor of drinking and the wrath of God, with lexical studies on the word cup, drink, drunk and wine, followed by the study of it’s metaphorical use of relevant passages that suggests God’s wrath.

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