Reading Samuel: A Literary and Theological Commentary

Van Wijk-Bos writes fluently and gives welcome attention to narrative texture and female characters, drawing well on Fokkelman and Alter. However, the commentary has limitations serious enough to warrant caution. Most concerning is its characterisation of God: she explicitly calls the God of Samuel "inscrutable, cruel, and capricious" (on 2 Sam 24), states that "God can evidently make mistakes," dismisses Samuel's canonical declaration about divine immutability (1 Sam 15:29) as "obviously wrong," and describes the portrayal of God in the census episode as "decidedly offensive" — language absent from every other major Samuel commentary, including the most critically liberal (McCarter AYB, Auld OTL, Klein WBC, Anderson WBC). She unambiguously labels the David-Bathsheba encounter "rape" as settled fact — a contested minority position rejected by all comparison commentaries, which use "adultery" — while elsewhere criticising readers for anachronism, an inconsistency that typifies the book's deeper methodological tension: she champions patient, ambiguity-embracing reading in principle but reaches hostile verdicts on God's character whenever the text is difficult. She also raises the homoerotic reading of Jonathan and David with unwarranted force, compares David's treatment of Moabite prisoners to Nazi death-camp selections (p. 184), and operates from a declared postmodern framework that treats the material primarily as "myth" — a characterisation unique to this commentary. Best used, if at all, alongside a historically and theologically grounded commentary such as Tsumura (NICOT), Firth (ApOTC), or Bergen (NAC).