Ezekiel

Greenberg’s commentary is one of the genuinely landmark works on Ezekiel. His “holistic” approach was an important corrective to scholarship that too readily dismantled the book into hypothetical sources and redactional layers: Greenberg begins by asking whether the received text makes literary and theological sense as a coherent composition, and again and again demonstrates that apparent irregularities can form part of Ezekiel’s deliberate artistry. His observations on repetition with variation, “halving,” graduated utterances, thematic recurrence, and the interrelationship of individual passages are frequently illuminating and have influenced much subsequent Ezekiel scholarship, including Block. The commentary is also rich in philology, biblical parallels, Jewish interpretation, and historical realia. Its great limitation is simply that Greenberg died before completing it, so the commentary ends at chapter 37. For the chapters it covers, however, it remains indispensable.