Hosea

Macintosh remains the philological benchmark for Hosea. The commentary’s greatest strength is its extraordinary attention to Hebrew vocabulary, grammar, textual criticism, comparative Semitic evidence and the ancient versions, with particular sensitivity to the possibility that apparent versional variants sometimes reflect interpretation rather than a different Hebrew Vorlage. His treatment of compositional history can be more speculative than his verse-level philology, and the volume is less concerned with literary and theological synthesis than newer commentaries. Even so, anyone attempting serious exegesis of Hosea’s notoriously difficult Hebrew will repeatedly find Macintosh indispensable. It is not always the easiest commentary to use, but it remains one of the hardest to replace.

A.A. Macintosh's ICC (1997) is the most recent, in-depth critical commentary on Hosea. It is more detailed in some ways even than Andersen and Freedman, but its price is much higher than its added detail might lead you to expect. I wouldn't tend to recommend this except to scholars who will be doing work on the book. Macintosh handles philology, text criticism (including DSS), archeology, and history of interpretation, especially Rabbinic Interpretation, but the focus is probably more on linguistic issues than anything else. He shows some interest in theology. He is generally more moderate than most commentators in this series. He considers Hosea to be the main author of this material, allowing for the possibly that some others reapplied his anti-Israel message to Judah, but he thinks Hosea may have done this himself. He argues that the linguistic peculiarities are a result of the northern dialect, in contrast to the common view that Hosea's manuscript tradition is hopelessly corrupt. He doesn't pay much attention to feminist interpretation and completely ignores both Stuart and Andersen/Freedman. The last is completely inexcusable. [Full Review]

A technical commentary concerned primarily with linguistic details and interested in contributions from rabbinic sources. [Full Review]