Hosea

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]