Jeremiah

Allen offers perhaps the best-balanced single-volume scholarly commentary on Jeremiah. His stated commitment to “context-driven exegesis” is borne out throughout: the final canonical form receives interpretive priority, while textual criticism, the ancient versions and earlier stages of literary development are used where they genuinely illuminate the received book. Particularly valuable is his reading of Jeremiah’s large-scale movement as repeated cycles of destruction and eventual reconstruction, reflecting the programmatic language of Jeremiah 1:10. Allen is attentive to genre, structure, repeated vocabulary and the theological purposes of the book without forcing Jeremiah into an excessively neat literary scheme. He is less idiosyncratic than McKane, Holladay or Lundbom, but that is in many ways an advantage: his originality generally emerges from careful exegesis rather than speculative reconstruction. For anyone wanting one serious academic commentary that combines critical scholarship with sustained theological sensitivity, Allen remains an excellent choice.

Allen offers excellent notes on text-critical and grammatical issues, as well as good observations about literary matters. He identifies a trajectory of grace in which the proclamations of doom can be understood within the context of promises for a renewed future. “Allen is an excellent scholar,” Longman notes, “and does a great job articulating the message of Jeremiah in its original context. He helpfully puts his focus on the final form of the book, but pays little attention to the book from a New Testament perspective.” [Full Review]

For basic textual, critical and exegetical issues, a recent resource.

My third choice reading on Jeremiah. It's not as good as Lundbom and Fischer (German), but it is sound and better than House (who wrote the preceding volume in OTL). It's exegesis is good (better than Thompson), but it's a bit lacking-in-thoroughness. It's certainly a readable commentary, but not the best one.