I & II Samuel: A Commentary

Robert Gordon's volume in the Library of Biblical Interpretation series (1986) is baffling. It seems to have no intended audience. It is far too thin to count as a decent scholarly commentary. Its treatment is not quite as thin (but almost on some aspects) as most popular commentaries. Yet at the same time, it uses Hebrew text in Hebrew font without transliteration or translation, and a lot of the argumentation is in notes that are fairly technical. He uses (without definition) terms that hardly anyone would know without attending upper-level seminars in biblical studies. It could not be used with ideal effectiveness by someone with no Hebrew language training. I stopped using it altogether except to refer to it when others cited it. Once I've got both volumes of Tsumura's NICOT, I probably won't hold on to this one. Its focus is largely literary and historical-grammatical, and though many reviews have called it evangelical, I would have a hard time classifying Gordon as within the mainstream of what I know as evangelicalism. Gordon has virtually no introduction, since the series editors insisted that he publish his introduction separately. It has been released as the Old Testament Guide on Samuel. That volume, while thin, is widely regarded as excellent scholarship. It's too bad that only a small portion of it made it into the introduction to the commentary. [Full Review]