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TL;DR: If you are a preacher, you will enrich your people’s understanding of God, and His word by preaching through Leviticus – and you need this commentary to help you do that. The book of Leviticus is an oft-neglected book of the bible, but it presents the beautiful hope of God’s presence dwelling among us. But how to preach and teach this book? As a pastor, I have decided to spend several months doing just this – preaching a series of 10 messages, and teaching an adult-education class on this topic. I must confess, this felt like an ambitious task, and I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to tackle it. It was around this time that I became aware of Jay Sklar’s commentary on the book of Leviticus. It’s hard for me to overstate how helpful this commentary has been. Commentaries can often veer into one of two sides of the road: Some wade so deeply into the textual, historical, and technical background of a text as to generally be unhelpful to a preacher seeking to explain the text faithfully and apply it to the everyday life of a believer. Others focus so much on trying to be practical that they fail to do justice to the linguistic, and literary background of the text, leaving a diligent pastor wishing for some more exegetical insight (and maybe even wondering how the author came to their application from a text when the author fails to “show their work). This commentary, however, manages to hold a solid middle-of-the-road approach that blends solid exegetical work with thoughtful and helpful application. Let me offer a few of the strengths. First off, the introduction alone is worth the price of the book because it lays a clear foundation that will inform the theology of the book as a whole. Particularly helpful are the explanations of the key concepts of clean and unclean, atonement, and the tabernacle. Without a clear understanding of these ideas, the rest of the book will remain foggy. Second, the layout of each section within the commentary was easy to follow, and generally easty to understand. Each section begins with the pericope laid out with Hebrew text next to the English outline. This will appeal to those who have a greater understanding of Hebrew – but those who don’t can easily skip over these sections. Following this is the commentary on the text, explaining the meaning of each passage. The exegesis is sound, and although I didn’t agree with every exegetical conclusion II could see clearly the reasoning behind each point being made. Sklar makes good use of other important scholars on this work (Wenham gets extensive attention), but not so much that the work reads like a book report of what other authors have said. There are a couple of places that I found the text to be a bit too dense for my taste, but I was able to move quickly past those sections back into what I found to be helpful. The author uses illustrations and examples that are easy to follow, which is helpful when working with a text where there is such a wide gap between “then and there” and “here and now.” Finally, I would say that the most helpful part (at least for preaching) is the part at the end of each section that offers reflection and application to today’s culture. It can sometimes be difficult to apply texts that are so different from our day and age – especially when the text includes concepts like skin lesions, clean and unclean animals, and slaughtering animals in a tent in the wilderness. However, I found Sklar’s approach helpful. He draws from the text concepts that are abstract enough (while still being faithful to the text) and then offers suggested ways that these might be applied today. This is, of course, the job of a preacher – and it’s clear that Sklar has experience in this work, and is thinking of the preacher when writing this commentary. Some readers may find this work too dense – that’s a fair point. It’s worth noting that there are some sections in the commentary that are taken from his earlier work on Leviticus (The Tyndale Old Testament Commentary series) which means that for some, having both books on their bookshelf won’t be necessary. A lay-person looking for a good resource that will introduce the themes of Leviticus and offer a basic explanation, the TOTC may be sufficient. But for those looking to go deeper, this commentary is the way to go. So – if you are a preacher, your congregation needs to hear from this book of the bible – and they probably haven’t yet! This is your opportunity to dig into the themes of God’s presence dwelling among his people, and what the implications of that are for us today. But, don’t try taking on that task alone! You need a guide with experience and expertise in the book of Leviticus, and Jay Sklar is that person, and this is that guidebook. ** I have received a complimentary copy of this work for the purposes of writing this review, but neither the author, nor the publisher has placed any conditions on my review; what is written here is an objective and honest assessment of this work. **