DavidH

Carolyn Sharp’s Joshua is a stimulating, morally serious commentary that brings a strong hermeneutic of resistance to the book’s conquest ideology and refuses to mute its rhetoric of annihilation. But it also overreaches. It contains clear inaccuracies, including the claim that no contemporary English Joshua commentary by a female scholar existed, despite works by Pressler, Dallaire, and Wray Beal, and the claim that children are not mentioned in Joshua, despite explicit references to children asking about the memorial stones and to Achan’s sons and daughters. Methodologically, Sharp is also too absolute in dismissing archaeology’s capacity to test historical claims, in contrast to the more nuanced treatments of Boling, Howard, and Hess. Her ideological lens can flatten Joshua’s internal complexity, especially around figures such as Rahab, Caleb, and the Gibeonites. Most importantly, the commentary never fully resolves its central tension: it calls Joshua sacred and theologically rich while repeatedly resisting its own claims about God’s commands. It is therefore best read as a provocative ethical dialogue partner rather than a balanced guide to Joshua.

O’Connor’s Genesis is a creative and pastorally sensitive commentary, especially strong on suffering, threatened futures, and the experiences of women, but its trauma/exilic framework is often too controlling and more confidently stated than the evidence warrants. That lens can be illuminating in major disaster texts, yet O’Connor never really explains what passages such as Genesis 24, 26, 36, and parts of 47 are doing in a book supposedly shaped primarily as trauma theology; those chapters suggest that Genesis is also preserving kinship memory, tracing genealogical continuity, mapping relations with neighboring peoples, and narrating ordinary providence, not simply processing catastrophe. Readers seeking firmer guidance on literary structure, philology, and narrative flow will usually do better with Wenham or Hamilton, while Goldingay offers a more balanced modern critical alternative. O’Connor is therefore best used as a stimulating supplementary voice rather than a primary Genesis commentary.