DavidH

Sharon Pace’s Daniel in the Smyth & Helwys series is readable, pastorally warm, and often helpful in presenting Daniel as a book of hope for faithful sufferers under violent empires, but when read alongside the major Daniel commentators its weaknesses become clear. Pace largely follows the Collins-Goldingay-Newsom-Seow historical-critical line: Collins gives the classic second-century/Maccabean framework, Goldingay offers a more literary and theologically sensitive version, Newsom gives a sophisticated account of Daniel’s gradual composition and “epiphanic rhetoric,” and Seow similarly reads Daniel through legendary court tales and Antiochene crisis; these scholars help explain Pace’s approach, but also show its limitations, because Daniel’s own rhetoric claims that God reveals and governs history, not merely that later writers imaginatively reframe history as revelation. Lucas shows that a late-date or Antiochus-centred reading can be held in a more evangelical and theologically reverent way, yet his nuance also exposes Pace’s problem: Daniel’s visions still need to function as trustworthy divine disclosure, not merely encouragement through pseudonymous literary strategy. Tanner, Baldwin, Miller, Hill, House, and Davis press the strongest historical and theological objections: Daniel’s Hebrew and Aramaic, Persian loanwords, Qumran evidence, court traditions, and detailed knowledge of Babylonian-Persian realities make a purely second-century explanation much less secure than Pace implies; Miller and Baldwin especially stress that treating Daniel’s prophecy as after-the-fact risks making the book’s revelation claims morally and theologically hollow, while House warns against circularly reasoning from “apocalyptic” to “pseudonymous.” Sprinkle, Longman, Widder, Duguid, Hill, House, and Davis also challenge Pace’s narrow Antiochus-only reading of Daniel 11: Antiochus IV is certainly important, but the prophecy can telescope beyond him to a final eschatological enemy, so the mismatch in Daniel 11:40–45 need not be “failed prophecy.” Widder’s mediating approach is especially valuable here, since she allows Antiochus as a genuine near fulfilment without exhausting the text’s canonical horizon. Walton/Buster, though not conservative in the Tanner/Miller sense, still expose Pace’s overstatements by showing that ancient narrative shaping does not automatically mean fabricated events, and that difficulties surrounding Darius the Mede do not justify simply dismissing him as fictional or composite. Duguid and Davis further show that Daniel’s centre is not merely anti-imperial resistance but the triumph of God’s kingdom, the Son of Man, resurrection hope, and Christological fulfilment. Pace’s problem is therefore not lack of pastoral sensitivity or theological seriousness, but a subtler and more serious tension: she eloquently affirms God’s sovereignty, justice, and compassion, yet her framework can make Daniel’s claimed revelations function as literary-theological reassurance rather than truthful divine disclosure. Useful for reception history, theological reflection, and exposure to mainstream critical scholarship, but not reliable as a primary commentary for readers who want Daniel treated as historically grounded, prophetically trustworthy, and canonically fulfilled in the larger biblical hope.

Paul L. Redditt’s Ezra-Nehemiah is learned, readable, and often useful, especially in its attention to historical-critical issues and its willingness to face the ethical difficulty of Ezra 9–10 and Nehemiah 13. Yet compared with Williamson, Blenkinsopp, Eskenazi, and Harrington, its major weakness is that Redditt too often lets a modern ethical-theological verdict control the exegesis. He is right to be troubled by the expulsion of foreign wives and children, and right that the identity of these women may have included local Judeans or Israelites rather than simply pagan outsiders; but he overstates the case by branding the reform “heartless,” “morally repugnant,” even “sin,” and by reducing the book’s concern to returnee privilege, ethnic exclusion, or xenophobia. The better commentaries show that Ezra-Nehemiah is dealing with a fragile post-exilic community struggling to survive after catastrophe, preserve covenant identity under Persian rule, rebuild temple, people, and city, and guard against idolatrous assimilation in a world where religion, kinship, land, language, and child-rearing were inseparable. Harrington’s priestly reading of intermarriage as maʿal, a sacrilege against the holiness of the community, and Eskenazi’s larger reading of Ezra-Nehemiah as a carefully structured account of rebuilding “YHWH’s house” — temple, people, and Jerusalem — make Redditt’s interpretation look too narrow. His appeal to Isaiah 56, Ruth, and universal inclusion also risks a category error: those texts welcome foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, whereas Ezra-Nehemiah addresses marriages perceived to threaten covenantal identity and the next generation’s allegiance. Likewise, Redditt’s late Maccabean dating of the book’s final form seems too strong; later updating of lists does not require making the whole work a second-century composition. Most seriously, his Christian critique sometimes approaches a canon-within-the-canon method in which Ezra-Nehemiah is judged from above rather than interpreted within the full biblical witness; indeed, his language risks reviving the old Christian caricature of Second Temple Judaism as narrow, legalistic, and exclusivist. Redditt’s commentary is therefore stimulating and pastorally provocative, but it should be used with caution: it highlights real moral tensions, yet too often underreads the book’s holiness logic, covenantal urgency, communal agency, historical setting, and theological architecture.

Roetzel’s 2 Corinthians is learned, readable, and often stimulating, but in my judgment it is seriously weakened by a partition-first approach to the letter. He repeatedly treats the very features that make 2 Corinthians so vivid — abrupt transitions, emotional shifts, repeated themes, severe warnings, and changes of tone — as evidence that the canonical letter is an editorial compilation of fragments, even though there is no manuscript evidence that 2 Corinthians ever circulated in such a divided or rearranged form. Against commentators such as Hughes, Guthrie, Harris, Barnett, Garland, Belleville, Lambrecht, and Hafemann, Roetzel’s reconstruction feels over-engineered: it multiplies lost openings and closings, hypothetical editorial activity, and speculative stages in Paul’s correspondence, while simpler explanations are available from the letter’s own pastoral and rhetorical logic. The long section on Paul’s ministry in 2:14–7:4 is better read not as an inserted essay but as the theological heart of the letter, explaining Paul’s apostolic integrity, suffering, boldness, and reconciliation ministry. Likewise, 6:14–7:1 is not best dismissed as a non-Pauline “lumpish” intrusion; its warning against idolatrous compromise fits Corinth’s setting and Paul’s appeal for holiness. Chapters 8–9 cohere as a careful, non-coercive appeal for voluntary generosity, not as two awkwardly juxtaposed offering letters. Chapters 10–13 are more plausibly the climactic warning before Paul’s third visit than the earlier “letter of tears.” Roetzel also tends to psychologize Paul too suspiciously, making pastoral grief, apostolic urgency, and theological argument sound like humiliation, anxiety, anger, or power-play. This sometimes leads to exegetical and theological imbalance: Paul’s reading of Moses’ veil in Exodus 34 is judged too much by modern historical-critical standards rather than understood as apostolic, christological rereading; reconciliation can sound overly political and horizontal rather than grounded in Christ’s atoning death; and language about God’s triumph or Paul’s ambassadorial appeal can risk making God appear coercive or imperial, even if Roetzel does not directly insult God. The commentary is therefore useful as an example of a sophisticated critical reconstruction, but it is far less satisfying as an exposition of 2 Corinthians as a unified, God-centred, cruciform letter in which Paul defends his ministry not for ego but because the truth of the gospel and the spiritual life of the Corinthians are at stake.

Correction to my earlier comment: I was too harsh in saying that Furnish simply failed to account for the Romans 1 parallels to 2 Thess 2:11. I have since noticed that he does explicitly discuss Rom 1:24–32, explains why he does not regard it as a true parallel, and also states that 2 Thess 2:11 is God’s response to prior wilful disobedience, not arbitrary predestination. I therefore retract that part of my earlier criticism.

Sleeper's James (ANTC, 1998) is readable and pastorally accessible, but is undermined throughout by a controlling framework — "Christian character formation" — that the letter itself does not support and that the major commentaries reject. The framework imports Hellenistic virtue ethics into a letter whose organizing category is not character but faith: McCartney (BECNT, 2009) demonstrates exhaustively that James uses pistis more than any other theological term and that the letter's central concern is the self-deception of people who believe themselves faithful while their lives belie that claim — a fundamentally different pastoral situation from the one Sleeper assumes. The letter's key diagnostic word, dipsychos ("double-minded," 1:8; 4:8), appears nowhere in extant Greek literature before James and is James's own coinage translating the Hebrew idiom of the "double-hearted" person (Ps. 12:2; 119:113) — a category of divided covenantal loyalty, not deficient virtue, confirming that the letter inhabits a Semitic theological world that Sleeper's Hellenistic framework misidentifies. From this central error flow several subsidiary ones. Sleeper's genre classification is incoherent: he accepts Dibelius's paraenesis label (a loose miscellany of moral maxims with no organizing argument) while importing Johnson's coherence thesis (which requires sustained thematic unity) — two incompatible positions that McCartney resolves by classifying James as protreptic discourse, sustained argumentation aimed at behavioral conversion. His dating (mid-70s to mid-80s CE) rests on circular reasoning: his primary anchor — that "the righteous one" in 5:6 alludes to James after his martyrdom — assumes what it needs to prove, since determining the letter's authorship is precisely the question at issue; Davids (NIGTC, 1982) and Martin (WBC, 1988) both read the phrase as belonging to the passio iusti tradition, the stock OT prophetic portrait of the faithful poor person killed by the wicked powerful, with no allusion to any specific historical individual. Sleeper also borrows Martin's two-stage compositional hypothesis — that an original Jacobean core of teaching (James's actual sermons to the Jerusalem church, 40s–50s CE) was later assembled into letter form by a disciple editor — but ignores its dating implication: if the letter has a Jacobean core, its Palestinian cultural fingerprint (the early and late rains of 5:7, the day-laborer economy of 5:4, the mercantile class of 4:13) reflects James's pre-70 world, not a later Antiochene editor's, which Davids shows argues powerfully for an early date of the source material — evidence Sleeper freely deploys for social description while never following to its chronological conclusion. His reconciliation of James and Paul is presented with unwarranted confidence: he adopts the popular view that James uses dikaioō to mean "demonstrate to be righteous" while Paul means "declare not guilty," but Moo (PNTC, 2d ed. 2021) argues this reading is probably untenable, finding both authors use the verb in the same forensic sense and that the real distinction is between Paul's initial justification (entering relationship with God by faith) and James's final justification (the ultimate divine verdict, which takes works into account); meanwhile Allison (ICC, 2013) demonstrates that five specific Greek expressions in James 2:14–26 — ἐξ ἔργων with δικαιόω, δικαιοῦται ἄνθρωπος, ἐκ πίστεως, χωρὶς ἔργων, and the passive of δικαιόω with instrumental ἐκ — are either Pauline coinages or expressions made distinctive by Paul, absent from pre-Pauline Jewish literature, appearing in James with a density too concentrated to be coincidental; notably, James consistently paraphrases the Jesus tradition when he draws on it, but reproduces these Pauline expressions with far greater verbal fidelity, suggesting deliberate engagement with Paul's specific formulations rather than independent development — none of which Sleeper's dismissive "different issues" resolution addresses. The letter's eschatological urgency — the imminent Judge at the door (5:9), mercy triumphing over judgment (2:13), the reversal of rich and poor (5:1–6), the anticipated eschatological joy (eschatologische Vorfreude, Davids) that alone makes "count it all joy" in 1:2 psychologically coherent — is systematically muted, reducing an apocalyptically urgent letter to a timeless self-improvement guide. The poverty-wealth theme, which Blomberg and Kamell (ZECNT, 2008) show is the central concern of the letter's chiastic structure, is treated as social background; James's declaration in 2:5 that God has chosen the poor to be heirs of the kingdom is a statement about divine election, not sociology, and its theological force is consistently underplayed. The theodicy of 1:13 — the letter's most explicit claim about God's character, refuting the perennial human charge (traceable from Genesis 3 through Proverbs 19:3) that God engineers human misery — is reduced to a passing observation, with no engagement with the linguistic complexity of ἀπείραστος κακῶν or the pastoral urgency behind the denial. Finally, Allison's reception history reveals that no significant commentator across seventeen centuries read James primarily as a program of Hellenistic character formation; if the text had been designed to convey one, its readers would have found it.

Victor Paul Furnish’s 1 & 2 Thessalonians (ANTC, 2007) offers readable background material and pastoral sensitivity, but when measured against the leading technical commentaries, it reveals a consistent pattern of exegetical errors and logical weaknesses. The most serious single error is Furnish’s claim that God sending a “powerful delusion” in 2 Thess 2:11 has “no real parallel in the apostle’s own letters” — factually false, since at least five independent commentaries cite Romans 1:24, 26, 28 as direct Pauline parallels without hesitation, and most damningly so is Malherbe (AYB), Furnish’s most-cited authority, who lists those very passages in his note on 2:11. Furnish compounds this by framing the verse as God sending delusion to those “he has not chosen for salvation,” substituting divine non-election for the text’s own explicit trigger — prior human refusal of the truth (v. 10) — implicitly portraying God as arbitrary and capricious in a way Green (PNTC), Weima (BECNT), and Wanamaker (NIGTC) all explicitly warn against as a theological distortion. Furnish’s openness to the interpolation hypothesis for 1 Thess 2:13–16 is presented without engaging its decisive objection — every extant manuscript contains the passage in its present position, unlike genuine interpolations such as Romans 16:25–27 or 1 Cor 14:34–35 — a point Weima calls fatal and Furnish never addresses. On 2 Thessalonians, Furnish’s pseudonymity case rests on arguments that are individually and cumulatively weak: his formal-tone argument is self-undermining since he concedes the tone “seems cool and impersonal only in comparison with 1 Thessalonians,” and Wanamaker adds the reductio that the same criterion applied to Romans and Galatians would require rejecting those letters too; the autograph of 3:17 is more naturally explained by Weima as Paul asserting authority over rebellious idlers and by Malherbe as authenticating the letter against a potentially misread copy of 1 Thessalonians; the temple reference in 2 Thess 2:4, dismissed by Furnish as “of no help in dating,” is what Weima calls the pseudonymity argument’s “Achilles’ heel,” since a post-AD 70 forger would not predict events requiring the temple still to be standing; and Fee (NICNT) makes the telling observation that writing a verse-by-verse commentary on 2 Thessalonians — having to account for every incidental detail rather than selectively targeting suspicious features from a distance — consistently pushes scholars toward authenticity, which is why advocates of pseudonymity have “seldom written a commentary on it,” making Furnish’s rare combination of pseudonymity and full commentary a position his own exegetical labors quietly undermine. Readers seeking reliable guidance on these letters’ hardest problems will find Malherbe, Weima, and Fee consistently more trustworthy — and will regularly find that Furnish’s own most-cited authority reaches conclusions materially different from his own.

Perkins's ANTC commentary is learned and often insightful, but it rests on a foundational assumption — that Ephesians is pseudonymous rather than authentically Pauline — that is far less secure than she presents it, and this weakness shapes every major interpretive decision she makes. The problem begins with burden of proof: Barth, Perkins's third most-cited authority, states explicitly that "the burden of proof lies with those questioning the tradition" and that the evidence against authenticity is "neither strong nor harmonious enough to invalidate the judgment of tradition" — yet Perkins simply inverts this burden without argument, following Lincoln (her most-cited authority) whose own Introduction contains contradictions she never addresses: he confesses he himself once held that "one should opt for authenticity unless there are weighty reasons against it"; simultaneously cites Donelson's view that pseudonymous authors "fabricated all the personal notes in the interest of deception" and Dunn's opposite view that readers "were almost certainly not deceived" — mutually exclusive positions he needs simultaneously but never resolves; and footnotes Best's finding, from a scholar who himself rejects Pauline authorship, that his research "removes one main argument from those who believe non-Pauline authorship can be firmly asserted on the basis of the use of Colossians," fatally qualifying Lincoln's own "most decisive" argument. The hypothesis also self-destructs within the letter: if Paul is dead, dispatching Tychicus to report on Paul's welfare (6:21–22) and asking readers to pray for Paul's ongoing proclamation (6:19–20) make no sense — as Hoehner puts it, "if the author was pseudonymous the Ephesians would not have known who he was, and if they knew who he was the letter is not pseudonymous." The suspicious thirty-two-word overlap between Ephesians and Colossians in the Tychicus commendation — which pseudonymity advocates treat as a forger's telltale — is eliminated by Thielman's observation that Ignatius, in two authenticated letters written simultaneously and carried by the same courier, reproduced nearly identical commendation language in both; when one messenger carries two letters, of course the author says the same thing about the same person. The hypothesis is also ethically self-defeating: the author commands "put off falsehood and speak the truth" (4:25), a tension with pseudonymous authorship that Lincoln acknowledges but never resolves. Arnold directly names Perkins in his commentary and rejects her style argument, while both he and O'Brien show there is no precedent for pseudepigraphical letters in Judaism — only apocalypses and testaments — and that the early church deposed an elder for composing a pseudonymous work "out of love for Paul," the precise motivation Perkins's theory invokes as legitimating. Lincoln's theological case depends on Mitton's argument that Ephesians uses Colossians' vocabulary to express subtly different ideas, implying later development; but Thielman shows Mitton's key examples rest on straightforward misreadings — Colossians 2:19 refers to the church not the cosmos, and Ephesians 2:16 explicitly reconciles both groups to God — making the whole argument circular. The commentary's insights on Jewish background and the Ephesian religious environment are real and valuable, but consistently filtered through a foundational assumption that Perkins's own most-cited authorities variously question, contradict, and quietly undermine.

Leander Keck's Romans (Abingdon New Testament Commentaries, 2005) is a stimulating contribution from a distinguished Pauline scholar, but several serious weaknesses place it outside the mainstream of responsible scholarship. The most pervasive is his replacement of "justify/justification" with his own invented word "rectify/rectification," introduced without exegetical argument and deployed throughout. The problem is not merely aesthetic: to "rectify" means to make something right in a transformative sense, whereas Paul's Greek word (dikaioō) consistently carries a forensic meaning — a judge's verdict declaring someone not guilty — as every major commentary confirms, from Cranfield and Dunn through to Thielman and Peterson. The structural damage becomes visible in Romans 6, where Paul's question "Shall we go on sinning?" only makes sense if chapters 3–5 described a legal acquittal, since nobody needs to be warned against exploiting a transformative process but everyone might be tempted to exploit a free pardon. A related evasion appears at Romans 3:25, where Paul calls Christ a hilastērion — a term the major commentaries identify as a propitiatory sacrifice or mercy-seat allusion through which God's wrath is averted; Keck declares propitiation and expiation "cannot be neatly separated" and moves on without argument, a position already refuted by Cranfield, Moo, and Schreiner. His reluctance rests on the assumption that propitiation imports a pagan picture of an angry God appeased by sacrifice, but those commentators had already established that Paul's propitiation is structurally different: it is God himself, out of prior grace and love, who satisfies his own righteous wrath — the cross flows from God's grace and does not make him gracious. Peterson has since deepened this case by showing that paredōken ("handed over," 1:24) was "a technical expression for the police or courts in turning someone over to official custody for the purpose of punishment," confirming that God's wrath in Romans is active and judicial, not the impersonal process of consequences Keck implies. Keck also refuses to decide whether "faith of Jesus Christ" (3:22) means Christ's own faithfulness or human faith in Christ, despite Cranfield, Moo, and Schreiner arguing at length for the latter, and despite Dunn's point that if Christ's faithfulness were key Paul would have made Christ, not Abraham, the model of faith in chapter 4; Thielman has since shown that Paul plants pistis as a thematic term at 1:17 — quoting Habakkuk 2:4 to mean that the believer lives by their own trust in God — and uses it consistently in that human sense through chapters 1–5, so that Keck's reading at 3:22 would require Paul to switch the word's referent without any signal to the reader. At Romans 9:5, where Paul appears to call Jesus "God over all, blessed forever," Keck again declines to decide — already challenged by Cranfield and Moo, and since refuted by Schreiner's seven-point case and by Peterson's observation that a free-floating doxology to God the Father, unattached to any proximate subject, would be without precedent in Paul's syntactical practice. Keck's reading of the "I" of Romans 7:14–25 as the pre-Christian Adamic self was contested by Cranfield and Moo, and is subsequently undermined by Peterson's argument that the conflict is eschatological — the tension of belonging to two epochs simultaneously — impossible for the pre-Christian who inhabits only the old epoch; Schreiner adds that Keck mines the passage for pastoral application to Christian experience while officially excluding the regenerate from its referent, an inconsistency he never resolves. Taken together, these tendencies reveal a commentary that operates by evasion rather than argument: each refusal to decide — on propitiation, on pistis Christou, on Romans 9:5 — produces a consistent theological outcome, leaving the reader with a less forensic atonement, a less faith-centred justification, and a lower Christology than the text supports, without Keck ever having to defend these positions directly. Readers seeking reliable exegetical guidance should first ground themselves in Moo (NICNT), Schreiner (BECNT), Peterson (EBTC), or Cranfield (ICC), and then return to Keck — whose erudition, fresh theological questions, and provocative framing of Paul's argument make him worth reading, provided one is equipped to recognise where his evasions are doing quiet theological work.

Bassler's 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus (ANTC, 1996) is accessibly written, well-organised, and genuinely helpful on background material, the Hellenistic context, and the pastoral dimensions of the letters, making it a serviceable introduction to the critical scholarly tradition on the PE — but major commentaries, including Marshall (ICC), Knight (NIGTC), Mounce (WBC), Towner (NICNT), Yarbrough (PNTC), and Köstenberger (EBTC), together with her own primary source Dibelius and Conzelmann (Hermeneia), raise substantial objections to its foundational arguments. The most fundamental problem is methodological: Bassler assumes pseudonymous authorship as an unargued starting point, then uses it to explain away every contrary feature — personal details become "fictional," opponents "literary constructs," theology "sub-Pauline," church structure "post-apostolic" — making the hypothesis unfalsifiable. Marshall shows it is also morally untenable, since the early church consistently rejected pseudonymous writings, and the PE's relentless emphasis on truth makes them the last documents one would expect to be products of a practice they implicitly condemn; Yarbrough adds that a pseudonymous author invoking God as truthful witness to his identity ("I am telling the truth, I am not lying," 1 Tim 2:7) while fabricating everything is "not only deceiving but on the verge of blasphemy"; and Köstenberger notes that pseudonymous authorship entails pseudonymous recipients, while a forger of the PE's sophistication would surely have matched the Acts chronology more carefully — the awkwardness of the fit argues for authenticity. Yarbrough further cites Schnabel's post-Bassler verdict that pseudonymity "has weaker support than authenticity," notes that both Schlatter and L. T. Johnson shifted from pseudonymity to authenticity after sustained study, and observes that the Africa Study Bible's 350 contributors from fifty countries present the PE as Pauline — a reminder that the pseudonymity consensus is a specifically Western, post-Enlightenment phenomenon rather than a universal scholarly judgment. Marshall's "allonymity" — composition by close Pauline associates without deceptive intent — resolves these difficulties, yet Bassler never engages it. Köstenberger warns that social-history readings like Bassler's risk "reductionism" and "anachronism," and Belleville's observation applies precisely: pseudonymity-assuming commentaries reduce the PE to social organisation, treating Christological statements as mere inherited formulae and losing the rich theological vision Köstenberger documents — "Christ Jesus" appearing 25 times, "Lord" 22 times — that gives the letters their coherence. On 1 Timothy 2:8–15, Bassler's claim that the creation-order appeal in verse 13 is situational midrash fails because the connector γάρ ("because") establishes creation order as the ground of the prohibition — the identical argument appearing in the undisputed 1 Corinthians 11:3–9 — and Köstenberger adds that Paul's appeal to the pre-fall order means the prohibition predates culture altogether; even Dibelius and Conzelmann concede it "refers to the place of woman in creation, not to her behaviour during the service." Yarbrough, citing France, notes that "it can hardly be denied that it was the changing nature and values of secular society which were the catalyst that led Christians to re-examine their understanding of the Bible on this issue" — directly challenging Bassler's assumption that her egalitarian reading is what the text naturally yields once cultural presuppositions are removed. Bassler's identification of 1 Corinthians 14:34–36 as an interpolation lacks any manuscript support — Towner notes "no manuscripts are known to have omitted the text" — and Yarbrough shows "Adam was not deceived" most naturally means he was not the first to be deceived, eliminating the contradiction Bassler identifies without resolving. Her most theologically reckless claim is that linking salvation to childbirth makes "a mockery of the abiding power of divine grace," but Köstenberger demonstrates sōzō in verse 15 means "preserved" from Satan and false teachers rather than "justified," connecting it to Paul's counter-argument against opponents who forbade marriage (1 Tim 4:3) — there is no tension with Pauline soteriology because the verse is not about justification at all; Bassler also contradicts herself by acknowledging the verse's proviso brings it into "some congruence with the letter's overall theology" while immediately charging it with mocking divine grace. Strikingly, Dibelius and Conzelmann — who share her pseudonymity assumption — call this same passage "the author's greatest contribution historically," making Bassler more hostile to it than her most sceptical source. The same methodological flaw recurs in her reading of the widows passage (1 Tim 5:3–16) as a patriarchal curtailment of female ecclesial power; Marshall concludes it is straightforwardly about responsible charitable provision, and Mounce identifies the root error: Bassler's reading "is based on the assumption that the PE represent a development from a supposedly fully egalitarian early church" — an assumption the undisputed Paulines do not support. She suppresses D-C's crucial qualification on the "bourgeois Christianity" label she borrows from them — "we cannot simply speak of the loss of a dialectical understanding of existence; good citizenship does not turn into secular piety" — radicalising D-C against their own caveats; Klinker-De Klerck's specific study of the ethical instruction of 1 Timothy and Titus confirmed that the christliche Bürgerlichkeit claim "lacks support" altogether. She endorses Hanson's claim that the PE have "no unifying theme," despite D-C identifying one in the very commentary she cites — "the constant emphasis upon the meaning of salvation for the present" — confirmed by Mounce, Towner, and Köstenberger independently. Her claim that the author marginalises the Holy Spirit is refuted by Marshall and Köstenberger, who show the Spirit poured out "richly" in Titus 3:5–6 is "as powerful as anything elsewhere in Paul"; and Towner shows the "epiphany replaces parousia" reading is simply wrong: epiphaneia in 1 Timothy 6:14 and 2 Timothy 4:1, 8 functions as a direct synonym for parousia, referring unmistakably to Christ's future return with the same urgency found in 1 Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians. Taken together, these critiques reveal a commentary whose conclusions are predetermined by a pseudonymity hypothesis now assessed by post-Bassler scholarship as having weaker evidential support than authenticity, whose key exegetical claims contain demonstrable internal contradictions, whose most striking formulation charges a canonical text with mocking divine grace on the basis of a misidentified soteriological category, and whose selective use of Dibelius and Conzelmann consistently suppresses the qualifications and positive evaluations found in the very pages she cites.

Biddle’s Reading Judges is readable and often stimulating, but suffers from methodological inconsistencies, weak exegesis on key passages, and — most troublingly for a theological commentary — a recurrently diminished portrayal of God. Biddle pledges to read the text “on its own terms” yet describes Samson’s Spirit-empowered killing of thirty Philistines as an act that “would place Samson prominently in a modern list of mass murderers” — a nakedly anachronistic 21st-century category that directly contradicts his own stated principle. His treatment of God is the deeper problem. Across multiple sections, Biddle’s own language reduces YHWH to a passive, reactive figure: God “need only nudge things along” in the Samson cycle; his purpose in using Samson’s lust is glossed as an “excuse” (Biddle’s own parenthetical addition to the text’s neutral word “occasion”); his behavior in the Benjamin war is described, via Biddle’s approving translation of a German scholar, as “obscure” and “irritating”; and in the Jephthah cycle God “only reacts to human initiative,” functioning as little more than a rubber stamp. These characterizations are exegetically unjustified. Block (NAC) identifies the book’s true subject as “Yahweh’s gracious determination to preserve his people,” not the anti-heroes’ failures, and states that “apart from the Spirit of Yahweh, Samson has neither the authority nor the power to act” — language of sovereign divine agency simply incompatible with Biddle’s “nudge.” Boda and Conway (ZECOT, 2022) demonstrate from Hebrew discourse analysis that the Spirit’s empowerment of Jephthah in 11:29 precedes the vow structurally, meaning God is already actively delivering Israel when Jephthah bargains — God is leading, not ratifying. Block further shows the vow was not rash, as Biddle claims, but deliberate and “outrightly pagan,” its form matching Carthaginian child-sacrifice votive inscriptions, its purpose being not faith but the attempted binding of God — the inverse of Abraham’s sacrifice in Genesis 22. Chisholm (KEL) adds that the theological climax of Judg 20:35 uses the verb נגף, identical to God’s plague on Egypt’s firstborn in Exodus 12, identifying YHWH as the battle’s decisive actor, not a reluctantly-engaged deity offering “qualified support”; and he shows that the catastrophes of chapter 21 result from Israel’s deliberate failure to consult God — a structural pattern Biddle’s “near silence of God” reading entirely misreads. Methodologically, Biddle’s “BLT sandwich” approach promises balance between synchronic and diachronic reading but in practice applies source-critical distinctions opportunistically — an inconsistency none of his peers (Butler, Niditch, Boda and Conway, Block, Chisholm) share. His predetermined “downward spiral” framework resolves every ambiguity negatively, causing him to miss, among other things, that Barak’s insistence on Deborah’s presence reflects not insecurity but the theologically coherent recognition — paralleled in Moses’s refusal to proceed without God’s presence in Exodus 33 — that the prophetess guarantees divine access. He also systematically retreats into an “interesting ambiguity” evasion, leaving resolvable questions open when closer attention to lexical parallels and discourse structure would settle them. Biddle is at his best as a literary guide to narrative artistry, but readers seeking rigorous exegesis, methodological consistency, or a theologically confident portrait of God in Judges will be better served by Block, Chisholm, Boda and Conway, or Niditch.

Queen-Sutherland's Ruth & Esther (Smyth & Helwys, 2016) is warmly written and pastorally engaged, but readers should be aware of serious theological and exegetical problems that emerge when it is placed alongside the major scholarly commentaries it cites. Most strikingly, the commentary is repeatedly derogatory toward God. In her theatrical "cast listing" for Ruth chapter 1, Sutherland places YHWH among the "Extras" — below three men who die in the first five verses — reducing the sovereign God of Israel to a walk-on in his own story. She states plainly that "God is named in the story, but the image is not flattering," and in the book's introduction brackets God grammatically alongside the villain Haman as one of the "forces that seek to destroy life" that "must be named and challenged" — an astonishing equivalence. She describes YHWH as "a heavy-handed God of famine and death" and introduces the book by saying God "finally remembers" his people in Ruth 1:6, implying divine negligence where the Hebrew word (paqad) simply means God acts faithfully on their behalf, with no connotation of tardiness. She praises Naomi for standing before God to "shake her fist," treating Naomi's bitter accusation against God not as a cry of spiritual crisis (which is how Bush, Block, and others read it) but as the moral engine of the story — even claiming Naomi surpasses Job because "Job speaks but Naomi acts." For Esther she concludes that "God may be absent, but Esther and Mordecai would nevertheless carry on," dismissing any reading that finds hidden divine providence as "apologetic and unconvincing." This brings us to the commentary's central inconsistency: Sutherland cites Adele Berlin's Esther (JPS) more than any other work — roughly 37 times — yet directly contradicts Berlin's core argument, which is that the book of Esther quietly advocates for the conviction that God's providence protects the Jewish diaspora even when his name is unspoken. Similarly, she cites Frederic Bush's Word Biblical Commentary as a technical authority throughout, while rejecting his equally explicit conclusion that the story's resolution involves "the providence of God," and she draws on Karen Jobes's NIV Application Commentary (which devotes its longest theological section to demonstrating that divine concurrence operates in every human decision in Esther) while ignoring that argument entirely. In short, she dismisses as inadequate the very theological framework of the scholars she most relies upon, without ever directly refuting their reasoning — a logical move called a false dilemma, because she presents only two options (God is truly absent, or you are naively importing LXX-style piety into the text) while ignoring the well-established third position that providence operates through human action even when unnamed. Her treatment of Ruth chapter 3's threshing floor scene exhibits circular reasoning: she assumes a sexual outcome in order to read the deliberately ambiguous Hebrew word for "uncover" erotically, then uses that reading to confirm the sexual atmosphere — whereas Bush and Block both argue carefully that the scene's restraint is intentional and that Ruth's speech in 3:9 is primarily a legal petition for marriage and protection under Israelite custom, not an act of sexual aggression. A sidebar titled "Just Get Him Drunk" opens with a crude line equating wine with male sexual availability and then draws false moral equivalences between Ruth and Lot's daughters committing incest, Tamar deceiving her father-in-law, and Judith beheading a general — situations that differ decisively in moral, legal, and narrative terms, all flattened into a single framework of women manipulating men through sex and alcohol. Vashti is heroized as a feminist resister who refuses to enter "male space," but as Jobes explicitly warns, this forces moral judgments onto a character whose motivation the text never supplies — and Berlin, Sutherland's own primary authority, treats Vashti almost entirely as a plot device with no heroic dimension. Throughout the commentary, Boaz is read with consistent suspicion — listed mockingly as "Mr. Pillar-of-the-Community," his piety in 2:12 described as possible "subtle flirtation" — while Daniel Block's Zondervan Exegetical Commentary, the most recent major Ruth commentary, reads Boaz as the book's supreme moral exemplar, a model of Torah righteousness who foreshadows the Davidic king and ultimately the Messiah, calling his book The King Is Coming for this very reason. Finally, Ruth's declaration "Your God is my God" (1:16) — which Block identifies as the theological climax of the entire book and analyzes in detail as a radical transfer of covenant allegiance from the Moabite deity Chemosh to YHWH — receives less space in Sutherland than a sidebar on lesbian reception history, leaving a lay reader without adequate guidance on what is arguably the most theologically significant moment in Ruth. Taken together, these problems — derogatory language about God, logical fallacies that avoid rather than engage opposing arguments, internal contradictions between Sutherland's conclusions and her own authorities, crude interpretive choices in key sidebars, and a structural bias toward reading human agency as a replacement for divine action rather than an expression of it — make this a commentary that should be used, if at all, only alongside a more exegetically and theologically grounded alternative such as Block, Bush, or (for Esther) Jobes.

Campbell's 1 Corinthians (Belief, 2018) is theologically creative and homiletially stimulating, but it rests on a foundational exegetical decision that propagates problematically through the whole volume: his expansion of the archonton tou aiōnos toutou in 2:6–8 — Paul's "rulers of this age" — into a framework, drawn from Walter Wink, of cosmic-structural-spiritual "Powers" encompassing institutions, systems, and hierarchies. This reading is justified partly by deriving the meaning of archonton from its root archē (the same root underlying monarchy, patriarchy, hierarchy) — a textbook etymological fallacy, since word meaning is determined by contextual usage rather than component parts — and partly by a circular argument in which the Powers framework is introduced as the lens for reading 2:6–8, generates that reading, and is then "confirmed" by it for every subsequent passage in the letter. Fee (NICNT) is categorical that the demonic-powers reading is "totally unwarranted" and "has finally been laid to rest," pointing out that the entire unit of 1:18–2:16 is Paul's ironic counter-attack against the Corinthians' own wisdom-boasting, so that the "rulers of this age" are unmistakably the human intellectual and political elites whose credentials the Corinthians were honouring — the very people Paul is skewering, not a cast of cosmic supernatural agents; Hays (Interpretation) concurs, warning that preaching demonic Powers from this passage "would be moving on a tangent away from the text." This misidentification is not a local misstep: it generates Campbell's sweeping dismissal of substitutionary atonement as "theologically misguided," which is a non-sequitur even on his own terms — "the Powers crucified Jesus" does not entail "God did not act salvifically in the crucifixion," since God's predestining purpose is explicitly affirmed in the immediate context (2:7, proōrisen, "destined before time began") and the ancient creedal formula of 15:3 — "Christ died for our sins" (hyper tōn hamartiōn) — which Campbell soft-pedals, asserts precisely the kind of purposive divine agency in the cross that he dismisses; he also misuses Hays here, converting Hays's careful descriptive observation that 1 Corinthians does not emphasise atonement language into a normative theological verdict — that substitutionary atonement is theologically illegitimate — that Hays himself never draws. The same Powers framework drives the selective "old-age captivity" diagnosis Campbell applies to Paul's arguments about women in 11:2–16: throughout the letter he reads Pauline tension and apparent contradiction as generative apocalyptic liminality — the creative friction of living between the old age and the new creation — but when the outcome is patriarchal he abruptly re-diagnoses the identical formal feature as Pauline failure and cultural captivity, which is special pleading masquerading as hermeneutic; Fee and Hays more patiently show that 11:11–12 ("in the Lord, woman is not independent of man or man independent of woman") does not contradict vv. 3–9 but complicates them, establishing a functional equality that neither explains away the patriarchal logic nor surrenders to it — a subtler and more textually honest account than Campbell's "he got it wrong" verdict. The deepest irony is that Campbell, who celebrates particularity above all and explicitly warns against imposing pre-formed systems on Paul's fragmentary, unsettled theology, consistently delivers the generality of his own closed system — derived from Brown, Martyn, Wink, and Boeve and applied top-down from chapter 1 to 16, with his jazz-improvisation apologetic ("wrong notes played with élan") functioning as pre-emptive special pleading that immunises his readings against substantive exegetical objection — while Fee and Hays, working with more traditional exegetical tools, consistently deliver the particular.

Lancaster's Romans (Belief, 2015) is a pastorally accessible commentary with genuine strengths: her engagement with the history of interpretation — bringing Origen, Chrysostom, Luther, and Wesley into dialogue with Paul throughout — is consistently illuminating, and her treatment of chapters 5–8, organised around the Adam-Christ typology and the two-dominion framework, is coherent and historically well-informed. However, its revisionist conclusions on four major issues are directly contradicted by the leading critical commentaries she herself cites. On homosexuality (1:26–27), Lancaster makes two arguments: that Paul condemns only the uncontrolled passion behind same-sex acts rather than the acts themselves, and that his para phusin ("against nature") language is mere cultural convention — no more binding than his remark about long hair in 1 Cor 11:14. Neither argument, however, survives scrutiny from the leading critical commentaries. Dunn (WBC) refutes the first directly from the Greek, showing that aschemosyny katergadzomenoi"indicates clearly that not merely homosexual tendency or desire is in view, but the genital act itself," and explicitly rejects the pederasty-only hypothesis she relies on to limit Paul's scope. Cranfield (ICC) refutes the second by turning Lancaster's own comparator passage against her: physis in both Romans 1 and 1 Cor 11:14 means "the very way God has made us," with "the decisive factor" being "his biblical doctrine of creation" — so the passage she recruits to relativize Romans 1 carries the same creation-grounded theological weight, and cannot do the relativizing work she needs it to do. On divine wrath (1:18), Lancaster imports the doctrine of impassibility as a hermeneutical lens, inferring that because God is beyond irrational passion His wrath-language must mean something mild, but Cranfield argues this inference does not follow: even granting that God is free from capricious emotion, "a man who is not angry at the injustice and cruelty of apartheid cannot be a thoroughly good man; for his lack of wrath means a failure to love," and a perfectly loving God must be capable of precisely this higher, rational indignation against evil. Dunn reinforces the point from the text itself, noting that the thrice-repeated paredōken ("handed over") "puts the issue beyond dispute" as a deliberate divine act, leaving "little of the 'impassibility of God'" in the passage. On atonement (3:25), Lancaster claims Christ's death "was not desired or needed by God," but this creates an internal contradiction in her own reading: she accepts Paul's wrath-diagnosis in 1:18–3:20, yet 3:21–26 is precisely Paul's answer to that wrath, and severing the cross from it leaves the two sections of the letter logically disconnected — she accepts the diagnosis but denies that the cure is actually a cure. Jewett (Hermeneia) closes the gap directly, stating that "the logic of Paul's exposition is that the wrath of God, expounded in 1:18–3:20, is somehow averted by Jesus' death," while Cranfield adds that for God simply to pass over sins without the cross "would have been to condone evil — a cruel betrayal of sinners," treating sin as having no moral weight and forgiveness as requiring no moral seriousness. On Jewish salvation (9:1–11:36), Lancaster gestures toward a dual-covenant reading in which Jews need not come to Christ, but Dunn is unsparing: the thesis "makes no sense either of Paul's anguish in 9:1–3, nor of the line of argument now to be developed," with Israel's salvation coming "through a personal encounter with the exalted Christ," a conclusion Cranfield and Jewett both confirm. Across all four issues, Lancaster reaches a predetermined conclusion and selectively marshals scholarly support, while the most rigorous critical work on the passages consistently points the other direction.

Anna Case-Winters' Matthew (Belief series, WJK, 2015) is a pastorally warm and accessible commentary, written with genuine care for how the text speaks to communities on the margins. Its limitations, however, are exegetical. The author draws almost exclusively from socio-political interpreters — Warren Carter, Donald Senior, Eugene Boring — while major critical commentaries are essentially absent, producing a work that reads Matthew through contemporary denominational concerns rather than the Gospel's own redemptive-historical logic. The recurring weaknesses follow from this. The claim that the Canaanite woman "teaches Jesus about a wider divine embrace" (pp. 201–202) requires ignoring everything Matthew has established before 15:21–28: Jesus has already envisaged a multi-racial people of God (8:11–12) and helped a Gentile on precisely the same faith-based exception (8:5–13). His stated priorities in vv. 24 and 26 are nowhere retracted; what changes is his recognition that this particular woman's extraordinary faith warrants an exception — which is not the same thing as learning a new theology. The claim that "Matthew does not present Jesus' death as something that must happen so that God could be forgiving" (p. 309) is self-undermining: she acknowledges 26:28 yet treats it as peripheral, when Matthew's own addition of γάρ makes the shed blood explicitly the reason for Jesus' directive, and the ransom saying of 20:28 — deeply rooted in Isaiah 53 — frames that death as representative and substitutionary. One cannot cite 26:28 and simultaneously deny Matthew connects Jesus' death to forgiveness. She flatly denies any supersessionist element, citing PCUSA policy rather than exegesis, but 21:43 — found only in Matthew — states the kingdom will be taken from "you" and given to another people bearing its fruit; policy cannot dissolve a Greek text. The demonic is demythologized on the grounds of modern incredulity, but Matthew's own summaries carefully distinguish demonic from natural causation as separate categories — the demythologizing imports a premise the text itself refuses. Divine omnipotence is redefined in Whiteheadian process terms despite Matthew's consistent presentation of Jesus exercising sovereign authority from the baptism to the Great Commission. For exegetical substance, readers should turn to France (NICNT), Nolland (NIGTC), Carson (REBC), or Davies and Allison (ICC).

Moore-Keish's James (Belief, WJK, 2019) is gracefully written and pastorally engaged, with genuine strengths in OT background and reception history, but readers should be aware of several interpretive commitments that sit uneasily with the text. The most serious is a pattern of placing contemporary ideological frameworks above the text: she questions whether the inspired doulos ("slave of God") metaphor at 1:1 is "necessary" today — a move unsupported by any other commentary in the field, including Johnson (AYB) and Allison (ICC), her own cited authorities, who treat the term as an honorific claim to prophetic authority; she applies a feminine pronoun to God at 1:9–11 without discussion or textual warrant; and in the "Further Reflections" on 1:17 she introduces Mary Daly's dismissal of classical theism as a male fantasy constructed to serve male power, presenting it without rebuttal alongside Athanasius and Aquinas as though it were a live theological option within the Christian tradition — which it is not, since Daly had by that point abandoned Christianity altogether. Dibelius, Johnson, Martin, and Allison all read 1:17 as a straightforward affirmation of divine immutability. She further warns that James's personification of desire as female (1:14–15) "damages women," that moichalides (4:4) reinforces harmful female stereotypes, and that the Akedah (2:21) requires child-abuse cautions — concerns raised by no other commentary in the field, including the feminist commentators Laws (BNTC), Spencer (KEL), and Reese (NCC), who read all three passages in their standard literary-historical and OT-prophetic contexts. Recommended with caution for supplementary pastoral use; not suitable as a primary commentary on James.

Cox & Paulsell’s Lamentations and the Song of Songs (Belief, 2012) is a stylistically accomplished volume with genuine literary sensitivity and pastoral warmth. Cox rightly insists Lamentations gives permission to grieve without rushing toward resolution; Paulsell’s engagement with the allegorical tradition — Origen, Bernard, Teresa — is learned and generous. Readers should nonetheless be aware of some important limitations. Drawing on Ricoeur and Caputo, Cox argues that the book’s “protector/punisher” God represents a stage of faith to be outgrown — a post-theistic reading that finds no support even in critical commentaries: Berlin (OTL) calls the Deuteronomistic punishment framework simply “taken for granted” in the book; Salters (ICC) finds all five poems united in interpreting the catastrophe as divine punishment for sin; Goldingay (NICOT) warns that modern readers are tempted to mine Lamentations for its emotional authenticity while quietly setting aside its equally insistent claim that waywardness issues in God’s rejection — which is precisely what Cox does; and Dobbs-Allsopp (Interpretation), the most sympathetic to protest readings, is explicit that hope in Lamentations “has but one object, God.” Cox’s dismissal of the God of Lamentations as “not very nice” fares no better against Goldingay’s insistence that compassion and steadfast love are more central to God’s nature than wrath, and Hillers’s (AYB) grounding of the book’s hope in divine hesed. Paulsell’s section is more carefully exegetical, but her implicit affirmation that the Song speaks to same-sex relationships finds no support even in Exum’s OTL — the most progressive feminist-critical commentary available — which states flatly that the Song portrays “love between a woman and a man” and identifies the queer reading as “one of the most avant-garde readings to date.” She presents Trible’s Eden-reversal thesis as settled, yet Pope’s AYB preserves Trible’s own acknowledgment that the Song’s garden “cannot be the final word,” since it operates in silence about God, sin, and mortality — a qualification Paulsell omits. Most significantly, she bypasses the canonical wisdom framework that Childs and Murphy (Hermeneia) identify as built into the Song’s Solomonic superscription — “The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s” — establishing it as “wisdom’s reflection on the joyful and mysterious nature of love between a man and a woman within the institution of marriage,” and leaving her application of the Song to any form of human love without adequate textual foundation. Both authors write with real flair, but readers seeking theological reliability on either book will need to look elsewhere.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Cox & Paulsell’s Lamentations and the Song of Songs (Belief, 2012) is a stylistically accomplished volume with genuine literary sensitivity and pastoral warmth. Cox rightly insists Lamentations gives permission to grieve without rushing toward resolution; Paulsell’s engagement with the allegorical tradition — Origen, Bernard, Teresa — is learned and generous. Readers should nonetheless be aware of some important limitations. Drawing on Ricoeur and Caputo, Cox argues that the book’s “protector/punisher” God represents a stage of faith to be outgrown — a post-theistic reading that finds no support even in critical commentaries: Berlin (OTL) calls the Deuteronomistic punishment framework simply “taken for granted” in the book; Salters (ICC) finds all five poems united in interpreting the catastrophe as divine punishment for sin; Goldingay (NICOT) warns that modern readers are tempted to mine Lamentations for its emotional authenticity while quietly setting aside its equally insistent claim that waywardness issues in God’s rejection — which is precisely what Cox does; and Dobbs-Allsopp (Interpretation), the most sympathetic to protest readings, is explicit that hope in Lamentations “has but one object, God.” Cox’s dismissal of the God of Lamentations as “not very nice” fares no better against Goldingay’s insistence that compassion and steadfast love are more central to God’s nature than wrath, and Hillers’s (AYB) grounding of the book’s hope in divine hesed. Paulsell’s section is more carefully exegetical, but her implicit affirmation that the Song speaks to same-sex relationships finds no support even in Exum’s OTL — the most progressive feminist-critical commentary available — which states flatly that the Song portrays “love between a woman and a man” and identifies the queer reading as “one of the most avant-garde readings to date.” She presents Trible’s Eden-reversal thesis as settled, yet Pope’s AYB preserves Trible’s own acknowledgment that the Song’s garden “cannot be the final word,” since it operates in silence about God, sin, and mortality — a qualification Paulsell omits. Most significantly, she bypasses the canonical wisdom framework that Childs and Murphy (Hermeneia) identify as built into the Song’s Solomonic superscription — “The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s” — establishing it as “wisdom’s reflection on the joyful and mysterious nature of love between a man and a woman within the institution of marriage,” and leaving her application of the Song to any form of human love without adequate textual foundation. Both authors write with real flair, but readers seeking theological reliability on either book will need to look elsewhere.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

González writes with pastoral warmth, brings voices from the global church into conversation with Luke, and his treatment of themes like table fellowship and the "great reversal" contains real insight. His handling of atonement, however, is the commentary's most persistent weakness. As early as Luke 4:31–44, he sets up a contrast between Jesus as conqueror of evil and Jesus as substitute for sinners, declaring that "the truth is that in the New Testament there is a different prevailing view of the work of Jesus: he is the one who conquers the powers of evil." At the Last Supper (22:14–20), where Jesus says "this is my body, which is given for you" and "this cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you," he discusses the liturgy and Passover but passes over the substitutionary force of these words, and claims elsewhere that Luke "does not even include the explanation that Jesus was to 'give his life a ransom for many'" — as though 22:19–20 were not there. In his excursus on the crucifixion (23:32–49), he associates substitutionary atonement with fundamentalism, calls it an "innovation" not "fully formulated until the eleventh century," and claims "not one ancient Christian writer takes this to be the only, or even the main, way to understand Christ's saving work." While Anselm's Cur Deus Homo (1098) is indeed the classic systematic treatment, the concept of substitutionary sacrifice pervades the New Testament itself (Mark 10:45; 2 Cor 5:21; 1 Pet 2:24; Heb 9:28), and conflating Anselm's specific satisfaction theory with this broader and much older concept gives a skewed picture of the history of doctrine. The contrast with peer commentators is instructive. Fitzmyer (AYB) reads 22:19 as adding "a vicarious dimension of meaning to his 'body,' and probably also a sacrificial nuance," insists "the Lucan form of the reinterpretative words is no less 'sacrificial' than the Marcan," and concludes that "Luke does insinuate the vicarious and salvific aspects of the death of Jesus." Bock (BECNT) rebuts the claim that Luke lacks substitutionary theology, listing "Luke 22:19–20; 24:21; Acts 7:35; esp. 20:28." Garland (ZECNT) writes that "it is at Golgotha, not at the temple, that the ultimate sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins will occur." Particularly telling are Carroll (NTL), Green (NICNT), and Bovon (Hermeneia), all of whom share some of González's inclination to de-emphasise atonement in Luke yet still reckon carefully with the text's sacrificial language. Carroll takes the minority text-critical position that Luke 22:19b–20 may be "an early expansion" under Pauline influence, yet he still acknowledges the cup-word's "blood poured out" implies "a sacrificial offering that is vicariously beneficial" and describes the longer text as carrying "the interpretation of the soteriological import of Jesus' sacrificial death." Green, who elsewhere writes that Luke's theology of the cross is rooted "not so much in a theory of the atonement, but in a narrative portrayal of the life of faithful discipleship," nonetheless concludes on 22:19–20 that "Jesus' death is said to atone for the sins of the people and thus to enable their participation in the renewed, eschatological covenant with God." Bovon acknowledges that "Luke is reserved about the expiatory nature of Jesus' death" but adds: "Yet he does not hesitate to acknowledge the biblical tradition of the expiatory suffering of the righteous person," and regarding Luke's omission of Mark 10:45 writes simply: "He has nothing against atonement." That even the commentators most sympathetic to González's reading still engage carefully with the substitutionary dimensions of these Lukan texts — and none resorts to associating them with fundamentalism or dismissing them as a medieval invention — suggests this is a significant gap in the commentary.

O'Brien's AOTC volume (2004) on Nahum–Malachi is competent in literary analysis and useful in surveying the history of interpretation, but it is seriously compromised by its ideological framework. Most troublingly, she applies derogatory language to God that no other major commentary uses. She calls Yahweh "the rapist" in her treatment of Nahum 3:5–7 and endorses the label "pornoprophetics" for divine actions — a characterisation that is reductive and inflammatory, collapsing the distinction between metaphor and literal description. By contrast, Timmer (ZECOT) reads the same passage as ironic reversal: the attractive prostitute (Nineveh/Ishtar) who consumed her clients is publicly stripped of her glory, with the theological point being Yahweh's dismantling of Assyrian ideology; Robertson (NICOT) and Patterson (WEC) similarly emphasise that God's action is judicial — the exposure of a guilty nation — rather than sexual violence; and Renz (NICOT) discusses the imagery carefully within Ancient Near Eastern conventions of warfare and shame without ever describing God as a perpetrator of sexual assault. Even where scholars acknowledge the difficulty of the imagery (as Renz, Barker, and Bruckner all do), no other major commentary on Nahum equates the metaphorical depiction of a city's fall with divine endorsement of sexual violence. Equally troubling, O'Brien argues (via psychologist Donald Capps) that Malachi's depiction of God as Father "perpetuates the necessary precondition for child abuse" — reasoning that because Malachi portrays God as demanding honour and because authoritarian parenting can lead to abuse, the text itself is complicit. This is a category error: the father-son analogy in Malachi 1:6 functions within the logic of covenant obligation, not domestic violence, as Taylor (NAC) demonstrates by showing the language is rooted in suzerain-vassal loyalty frameworks pervasive in the Ancient Near East and Deuteronomy, and as Verhoef (NICOT) and Hill (TOTC) confirm by treating it as covenantal analogy calling priests to accountability, not servile terror. Her method is also internally inconsistent: she insists the prophetic message cannot be universalised because it is historically contingent, yet universalises twenty-first-century Western feminist ethics as her evaluative standard across all six books — Nahum's imagery assessed against "contemporary views of rape and domestic violence," Malachi's father-son language measured against modern child psychology, Zephaniah's treatment of nations evaluated through postcolonial theory — and she criticises G. A. Smith (1903) for cultural arrogance toward Nahum while applying exactly the same evaluative method with different cultural content, the difference being the substance of the external standard, not the approach. Her reading of Malachi 2:10–16 as entirely about idolatry rather than divorce — including a gender-switch in which Yahweh becomes Judah's "covenant wife," reversing the conventions of the entire prophetic marriage metaphor without any textual signal — is a significant exegetical stretch and a minority position that does not adequately account for the passage's explicitly marital vocabulary (as demonstrated by Taylor [NAC], Verhoef [NICOT], Hill [TOTC], and Hugenberger's monograph). She leans toward a late, post-Assyrian composition of Nahum without adequate defence against the strong arguments for a 663–612 BCE date marshalled by Timmer (ZECOT), Roberts (OTL), Robertson (NICOT), Patterson (WEC), and Barker (NAC). Throughout, her engagement with scholarship is selective, drawing heavily on feminist and ideological critics while largely ignoring evangelical, Reformed, and moderate critical scholars; a reader relying on O'Brien alone would not know that the overwhelming majority of commentators across the theological spectrum treat Nahum's theology of divine justice as theologically legitimate, read Malachi 2:10–16 as at least partly about literal marriage, and affirm that the prophetic books substantially preserve prophetic speech rather than being editorial fictions. Best used as one voice among many, read alongside Renz (NICOT), Timmer (ZECOT), Boda (NICOT/NIVAC), or Robertson (NICOT) for theological balance.

Kovacs & Rowland's Blackwell commentary is a rich reception history tracing Revelation's impact on Western art, theology, and culture, but it has notable weaknesses. Several factual errors undermine confidence: Dionysius of Alexandria is wrongly said to have suggested Cerinthus wrote Revelation (it was Gaius of Rome and the Alogoi; Dionysius explicitly distanced himself from that claim, as Aune's WBC confirms); "2 Esdras 21:31" is cited but 2 Esdras has only 16 chapters; the works-based judgment criterion is attributed to Rev 20:11 when it belongs to 20:12–13; and 1 Cor 6:9 is oddly cited as a "hint of the millennium" when it concerns moral qualifications for the kingdom, not an earthly messianic reign. Theologically, the commentary's most troubling move comes in its Hermeneutical Postscript, which describes Revelation's "catalogue of disaster and destruction, apparently sanctioned by God, its cries for vengeance, and its terrible gloating over the fall of Babylon" as "so contrary to the spirit of Jesus." But Revelation presents itself as "the revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him" (1:1), so characterizing its content as contrary to Jesus' spirit effectively sets Christ against his own revelation; Jesus' own teachings include extensive judgment oracles (Matt 23; 25:31–46; Mark 13), and the cry for divine vengeance in Rev 6:10 echoes his parable in Luke 18:7–8; the exultation over Babylon's fall (18:20; 19:1–3), far from "terrible gloating," is rooted in OT precedent (Jer 51:48; Deut 32:43) and reflects the vindication of martyrs — as Beale (NIGTC), Osborne (BECNT), Fanning (ZECNT), Mounce (NICNT), and Schreiner (ESVEC) all argue; and the qualifier "apparently sanctioned by God" introduces doubt about whether the judgments truly reflect God's character, approaching derogation of the divine nature as portrayed in canonical Scripture. Similarly, Jung's reading of the wrathful Lamb as "an aggressive and irascible ram" representing repressed archetypes — effectively treating Christ's wrath as psychological regression from the teaching of divine love — is presented without critique, even though Rev 5–6 deliberately integrates the slain Lamb with the one who opens the seals of judgment, holding sacrificial love and righteous wrath together. Rev 14:4 is flatly stated to commend "male celibacy" despite the dominant scholarly view (Beale, Osborne, Fanning, Koester, Smalley) that the virginity language is metaphorical for faithfulness against idolatry, and the claim that "resistance to the Beast and Babylon can be discerned in all those who instinctively do what is required of them by God (cf. Rom 2:13–14)" imports a contested Pauline passage into Revelation's final judgment to suggest a quasi-universalist ethic unsupported by the text's own language, which ties salvation to the book of life and to those who have "washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb" (7:14; 21:27). Methodologically, while reception history is a legitimate genre, the commentary's practice of presenting hundreds of interpretations side by side — from Victorinus to Blake to liberation theologians — without consistently evaluating them against the text leaves the impression that Revelation's meaning is essentially indeterminate, and the inconsistency of applying critical criteria to some readings (e.g., the Münsterite Anabaptists) but not others (Jung, Adela Collins' catharsis model, Girard's scapegoat theory) weakens its scholarly balance. As a cultural and literary resource the volume is genuinely valuable, but readers seeking exegetical engagement with what Revelation actually says will need to look elsewhere.

Johnstone's two-volume commentary (Sheffield, 1997) offers genuine strengths — his identification of ma'al as a structuring theme, his attention to Masoretic paragraph markers, and his intertextual work linking Chronicles to Leviticus 5–6 and 25–26 are all valuable. However, the commentary is marred by serious problems. Methodologically, his programmatic dismissal of historicity as "at best a distraction," his labelling of Manasseh's repentance and Jehoiakim's exile as the Chronicler's "inventions," and his treatment of narrative data as "moveable counters" go further than even critical scholars like Japhet (OTL) or Knoppers (AYB), and stand sharply at odds with Thompson (NAC), who marshals Assyrian inscriptions supporting the very historicity Johnstone denies; Dillard (WBC) likewise argues that the deviations from orthodox practice in Hezekiah's Passover would be highly unlikely in a fabricated account, and most commentators allow that the differing accounts of Josiah's death may simply reflect different aspects of the same event — mortally wounded at Megiddo, dying upon arrival in Jerusalem — rather than irreconcilable theological constructions. To construct a theology of atonement and holiness from narratives one has already admitted are "inventions" and "moveable counters" is to build on sand by one's own reckoning, and the same self-undermining logic applies to his claim that the Chronicler's prophetic source citations refer to works that "probably never existed" — if an author fabricates his sources, how secure is the theology built upon them? His method compounds the problem: he treats every minute textual variation between Chronicles and Samuel–Kings as theologically significant and deliberate, while acknowledging that some may be accidents of transmission, resolving the tension by fiat ("any changes that exist are deliberate, no matter how small") — creating an unfalsifiable system in which every variation confirms the thesis. Theologically, his opening claim that Chronicles teaches "no easy blotting out of the guilty past" foregrounds legalistic reparation while backgrounding the Chronicler's own repeated celebrations of divine mercy, not least the centrepiece of the Chronicler's forgiveness theology in 2 Chronicles 7:14 — "If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land" — a remarkably gracious and direct promise that sits poorly with Johnstone's framing; the effect is to present a harder, more legalistic picture of God than the text warrants. Several of his distinctive constructs — a jubilee chronology making the exilic generation the "fiftieth from Adam," a "duality in the one Deity," and the elevation of Pharaoh Neco to a "righteous gentile" alongside Cyrus — find no support in any other major commentary. His listing of "consulting the physicians" (2 Chr 16:12) as an abstract theological category of sin alongside idolatry and foreign alliances miscategorises what is specifically a criticism of Asa's failure to seek God — not a blanket condemnation of medical practice — potentially misleading readers about the Bible's stance on medicine, as Selman (TOTC) carefully notes. In short: stimulating to argue with and frequently illuminating on details, but too thesis-driven and too dismissive of the text's historical claims to serve as a reliable guide to what the Chronicler is actually saying.

Johnstone's two-volume commentary (Sheffield, 1997) offers genuine strengths — his identification of ma'al as a structuring theme, his attention to Masoretic paragraph markers, and his intertextual work linking Chronicles to Leviticus 5–6 and 25–26 are all valuable. However, the commentary is marred by serious problems. Methodologically, his programmatic dismissal of historicity as "at best a distraction," his labelling of Manasseh's repentance and Jehoiakim's exile as the Chronicler's "inventions," and his treatment of narrative data as "moveable counters" go further than even critical scholars like Japhet (OTL) or Knoppers (AYB), and stand sharply at odds with Thompson (NAC), who marshals Assyrian inscriptions supporting the very historicity Johnstone denies; Dillard (WBC) likewise argues that the deviations from orthodox practice in Hezekiah's Passover would be highly unlikely in a fabricated account, and most commentators allow that the differing accounts of Josiah's death may simply reflect different aspects of the same event — mortally wounded at Megiddo, dying upon arrival in Jerusalem — rather than irreconcilable theological constructions. To construct a theology of atonement and holiness from narratives one has already admitted are "inventions" and "moveable counters" is to build on sand by one's own reckoning, and the same self-undermining logic applies to his claim that the Chronicler's prophetic source citations refer to works that "probably never existed" — if an author fabricates his sources, how secure is the theology built upon them? His method compounds the problem: he treats every minute textual variation between Chronicles and Samuel–Kings as theologically significant and deliberate, while acknowledging that some may be accidents of transmission, resolving the tension by fiat ("any changes that exist are deliberate, no matter how small") — creating an unfalsifiable system in which every variation confirms the thesis. Theologically, his opening claim that Chronicles teaches "no easy blotting out of the guilty past" foregrounds legalistic reparation while backgrounding the Chronicler's own repeated celebrations of divine mercy, not least the centrepiece of the Chronicler's forgiveness theology in 2 Chronicles 7:14 — "If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land" — a remarkably gracious and direct promise that sits poorly with Johnstone's framing; the effect is to present a harder, more legalistic picture of God than the text warrants. Several of his distinctive constructs — a jubilee chronology making the exilic generation the "fiftieth from Adam," a "duality in the one Deity," and the elevation of Pharaoh Neco to a "righteous gentile" alongside Cyrus — find no support in any other major commentary. His listing of "consulting the physicians" (2 Chr 16:12) as an abstract theological category of sin alongside idolatry and foreign alliances miscategorises what is specifically a criticism of Asa's failure to seek God — not a blanket condemnation of medical practice — potentially misleading readers about the Bible's stance on medicine, as Selman (TOTC) carefully notes. In short: stimulating to argue with and frequently illuminating on details, but too thesis-driven and too dismissive of the text's historical claims to serve as a reliable guide to what the Chronicler is actually saying.

Johnstone's two-volume commentary (Sheffield, 1997) offers genuine strengths — his identification of ma'al as a structuring theme, his attention to Masoretic paragraph markers, and his intertextual work linking Chronicles to Leviticus 5–6 and 25–26 are all valuable. However, the commentary is marred by serious problems. Methodologically, his programmatic dismissal of historicity as "at best a distraction," his labelling of Manasseh's repentance and Jehoiakim's exile as the Chronicler's "inventions," and his treatment of narrative data as "moveable counters" go further than even critical scholars like Japhet (OTL) or Knoppers (AYB), and stand sharply at odds with Thompson (NAC), who marshals Assyrian inscriptions supporting the very historicity Johnstone denies; Dillard (WBC) likewise argues that the deviations from orthodox practice in Hezekiah's Passover would be highly unlikely in a fabricated account, and most commentators allow that the differing accounts of Josiah's death may simply reflect different aspects of the same event — mortally wounded at Megiddo, dying upon arrival in Jerusalem — rather than irreconcilable theological constructions. To construct a theology of atonement and holiness from narratives one has already admitted are "inventions" and "moveable counters" is to build on sand by one's own reckoning, and the same self-undermining logic applies to his claim that the Chronicler's prophetic source citations refer to works that "probably never existed" — if an author fabricates his sources, how secure is the theology built upon them? His method compounds the problem: he treats every minute textual variation between Chronicles and Samuel–Kings as theologically significant and deliberate, while acknowledging that some may be accidents of transmission, resolving the tension by fiat ("any changes that exist are deliberate, no matter how small") — creating an unfalsifiable system in which every variation confirms the thesis. Theologically, his opening claim that Chronicles teaches "no easy blotting out of the guilty past" foregrounds legalistic reparation while backgrounding the Chronicler's own repeated celebrations of divine mercy, not least the centrepiece of the Chronicler's forgiveness theology in 2 Chronicles 7:14 — "If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land" — a remarkably gracious and direct promise that sits poorly with Johnstone's framing; the effect is to present a harder, more legalistic picture of God than the text warrants. Several of his distinctive constructs — a jubilee chronology making the exilic generation the "fiftieth from Adam," a "duality in the one Deity," and the elevation of Pharaoh Neco to a "righteous gentile" alongside Cyrus — find no support in any other major commentary. His listing of "consulting the physicians" (2 Chr 16:12) as an abstract theological category of sin alongside idolatry and foreign alliances miscategorises what is specifically a criticism of Asa's failure to seek God — not a blanket condemnation of medical practice — potentially misleading readers about the Bible's stance on medicine, as Selman (TOTC) carefully notes. In short: stimulating to argue with and frequently illuminating on details, but too thesis-driven and too dismissive of the text's historical claims to serve as a reliable guide to what the Chronicler is actually saying.

Duncan's AOTC Ecclesiastes (2017) offers genuine contributions—her case for retaining "vapor" as a concrete metaphor for hebel is well argued, and her literary analyses are often perceptive—but the commentary is undermined by a systematic theological skew. Her cumulative portrayal of God trends toward the adversarial: God has "stacked the deck" against humanity, "withheld information," and "created barriers to human insight," language that goes well beyond the text's own wrestling with divine inscrutability and that Murphy (WBC) and Krüger (Hermeneia) explicitly warn against (Murphy: "It is a mistake to characterize Qoheleth's God as a 'distant despot'"). This trajectory is reinforced by several interlocking exegetical choices: she reads ḥōṭēʾ in 2:26 as a non-moral category, making God's distribution of blessings appear arbitrary (contra Bartholomew's strong counter-argument in the BCOT); she narrows "fear God" toward existential dread of an opaque sovereign rather than the richer wisdom-tradition concept of relational and covenantal reverence; and she grounds the joy passages more in courageous human acceptance of mortality than in grateful reception of divine gifts, despite the text's repeated "from the hand of God" language. Her heavy reliance on Camus and existentialist philosophy as an interpretive lens, while interesting, tends to secularise the book's theology: what gets noticed is confrontation with mortality and the limits of existence, while what gets minimised is the positive theological content—God as giver of good gifts, creation as fundamentally good, and the enjoyment refrains as genuine affirmations of divine generosity rather than consolation prizes wrested from the void. As Bartholomew warns, Ecclesiastes is wisdom literature rooted in the fear of YHWH, not a proto-existentialist manifesto; the book may resonate with existentialist themes, but making existentialism the hermeneutical key reverses the proper order. Duncan's reading also harbours an unresolved internal contradiction: she affirms that food, drink, and enjoyment are "from the hand of God" (2:24), while simultaneously arguing that God has "stacked the deck against humanity"—yet if God is the generous source of life's good things, the language of rigging the game is at best misleading, and Duncan never adequately reconciles these two portraits. Most problematically, she treats the canonical epilogue (12:13–14) as "fundamentally at odds with the temper of the book" and is explicitly "wary of allowing this voice the last word"—effectively marginalising the conclusion that calls for fearing God and keeping his commandments. Readers will benefit from her literary observations but should be aware that her theological reading is notably darker than what the consensus of scholarship across critical (Seow, Krüger, Crenshaw), evangelical (Bartholomew, Longman, Enns, Kidner, Garrett), Catholic (Murphy, Lohfink), and Jewish (Fox) traditions would support, and should supplement accordingly.

Gowan's Abingdon OT Commentary on Daniel (2001) is readable and pastorally warm, with perceptive literary analysis of the court tales and a moving treatment of Dan 3:17–18, but it suffers from several significant weaknesses when measured against the full range of Daniel scholarship. His central axiom—that an inspired author has "no more exact knowledge of the future than any other human being—inspired or not"—is a philosophical presupposition, not an exegetical conclusion, and goes further than even fellow critical scholars like Collins (Hermeneia), Goldingay (WBC), or Newsom (OTL), who handle the dating question without issuing sweeping verdicts on what inspiration can accomplish. This creates a deep internal inconsistency: Gowan affirms God's absolute sovereignty as the book's controlling theme while denying that this sovereign God could communicate future events—even though the text itself explicitly claims that God "reveals deep and hidden things" and "knows what is in the darkness" (2:22), meaning Gowan's hermeneutic requires him to affirm the theology of the text while denying the very epistemological mechanism the text identifies as the basis for that theology. He calls the prophecy "defective" and the author's timing "wrong" without explaining how a defective vehicle carries reliable theology, and even Collins concedes that the prediction in 8:14 "cannot be after the fact and must have been composed before the actual rededication of the temple"—acknowledging genuine predictive content within the critical framework itself—yet Gowan frames the author being "partly right" about Antiochus's imminent fall as essentially a lucky guess rather than engaging its theological significance. He overstates the historical difficulties in Dan 1:1, the Belshazzar problem, and the Darius the Mede question: the Dan 1:1 discrepancy, for instance, is easily explained by the difference between Babylonian accession-year and Judaean non-accession-year dating systems, a solution widely acknowledged since Wiseman and defended by multiple commentators (Miller/NAC, Tanner/EEC, Baldwin/TOTC, Young). His tone toward conservative and dispensationalist readings is unusually sharp—repeatedly labelling them "misuse" and "inappropriate" rather than engaging their arguments, a contrast with Collins's detached neutrality. He raises the question of whether Daniel's angelology represents "a partial surrender, finally, to polytheism," a framing not shared by any major Daniel commentary, whether conservative or critical, all of which treat Daniel's angelology as a development within monotheism rather than a compromise of it. Most strikingly, he parenthetically includes Jesus and Paul among those whose eschatological expectations were mistaken, an extraordinary claim for a commentary series aimed at Christian teaching and preaching; most scholars who engage the imminent-eschatology question frame it with far greater care through the "already/not yet" framework or the distinction between prophetic foreshortening and outright error, and Gowan's formulation carries Christological implications he never explores. Ultimately, Gowan occupies an uneasy middle ground—too theologically committed to satisfy critical scholars, and too dismissive of the text's own claims to satisfy those who take those claims seriously. Readers seeking a rigorous critical commentary are better served by Collins or Goldingay; those seeking theological and pastoral depth will find Davis (BST), Duguid (REC), or Longman (NIVAC) more reliable guides.

Chapman's 1 Samuel as Christian Scripture (Eerdmans, 2016) is a cultivated, intellectually serious work whose introduction — his engagement with the "book" as a theologically significant unit, his rebuttal of Sommer's midrashic objection, and his synthesis of Alter's literary approach with a genuinely theological intention — is worth consulting by any serious student of canonical and literary hermeneutics; but the commentary proper is compromised by a cluster of idiosyncratic and occasionally troubling positions that sit uneasily with the text and with the mainstream of Samuel scholarship. Most significant is his claim that Saul "adumbrates Christ" in his suffering and "overliving": the move is theologically confused, because Saul's dying-in-life is explicitly the consequence of his own disobedience and God's judicial withdrawal — punitive deterioration, not innocent redemptive suffering — and equating this with the Christ of Gethsemane and Calvary distorts the theological logic of the narrative, since Chapman's own assurance that such a christological interpretation "can honor the contours of the Old Testament narrative in a highly effective manner" is quietly refuted by the text's own explicit judgment on Saul's disobedience; no other major Samuel commentary — not Brueggemann (Int), Arnold (NIVAC), Tsumura (NICOT), Firth (ApOTC), Phillips (REC), Bergen (NAC), or McCarter (AYB) — supports this typological identification. More troubling still is his treatment of 1 Samuel 15, where he entertains "the possibility" that the narrator "actually means to portray" Samuel's execution of Agag as "reprehensible" — "perhaps Samuel is now depicted as making the opposite mistake by bringing battle into worship" — a reading unsupported by any narratorial signal and contradicted by the book's consistent presentation of Samuel as its orthodox spokesman; he then approvingly cites Buber's declaration that "Nothing can make me believe in a God who punishes Saul because he has not murdered his enemy" without substantive rebuttal, lending credence to what is, in effect, a protest against the divine command itself — a position verging on the derogatory toward God that no other serious evangelical or even moderate critical commentary endorses. His handling of 1 Sam 15:29 versus 15:11 and 15:35 is characteristically glib — "God, being God, absolutely does not regret, except when God does" — whereas Tsumura (NICOT), McCarter (AYB), and Klein (WBC) all show that naham in v. 29 functions in a different register (God will not reverse his judicial decision on Saul) from its uses in vv. 11 and 35 (God's personal grief over Saul's behavior), so there is no flat contradiction requiring the embarrassed irony Chapman deploys. His reading of Saul's removal of mediums (28:3) as "a worrisome signal" of prior spiritualist involvement rather than an act of Deuteronomic piety is a minority position against the near-consensus of Baldwin, Arnold, Bergen, and Firth, who rightly see it as obedience to Deut 18:10-11, making the subsequent resort to the medium all the more bitter. Chapman's characterisation of David's "sex appeal" as "contributing to the sense that he is God's chosen one" is an underdeveloped and misleading theological inference, and his footnote noting without explicit rejection the view that David's attractiveness to both men and women evidences "bisexuality" is an irresponsible half-endorsement of a fringe reading. The Thérèse of Lisieux conclusion is charming but finally a category error: a nineteenth-century French Carmelite's interior spirituality is not an adequate analogical lens for the thoroughly public, political, and covenantal theology of a book about the origins of Israelite monarchy, and the application says more about Chapman's Baptist pietist instincts (which he himself acknowledges) than about the text. There is also an internal inconsistency between Chapman's announced goal of letting literary presentation govern interpretation and his willingness to treat 2 Samuel 21–24 as the hermeneutical key to 1 Samuel — material he concedes is chronologically and compositionally displaced — quietly privileging the canonical-redactional perspective he claims to resist elsewhere; and despite the theological richness of the introduction, the exegetical engagement with Hebrew linguistics is thinner than in Arnold, Tsumura, Firth, or McCarter, so that the literary-theological readings sometimes float free of the grammatical anchors that would make them compelling rather than merely suggestive. The commentary is best read as an extended hermeneutical essay by a serious canonicist, paired with Firth (ApOTC) or Arnold (NIVAC) for exegetical control; readers should be forewarned that its willingness to leave the divine commands of 1 Samuel 15 as an open theological wound — rather than doing the harder work of canonical theodicy — reflects a fashionable academic discomfort with the Old Testament's portrayal of God that the text itself does not share.

Thompson's Deuteronomy (Belief series, WJK, 2014) is a readable pastoral essay for church audiences, but it has significant weaknesses that limit its usefulness as a scholarly commentary. As a systematic theologian rather than an OT specialist, Thompson makes recurring factual errors — misdating the end of the Babylonian exile (stating "540 BCE" rather than the standard 539/538 BCE), overstating the current consensus behind Wellhausen's four-source theory, and claiming Deuteronomy is "the only book of the Pentateuch" with monotheistic claims. Her logic is inconsistently applied: she mounts a sustained argument against Marcionite separation of the OT and NT gods, yet persistently frames OT divine violence as morally troubling in ways she never applies to NT judgement texts, effectively reproducing the emotional valence she formally rejects. Most seriously for a Christian theological commentary, she concedes that "it is difficult to mount a defense against" David Blumenthal's characterisation of God as "abusive," approvingly cites Martin Buber's "This is no God that I know" in response to the Amalek command, and flatly describes "the God of the Bible in its entirety" as "irreducibly… destructive toward God's own creation" — language that goes beyond acknowledging textual tension and into an evaluative indictment of the divine character. She also politicises the "choose life" passage (30:19) by framing it primarily as a counter to pro-life usage, and she endorses Muslim claims on Deuteronomy 18:18 without critical theological evaluation. Readers wanting serious engagement with Deuteronomy's theology would be better served by Block (NIVAC), McConville (ApOTC), or even the more critical Miller (Interpretation).

Jensen's 1 & 2 Samuel (Belief, 2015) offers moments of genuine theological reflection — on Hannah's prayer, place theology, and the ambiguities of power — but is undermined by serious and recurring problems. His opening claim that "many, if not most" events in Samuel "probably did not happen in the way the authors describe" is both historically overstated and logically inconsistent, since he then mines every passage for authoritative theological meaning. He incorrectly defines Samuel's name as meaning "name of God" or "He who is from God," when virtually every other commentary correctly derives it from sha'al ("to ask"), meaning "asked of God." His consistent framing of the David–Bathsheba episode as rape — including a section header "David Seizes Bathsheba" — goes beyond what the Hebrew text supports and against the mainstream of scholarship, which treats it as adultery. His "Further Reflections: LGBT Theologies" section approvingly surveys queer theology (including the claim that the Eucharist is "gay sex as well as straight sex") with minimal critical engagement, while the David–Jonathan relationship is left open to a homoerotic reading that commentaries such as Bergen (NAC) explicitly and carefully reject — Bergen rightly notes that in ancient Israel a man's wife was a partner in procreation rather than his closest emotional confidant, which fully accounts for the intensity of David's bond with Jonathan without any sexual dimension. His treatment of biblical authority effectively endorses Carter Heyward's position that some canonical texts are neither inspired nor authoritative. Most seriously, Jensen repeatedly uses language derogatory toward God: he approvingly cites the characterisation of the resurrected Christ as "the disabled God," leaves unrebutted the claim that God has a "dark side" and is "demonic" in his dealings with Saul, and twice quotes approvingly the view that the God of Samuel is "not particularly loving or lovable." A process-theology influence (drawing on Catherine Keller) further undermines classical theism in his treatment of God's relenting over kingship — a passage Brueggemann, himself a liberal scholar, handles comfortably within a covenant-relational framework without recourse to process categories. The commentary is also heavily burdened with partisan contemporary political commentary. Readers seeking theologically rich engagement with Samuel will be better served by Arnold (NIVAC), Firth (ApOTC), Bergen (NAC), or even Brueggemann (Interpretation).

Jennings' Acts (Belief, 2017) is a creative postcolonial and homiletical meditation rather than a commentary in any traditional exegetical sense, and readers should approach it accordingly. Its genuine strengths — attentiveness to diaspora as Acts' social context, sensitivity to Luke's portrayal of women, and sustained focus on the Spirit's agency — are real contributions. However, several serious problems warrant caution. Most troubling is Jennings' repeated characterization of God in explicitly erotic terms ("an erotic God," divine desire as "eros" and "sensuality," the resurrection as "closer to the erotic than the evidentiary"), language with no grounding in Luke's text and potentially dishonoring to God's holiness. He also calls Jesus' disruption of kinship networks "an act of utter terrorism" and describes God as "an extravagant busybody" — rhetorical flourishes that cross into irreverence. Exegetically, his treatment of Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5) is a significant failure: he displaces the passage's own stated issue — lying to the Holy Spirit (5:3-4), as every mainstream commentary from Barrett and Bruce to Peterson and Bock consistently identifies — with an argument about "the idol of the couple," which he then uses as a platform for same-sex marriage advocacy entirely absent from the text. His characterization of Gamaliel as "the quintessential compromised intellectual" is dismissive beyond what the text warrants. He also asserts without justification that "all violence is religious violence," a claim internally inconsistent with his own economic analysis of the prison system elsewhere in the same volume. Throughout, contemporary political concerns — prison abolition, anti-nationalism, postcolonial critique — are read into Acts with a confidence the text itself rarely supports. Useful as a supplementary homiletical perspective when read critically; not reliable as a guide to what Luke actually wrote or meant.

Kraftchick's ANTC commentary has real strengths — readable prose, solid rhetorical analysis, and useful engagement with the Hellenistic background of 2 Peter — but it is weakened by a persistent bias against the letters' sharpest theological claims, which surfaces at nearly every significant exegetical decision. Most strikingly, the preface connects the letters' rhetoric about divine judgment and the distinction between the faithful and the "ungodly" to the 9/11 attacks, warning that "these texts can be used for harm" — an extraordinary insinuation, without precedent among commentaries on these letters, that frames canonical Scripture as potentially dangerous before the exegesis even begins. This same instinct to soften and qualify runs through the commentary proper. God's judgment is consistently reframed as sinners forfeiting their status rather than incurring the active wrath of a holy God; Käsemann's verdict that 2 Peter corrupts the Pauline gospel into institutionalised moralism is treated with unwarranted sympathy, with Kraftchick's concession that the letter's theology is "not particularly daring" implicitly validating the core charge that Bauckham and Schreiner decisively reject; and at 2 Pet 2:1 the claim that condemned false teachers retain intact redemption is simply self-contradictory. Exegetically, the confident assertion that pseudonymity is near-universal consensus overstates the case — Bauckham, Kraftchick's primary source, argues for the authenticity of Jude, noting that the author's self-description as "brother of James" rather than "brother of Jesus" is far easier to explain on authenticity than pseudonymity, since a pseudepigrapher would naturally have invoked the more prestigious connection. At two critical Christological texts (Jude 4; 2 Pet 1:1), Kraftchick ignores the Granville Sharp rule — that a single article governing two singular nouns connected by kaiidentifies them as the same person — which would render "Master and Lord" and "God and Savior" as unified titles for Christ; the cost is particularly high at 2 Pet 1:1, where the rule yields one of the New Testament's clearest direct ascriptions of deity to Jesus. His reading of Jude 7 follows Bauckham's minority view that Sodom sought sex with angelic beings rather than engaging in homosexual activity, without adequately engaging Schreiner's compelling counter that the Sodomites didn't know their visitors were angels. Best used cautiously and alongside Bauckham (WBC), Schreiner (NAC), or Green (TNTC).

Thompson's Revelation (ANTC, 1998) is a compact, student-oriented commentary whose sociological and comparative-religion methodology produces several significant problems. Its most controversial thesis — that Asian Christians lived "quietly, peacefully, and prosperously" with no widespread persecution — is both historically questionable and internally inconsistent: Thompson never reconciles it with the text's own depictions of martyrdom, poverty, and imprisonment (2:9–10; 6:9; 11:7–8). The commentary also exhibits what Sandmel called parallelomania: at virtually every significant image Thompson reaches first for Hellenistic, Egyptian, or Greco-Roman parallels — the Mithras Liturgy alone is cited repeatedly — consistently subordinating the OT prophetic tradition to pagan comparanda and reversing the methodological priorities most other scholars consider primary; Beale's meticulous demonstration that John's imagery derives overwhelmingly from Daniel, Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Zechariah stands as the decisive corrective here. More troubling, Thompson applies derogatory language to God's judicial acts, describing divine vengeance as involving "personal spite and vindictiveness" (on 6:10–11), the two witnesses' God-authorised judgments as "an excess of vengeance and gore," and the Messiah's career in ch. 12 as "aborted" — language unwarranted by the Greek and found in none of the other major commentaries. Several exegetical positions are idiosyncratic and thinly argued, including the denial that the "one like a human" in 14:14 is Christ (against Beale, Mounce, Aune, Koester, and Fanning). Thompson's introductory sketch of civic life in Asia Minor has genuine student value, but the commentary as a whole should be read with significant caution and alongside Beale, Koester, or Aune as necessary correctives.

Black's ANTC commentary on Mark is well-written and literarily sensitive, with astute structural analysis, a moving treatment of Gethsemane, and careful attention to the women characters — but several significant problems warrant caution, and what is striking is that Black frequently exceeds even the most critical scholars in this field in his harshness. On the hardening theme in 4:11–12, Marcus (AYB) and Collins (Hermeneia) — neither of them conservative — both question whether the Greek hina ("so that") implies divine intent or merely describes an unfortunate result, and situate the hardening within a framework of human responsibility and redemptive purpose; Black dismisses such attempts as "heroic efforts to soften its blow" and presents God flatly and without qualification as the agent of deliberate blindness, yet later declares "God is no punishing agent" — a contradiction he never resolves, leaving his theology of God incoherent. On the centurion's confession at 15:39, Collins and Marcus acknowledge ambiguity but still lean toward a genuine if imperfect confession; Black alone among major commentators calls it possibly "sarcastic" and ultimately "inconsequential," undermining what the narrative structure of the entire Gospel has been building toward. On Jesus' apparent slip at 2:26 (Abiathar/Ahimelech), even Hooker is cautious before concluding error; Black accepts it without examining the exegetical alternatives France, Lane, and Guelich carefully lay out. The Petrine tradition is dismissed outright where even Marcus and Collins engage it as a live option. Readers will be better served by France (NIGTC) or Lane (NICNT), which handle the hard questions with greater precision and consistency.

Bergant's AOTC Lamentations is readable and literarily sensitive, but contains problems serious enough to warrant caution. Most concerning is a persistent pattern of framing God's character negatively: she dismisses omniscience and omnipotence as "not really biblical" (a claim contradicted by Ps 139, Jer 32, and her own subsequent exegesis); she labels God's actions in chapter 3 "divine brutality" as her own theological verdict rather than as the sufferer's lament rhetoric; she repeatedly asks whether God's punishment was "excessive" or "vindictive," which cuts against the text's own declaration that "the LORD is in the right" (1:18); and she flatly asserts that "the voice of God is never heard" in the book, overlooking 3:57 where God explicitly speaks ("Do not fear"). Other unusual moves include raising — as a genuine open question — whether the mothers who cannibalized their children were morally wrong, apparently finding the mothers' intent to survive a mitigating factor, whereas every other commentary treats these passages (Lam 2:20; 4:10) with unambiguous horror as the nadir of devastation and the covenant curses of Deuteronomy 28 in their most extreme form. She also states a methodological commitment to avoid historical presuppositions that she then ignores throughout. These tendencies are compounded by a selective bibliography that omits significant pre-2003 evangelical works (Harrison TOTC, Kaiser, Huey NAC), meaning perspectives that read Lamentations within a robust doctrine of God — affirming divine justice, covenant faithfulness, and the ultimate goodness of God's discipline — are largely absent from the conversation and contribute to the commentary's overall theological tilt. Useful as a supplementary voice on poetic structure, but a poor first choice.

Horsley's 1 Corinthians (ANTC, 1998) brings useful social-historical colour to the Corinthian context but is seriously compromised by a totalising socio-political hermeneutic that consistently subordinates Paul's theology to an anti-imperial agenda — framing Paul from the outset as "a third-world missionary," an anachronistic postcolonial label that is more rhetorical positioning than historical description, and then reducing the cross to "God's political action" against Rome with atonement for sin mentioned almost in passing, reframing the resurrection as "an imminent worldwide political event" rather than a redemptive eschatological reality, treating the Lord's Supper primarily as political-communal boundary maintenance, and describing love in chapter 13 as Paul's tool for "building a countersociety" — robbing each of these of its directly theological character. God himself is reduced to a "divine estate-owner" operating through Roman-style patronage categories. Several exegetical positions are either idiosyncratic or indefensible: he argues that 11:2–16 "fits so poorly into the context" that it is a later interpolation, and that 15:56 is "probably a gloss" — both conclusions drawn without a shred of manuscript evidence; he follows Countryman's fringe reading of malakoi and arsenokoitai as "masturbators" and "male prostitutes" and then draws the remarkable conclusion that "the list in 6:9 provides no indication that Paul considered [homosexual relations] to be sinful" — a position contradicted by Fee, Thiselton, Ciampa/Rosner, Barrett, and virtually every major technical commentary; and he dismisses 8:6 as "a foreign body in the midst of a genuine Pauline letter," effectively evacuating one of Paul's most significant Christological statements. A glaring internal inconsistency undermines his central thesis: he denies any demonic dimension to the "rulers of this age" in chapter 2 in order to sustain his purely political reading, yet in chapter 10 he acknowledges that Paul genuinely believed idol worship involved fellowship with demons. Paul himself is repeatedly characterised as "arrogant," "insecure," "paternalistic," and even employing "psychic coercion," and the dedication — "To the many many women and slaves who suffered because of what 'Paul' wrote and how that was used" — with its scare-quoted "Paul," signals an adversarial posture toward both the apostle and the text from the very first page. Valuable for its social-historical background, but its theological judgments must be checked carefully against more balanced treatments such as Fee, Thiselton, or Ciampa/Rosner.

McCann's Judges (Interpretation, 2002) offers genuine value in its canonical framing, its tracing of the book's progressive deterioration motif, and its pastoral attentiveness to the role of women — but it carries significant theological baggage that warrants caution. Most seriously, McCann repeatedly limits divine sovereignty: he explicitly states that "God cannot prevent" injustice and violence, that God's "quality of life is diminished" by human sin, and that God "risks" the failure of his purposes — all formulations drawn from Fretheim's open-theist leanings rather than from the text itself. He even parenthetically describes God as among "the big losers" in the Samson narrative, a stark contrast to Block's well-grounded conclusion that "the true hero in the book is God and God alone." Hermeneutically, McCann advocates a "hermeneutic of suspicion toward Scripture" and reduces the Canaanites to a purely symbolic code-word for oppressive social systems — a move that dissolves the historical seriousness of the text and creates an unresolved logical tension: real battles, real deaths, but victims who are only metaphors. His identification of Jephthah's daughter as the primary Christ-type in Judges is directly rejected by Butler's WBC as "going too far," and is internally inconsistent with McCann's own insistence that suffering is not inherently redemptive. Useful for its homiletical creativity, but needs to be read alongside Block (NAC), Webb (NICOT), or Younger (NIVAC) for a theologically reliable treatment.

Perkins's First and Second Peter, James, and Jude (Interpretation, 1995) is a competent pastoral commentary with useful social-contextual background on 1 Peter and solid epistolary analysis, but it carries several serious problems that teachers and preachers should weigh carefully. Most critically, on 1 Pet 1:10–12 Perkins does not merely note interpretive complexity — she explicitly tells readers that 1 Peter's argument is wrong, asserting that "we cannot suppose, as 1 Peter argues, that God had only the Christian community of faith in mind throughout the Old Testament," and then suggesting that Jews may be "obedient to the word of the Lord in the law and the prophets without being obedient to the word of the gospel" — a two-covenant theological position contradicted by every letter she is expounding and introduced without exegetical justification. On James 5:7–8, she confidently asserts that the parousia tou kyriou refers to God the Father rather than Jesus Christ, a minority position directly contradicted by Martin (WBC), McCartney (BECNT), Blomberg/Kamell (ZECNT), and Moo (PNTC), all of whom identify the language as the standard early Christian technical term for Christ's return. She describes the difficult passage 1 Pet 3:18–22 as the text "confusing" its own sequence — unusual and theologically troubling language for a preaching commentary. Her dismissal of apostolic authorship across all four books is stated with more confidence than the divided scholarly field warrants (Bauckham, Moo, and McCartney all argue substantively for authenticity of Jude, James, and 1 Peter respectively), and she never resolves the logical inconsistency of invoking apostolic authority for letters she regards as pseudonymous — since the only reason these letters ever carried that authority is that the church believed apostles wrote them; if it had known otherwise from the start, they would not have been canonized. The commentary's opening frames these letters as "marginal indeed" to the apostolic faith and introduces a parishioner who wasn't sure there was "anything there" — a dismissive posture toward canonical Scripture that stands in striking contrast to the enthusiasm with which McCartney calls James urgently relevant for our age, Blomberg and Kamell call it "probably the first NT document written" and "our roots," and Bauckham argues Jude is a unique and irreplaceable Jewish-Christian witness. Best used cautiously, as a supplement for its social-historical material on 1 Peter, but not as a primary resource for preaching or theological formation.

Brown's Ecclesiastes (Interpretation, 2000) is elegantly written and pastorally imaginative, with real strengths in its treatment of joy, work, and the carpe diem passages. Several concerns, however, warrant caution. He uses the Gilgamesh Epic as his primary interpretive lens throughout, well beyond what the evidence supports; Krüger (Hermeneia) calls broader dependence claims "pure hypothetical speculation," and Seow (AB) treats the parallels as shared cultural themes, not literary dependence. His heading "Cosmos without Creation" (on 1:3–7), arguing that God "does not appear to be involved," is exegetically extreme and inconsistent with his own later affirmations that God gives every good gift and receives the life-breath back (12:7); Seow, Bartholomew (BCOT), and Longman (NICOT) more accurately read 1:3–7 as a rhetorical omission of creation, not a cosmological denial. He describes the epilogue as "blunting the book's subversive edge" — privileging Qoheleth's autonomous voice over the canon's framing device — while criticising Longman for separating Qoheleth's theology from the book's, a mirror-image of the same move. His reading of 7:16 as prescribing moral "balance" between righteousness and wickedness misleads preachers; Fox (JPSTC) and Seow more accurately read it as warning against perfectionist scrupulosity. The epilogue imports Bonhoeffer's contested "living without God" as an interpretive key and characterises God as "the God of small things" (Arundhati Roy's ironic novel title) — framings that risk portraying God as passive and marginal, contrary to Qoheleth's own insistence that God judges, gives, and determines all (3:14; 5:2; 11:9). Brown also invokes Bildad to critique Job's lament, overlooking that God vindicates Job and condemns Bildad in Job 42:7; and he draws a positive parallel between Qoheleth's joy and the medium at Endor, whose divination the law explicitly forbids (Lev. 19:31). Useful homiletically, but best read alongside Seow, Fox, or Bartholomew.

Towner's Daniel (Interpretation, 1984) is readable and pastorally warm, but its foundational framework is seriously compromised. Its most pervasive problem is a categorical denial of predictive prophecy — stated not as a debated position but as settled fact ("human beings are unable accurately to predict future events centuries in advance") — which is essentially the 3rd-century pagan philosopher Porphyry's antisupernatural argument dressed in incarnational language. From this premise flows a series of escalating problems: Daniel is declared "a non-historical personage" and his narratives "a work of fiction" (described, remarkably, as "good news"), despite Jesus's own explicit reference to "the prophet Daniel" in Matthew 24:15. Most troubling of all, Towner states outright that "the eschaton failed" and "the prophet failed to call history correctly" — charging inspired Scripture with error while simultaneously trying to affirm its theological truth claims, a logical contradiction the commentary never resolves. He also states in the Introduction that for the oppressed, "the greatest source of hope lay not in God's mercy, but in his wrath" — a formulation that directly contradicts Daniel 9:18, where hope is grounded explicitly in God's "great mercy." Historical problems compound these theological ones: Darius the Mede is dismissed as fiction without engaging Wiseman's or Whitcomb's serious counterarguments; a factual error places Antiochus III "recapturing Antioch" from Ptolemy (Antioch was always Seleucid territory); and Ginsberg's minority interpolation theory for the Daniel 9 prayer is accepted without scrutiny. Useful for its literary and applicational insights, but its critical presuppositions must be handled with considerable caution throughout.

Bechtel's Esther (Interpretation, 2002) is warmly written and structurally perceptive, with helpful observations on the book's banquet structure and the theme of proportion among characters. However, several significant problems limit its usefulness. Most seriously, Bechtel applies a canoe metaphor — explicitly defined as achievable "only with a lot of exhausting effort, and even then, not always successfully" — to God's own providential working ("even God sometimes chooses to steer from the front"), producing a theologically reductive picture of divine sovereignty that no other major Esther commentary endorses; she also describes God as "notoriously elusive," an unfortunate choice of language. Her interpretive positions include a number of unsupported novelties: she floats the idea that Mordecai's refusal to bow was "a fit of pique" driven by jealousy; she reads Mordecai's urgent words to Esther in 4:13–14 as "a thinly veiled threat" to expose her identity — a reading found in no other commentary; and she treats Sandra Berg's speculative homophone theory (that Ahasuerus may have misheard "destroy" as "enslave") as a foundational interpretive key to chapters 3 and 7, when virtually no other major commentary adopts it. She also contains a chronological inaccuracy, claiming Xerxes "was off fighting the Battle of Salamis" when Esther was presented to him, when Salamis preceded Esther's arrival by some three months. Internally, her "proportionality" framework produces a logical inconsistency: she blames Mordecai for "getting the people of God into this mess" with a rash refusal, yet simultaneously celebrates his being honored "in proportion to his merits." Her governing theological framework of "critical compromise" as a model for modern Christians is applied without adequate engagement with the moral and covenantal failures of Esther and Mordecai — a dimension taken more seriously by Jobes (NIVAC), Tomasino (EEC), and Duguid (REC). Best used as a devotional supplement; serious exegetical work should rely on Levenson (OTL), Bush (WBC), or Jobes (NIVAC).

Cook's Genesis (New Collegeville Bible Commentary, 2011) is a readable popular-level introduction, but it is marred by serious problems that limit its reliability. It presents the Documentary Hypothesis in its classical Wellhausenian form as settled fact, without acknowledging that the consensus has collapsed even within critical scholarship. More troubling are several derogatory characterizations of God: Cain's rejected offering is described as "troubling" and seemingly evidence that "God plays favorites" — ignoring the text's own distinction between Abel's choicest firstlings and Cain's unqualified produce; God's response at Babel is framed as a defensive move to avoid "a recurrence of chaos," implying an anxious, reactive deity; the flood narrative says God's grief "announces God's realization that something is out of place," the word "realization" implying prior ignorance; and Abraham is said to "persuade the Lord to think again about this plan that is out of character for the Deity" at Sodom, suggesting God required human moral correction. Additional unusual positions include the claim that Melchizedek's "God Most High" was "the chief deity among the Canaanite gods" — ignoring Abram's own identification of El Elyon with Yahweh in the very next verse — and the assertion that identifying Dinah as Leah's daughter "casts her in a negative light," a reading unsupported by any major commentary. The volume also contains a notable logical inconsistency, praising Abraham's silence as obedience in earlier chapters while calling his silence before God in Genesis 22 "problematic." Readers wanting an accessible Catholic commentary on Genesis would be better served elsewhere.

Meyers' Exodus (NCBC, 2005) is a learned work with genuine strengths: her Egyptian and ancient Near Eastern contextualisation is expert, her attention to literary technique is careful, and her recovery of female figures in the narrative is welcome. However, the commentary is controlled by a "mnemohistory" framework that consistently replaces the text's own theological claims with sociological analysis — treating the exodus not as God's acts in history but as Israel's "collective cultural memory," Moses not as the inspired covenant mediator but as "a larger-than-life figure, if not a demi-god" comparable to George Washington, and the Passover not as a divinely commanded memorial but as a repurposed agricultural festival. This framework produces a series of serious problems: the plagues are described as "neither miraculous nor unusual" once stripped of "exaggerated language"; the death of Egypt's firstborn is mitigated by declaring it "ahistorical"; and Exodus 34:6–7 — the theological climax of the book — is treated as an interesting creedal formula rather than the supreme self-disclosure of the God of mercy. Most damaging is Meyers' claim that in Exodus 32 "Moses comes off better than God — representing mercy and forgiveness in contrast with God's unremittingly punitive stance," a reading sourced from Whybray's "immorality of God" thesis that is both exegetically indefensible (it contradicts the text's own disclosure in 34:6–7) and internally inconsistent (Meyers herself writes, in the same section, that "God can be both punitive and merciful"). Throughout, divine commands are framed as community policy, the holiness concept is explained partly as property-protection strategy, the Canaanite expulsion passages are labelled "ethnic cleansing," and the kappōretis stripped of atonement theology in favour of a "neutral" translation. Readers wanting sociocultural background to Exodus will find much of value here; those seeking a commentary that takes seriously what the text claims about the God who redeems, covenants, and dwells among his people should look to Childs, Fretheim, Sarna, or Moberly instead.

Van Wijk-Bos writes fluently and gives welcome attention to narrative texture and female characters, drawing well on Fokkelman and Alter. However, the commentary has limitations serious enough to warrant caution. Most concerning is its characterisation of God: she explicitly calls the God of Samuel "inscrutable, cruel, and capricious" (on 2 Sam 24), states that "God can evidently make mistakes," dismisses Samuel's canonical declaration about divine immutability (1 Sam 15:29) as "obviously wrong," and describes the portrayal of God in the census episode as "decidedly offensive" — language absent from every other major Samuel commentary, including the most critically liberal (McCarter AYB, Auld OTL, Klein WBC, Anderson WBC). She unambiguously labels the David-Bathsheba encounter "rape" as settled fact — a contested minority position rejected by all comparison commentaries, which use "adultery" — while elsewhere criticising readers for anachronism, an inconsistency that typifies the book's deeper methodological tension: she champions patient, ambiguity-embracing reading in principle but reaches hostile verdicts on God's character whenever the text is difficult. She also raises the homoerotic reading of Jonathan and David with unwarranted force, compares David's treatment of Moabite prisoners to Nazi death-camp selections (p. 184), and operates from a declared postmodern framework that treats the material primarily as "myth" — a characterisation unique to this commentary. Best used, if at all, alongside a historically and theologically grounded commentary such as Tsumura (NICOT), Firth (ApOTC), or Bergen (NAC).

Van Wijk-Bos writes accessibly but this commentary has enough shortcomings to warrant caution. She misreads Ezra 3:3 — where the exiles built the altar despite their fear of neighbours — as if fear were the motivating purpose, and her claim that the foreign-wife expulsion had "no precedent in the laws anywhere" ignores the Deuteronomic prohibitions she herself quotes nearby; as Williamson (WBC) shows, the issue was not the absence of legal basis but of a prescribed remedy once marriage had occurred. More seriously, she accuses Nehemiah of deliberately inflating the threat from Sanballat — "who can blame Nehemiah if he fanned the fires of rumors a little" — a grave charge no other major commentary supports. She calls Ezra's handling of the intermarriage crisis "cowardly and condemnable behaviour," reduces the community's genuine theological motivation to mere fear and "scapegoating," and is inconsistent in praising creative application of Torah in one passage (Neh 10) while condemning it in another (Ezra 9–10). The Esther section fares no better: her suggestion of a Maccabean date is an older view Berlin (JPSBC) regards as largely abandoned; she dismisses Esther 4:14 ("relief will arise from another quarter") as merely human agency, against the near-consensus of Baldwin, Berlin, Levenson, and Jobes that it is a veiled reference to divine providence; and her flat assertion that "God is not a presence in the book" contradicts commentators who find a theology of hidden sovereignty throughout. Her reading of Esther primarily as a patriarchal critique is what Jobes (NIVAC) calls an "ideological reading" that misses the author's actual concerns. The commentary closes by declaring "there is no hope in the 'letter of the law,' no matter how creatively interpreted" — an unfortunate verdict on the very books being expounded. For better lay-level alternatives: Kidner or Throntveit on Ezra-Nehemiah, Baldwin or Jobes on Esther.

Laughlin's Reading Joshua (Smyth & Helwys, 2015) brings genuine archaeological competence to the table — his survey of the LBA/Iron Age I transition, his treatment of extra-biblical inscriptions, and his discussion of DH literary structure are all solid — but the volume is fatally compromised by an ideological agenda that overwhelms its scholarship. From the preface onward, Laughlin treats the non-existence of God not as a methodological bracket but as a settled conclusion, repeatedly characterizing Yahweh as a "killer god," "celestial despot," and "xenophobic and genocidal deity," and approvingly quoting Dawkins, Hitchens, and — remarkably — Archie Bunker as theological authorities. He claims agnosticism while practicing atheism, invokes the "comfortable theory" warning against scholarly bias without applying it to himself, and calls for tentativeness in archaeological conclusions while simultaneously declaring the Jericho and Ai stories "abundantly clear" fictions. His false dichotomy between naïve "literalists" and evasive "decoders" leaves no conceptual room for the serious theological-historical scholarship of commentators like Nelson, Butler, Hess, or Firth. There is also a striking internal contradiction: the series editor's foreword explicitly states that the Reading the Old Testament series aims to present the Bible "as authoritative Scripture" and hopes its scholarship will "water the faith of another generation," yet Laughlin announces in his preface that he will not assume Joshua is "the 'word' of the god, Yahweh" — a repudiation of the series' stated mission that the editor appears not to have anticipated. As a commentary proper, the book also disappoints: despite offering fresh translations of the Hebrew, actual exegesis is frequently thin, with large sections of chapters 13–21 receiving little more than perfunctory translation notes, and the sustained attention to narrative structure, rhetorical strategy, and theological implication found in Butler (WBC), Nelson (OTL), Hess (TOTC), or Firth (EBTC) is largely absent — the volume reads more as an extended archaeological and ideological essay that uses Joshua as its occasion. Even at the level of individual passages, the approach misfires: on the spies "lying down" in Rahab's house, Laughlin volunteers that "knowing human nature, sex would be my guess" — a conjecture with no lexical basis in the standard Hebrew verb shakav, one that every other serious commentator reads simply as lodging, and that demeans Rahab while misleading readers about what the text actually says. A fabricated mocking epitaph for Joshua — complete with scotch and cigars — and a closing recommendation that the book simply be "put on the shelf" confirm that this is advocacy, not commentary. It can be read as a representative of the skeptical-minimalist position, but should always be paired with more balanced critical works such as Nelson (OTL) or Butler (WBC), and readers should be forewarned that its hostile tone and sweeping dismissals do not reflect the mainstream of historical-critical scholarship.

Brayford’s 2007 Brill volume comments on the Greek Septuagint of Genesis (specifically Codex Alexandrinus), and its philological attention to Greek translation technique is the work’s strongest feature. However, a persistent and undisclosed theological agenda significantly compromises its value as a commentary. Most pervasively, God is characterised across the entire narrative as jealous, reactive, insecure, and self-protective in ways that are presented as straightforward description rather than acknowledged interpretive choices. In Genesis 3, his expulsion of Adam is described as “the first subtle instance of the jealousy that will become one of his chief characteristics,” driven by the need to protect his own uniqueness from creatures who might acquire immortality — a framing that makes God’s action indistinguishable from self-interested rivalry. At Babel, God’s confusion of tongues is presented as frustration that humans were accomplishing more than he “wanted them to do,” casting divine judgment as the suppression of human potential rather than a response to hubris. In the Akedah, God’s command to Abraham is described as “the most heinous of God’s instructions,” a stark moral verdict that stands against the text’s own evaluative grain, which presents the episode as the pinnacle of covenant faithfulness. Genesis 3 itself is recast as a coming-of-age story rather than a fall narrative, with the expulsion from the garden as healthy developmental growth, a reading that conveniently coheres with the diminished God on display throughout. Taken together, these readings produce a portrait of a deity who is threatened by human capability, prone to jealousy, and given to extreme measures to preserve his own prerogatives — a characterisation more reminiscent of the capricious gods of pagan mythology than the sovereign Creator of the biblical text, and one that no serious commentator in either the Jewish or Christian tradition, critical or conservative, has endorsed. Readers will find it useful as a Septuagintal linguistic resource but should treat its theological conclusions with considerable caution.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Walter Brueggemann’s Genesis is a creative, pastorally engaged commentary, but also one of the less exegetically controlled. Its strength is its ability to keep Genesis theologically urgent for the church through promise, conflict, and divine freedom; its weakness is that this same energy often overrides historical, literary, and structural discipline. His church-facing method, his use of the United Church of Christ’s Statement of Faith as a governing framework, his selective appeal to historical criticism, and his rapid move from Genesis to New Testament fulfillment often blur the line between exegesis and theological appropriation. His most vulnerable readings include the downplaying of Genesis 3 and the entrance of sin by insisting that chapter 3 must not control chapter 4 and that Cain “is not fallen,” which weakens the narrative continuity between Eden and Cain’s violence; the claim that Yahweh’s rejection of Cain reflects “capricious freedom,” which makes God the effective cause of Cain’s crisis while still demanding Cain’s responsibility; and a weak structural judgment that resolves the Joseph story too early, minimizing the real closure of Genesis 48–50, where family drama becomes tribal destiny, providence is made explicit in 50:20, the land promise is reasserted through burial in Canaan, and Genesis ends by looking toward Exodus rather than simply settling Joseph in Egypt. The result is a commentary with real interpretive interest, but one best read alongside more textually and methodologically disciplined works.

Brueggemann’s Deuteronomy is a vivid, morally serious, and often penetrating theological commentary, especially strong on covenantal rhetoric, social ethics, land, debt, and royal power under Torah. Its chief limitation is exegetical and methodological: compared with Driver, Weinfeld, McConville, and Merrill, he leans too heavily on Josianic and exilic framing and gives too little weight to philological, geographical, treaty-form, and legal counterevidence. The clearest example is his reading of Deut 4:24–28 as a late vaticinium ex eventu (“prediction after the fact”) because phrases such as “provoke to anger” sound Jeremianic; the argument is circular, assuming the text must be late because it describes exile, whereas Weinfeld and Merrill note that such warnings fit the blessing-and-curse logic of ancient treaty forms and do not by themselves require a late date. He is often more illuminating on rhetorical force than on lexical or compositional detail, and at times reads centralization, war, and some family laws more through modern ethical sensibility than through their ancient covenantal logic. The result is a stimulating and often profound commentary, but one stronger as theological and homiletical exposition than as tightly argued critical exegesis.

Biddle’s Deuteronomy is thoughtful and often pastorally stimulating, especially on covenant and Deuteronomy’s canonical significance, but it is uneven as a primary scholarly guide. As Longman notes, Biddle’s introduction creates a straw man on Mosaic authorship: he suggests conservatives treat any doubt that Moses wrote every word of the Pentateuch as irreverent or heretical, yet evangelical commentators such as Thompson, Craigie, Block, Arnold, and Merrill all allow some degree of post-Mosaic shaping while still preserving substantial Mosaic origin or authority. The volume also contains avoidable errors and inconsistencies: Biddle says observant Jews “twice daily donned” phylacteries at “morning and evening prayers,” but Thompson and Tigay note weekday morning use, not evening prayer; and on asherim he calls them “probably phallic fertility symbols” in one place but elsewhere “wooden carvings in the form of stylized trees, probably date palms,” with Thompson, Weinfeld, Nelson, Arnold, and Christensen supporting the latter view. His Decalogue-grid for chapters 12–26 is also often strained: McConville says it has only “some cogency” and is “not wholly convincing at every point,” and Biddle’s assignment of 14:1–21 to misuse of the divine name is a particularly weak example. The sidebar-heavy SHBC format can also drift from exposition into contemporary political discussion, so that application sometimes overtakes careful textual analysis. Best used for pastoral reflection, it is less reliable where its structural theories or applications outrun the evidence.

Walter Brueggemann’s First and Second Samuel is a vivid, provocative, and often brilliant commentary whose great strength lies in literary and theological imagination: he reads Samuel as an “artistic” narrative of power, ambiguity, and Yahweh’s hidden sovereignty, and he is especially good at exposing irony, rhetoric, and the moral cost of monarchy. But that same method also creates his main weakness. Brueggemann explicitly sidelines the “immensity of textual problems” and treats “historical” and some “theological” questions as beside the point, even while still speaking of the story as historically reliable; compared with technically grounded commentators like P. Kyle McCarter and especially David Toshio Tsumura, who insist that the text must first be established philologically before literary interpretation can safely proceed, this can feel methodologically inconsistent. His strong sociopolitical lens also sometimes presses the narrative too far in an anti-monarchical direction: compared with Robert Bergen’s more canonical and messianic reading, and with J. Robert Vannoy’s structural case that 2 Samuel 21–24 is a carefully designed conclusion rather than merely an intrusive deconstruction of David, Brueggemann can sound overly partisan and anachronistic. And at least once his rhetoric outruns the evidence: Harry Hoffner explicitly notes that Brueggemann is “clearly in error” to call 2 Sam. 20:24 the first mention of forced labor, since such practices appear already in Joshua and Judges. The result is a commentary that is highly stimulating and memorable, but best used alongside more textually careful and historically controlled works such as McCarter, Tsumura, Bergen, Vannoy, and Hoffner.

Samuel Balentine’s 2006 Smyth & Helwys commentary offers a provocative, post-critical analysis that frequently turns exegetical tensions into radical theological antitheses. While brilliant on reception history, Balentine often escalates daring suggestions into governing theses, such as his controversial rejection of the "euphemism" theory for barak (bless) in Job 1:5 and 2:9, which introduces a logical inconsistency regarding Job’s subsequent sacrifices. He further radicalizes the divine character in 2:3, suggesting a "manipulable" God "coerced" by the satan—a view far more extreme than the "sovereign testing" interpreted by Garrett (EEC) or Andersen (TOTC). By portraying Job as a heroic figure of dissent in his "assault on creation" (Ch. 3), Balentine struggles to reconcile this with the "Patient Job" of James 5:11, creating a disconnect in his contemporary "Connections." This interpretive trajectory culminates in a skeptical view of the "happy ending" (42:7–17), which Balentine dismisses as a "cliché" that fails to address Job’s trauma. This stands in sharp contrast to Hartley (NICOT) and Andersen, who defend the epilogue as a necessary "gesture of grace." Ultimately, by authorizing Job as a uniquely truthful speaker who offers God "redemption," Balentine renders the final form a collection of rival theological strata rather than the profound vindication of piety defended by the broader commentary tradition.

Beverly Roberts Gaventa’s contribution to the Interpretation series offers a distinctively theological and pastoral reading of the Thessalonian correspondence, though it takes several positions that challenge both traditional and technical consensus. Most notably, Gaventa rejects the Pauline authorship of 2 Thessalonians, categorizing it as a later "Deuteropauline" work—a stance that puts her at odds with the robust defenses of authenticity provided by scholars like Fee and Weima. In doing so, she employs a sharp "nuclear holocaust" analogy to describe the negative reaction of those who equate pseudonymity with "a lie," a rhetorical framing that is highly unusual for an academic commentary and serves to distance her from traditionalist readings. Her interpretation is further marked by a socio-rhetorical emphasis on Paul’s familial metaphors (infant, nurse, orphan) as a deliberate subversion of Greco-Roman patriarchal authority, and a nuanced reading of Ioudaioi as "Judeans" in 1 Thessalonians 2:14–16 to mitigate anti-Jewish interpretations. However, her methodology reveals a significant logical tension: she rejects the theory that the "wrath" passage in 1 Thessalonians is a later interpolation specifically due to a lack of manuscript evidence, yet she simultaneously accepts the pseudonymity of 2 Thessalonians despite its own unblemished manuscript tradition. While insightful for its apocalyptic focus and sensitivity to gendered imagery, Gaventa’s work occasionally prioritizes thematic and sociological frameworks over the strict textual and historical rigor found in more technical volumes like those of Wanamaker or Bruce.

Amy Erickson’s Illuminations volume is a stimulating and learned contribution, distinguished by its extensive reception history and a robust challenge to the anti-Jewish "narrow Jew vs. enlightened Gentile" schema—a critique echoed by scholars like Salters and Elaine Phillips. However, the work is frequently marked by hermeneutical overstatement; her central thesis regarding Protestant ideological bias is viewed by some as rhetorically over-totalizing, while her characterization of God as "capricious" or "suggestible" contrasts sharply with the measured mercy described by Youngblood and Richard Phillips. While her postexilic scribal provenance argument aligns with modern trends, she presses the theory of "scribal literary invention" with a confidence that exceeds the suggestive data provided by more restrained scholars like Nogalski. Methodologically, her fluid genre treatment offers fresh "meta-prophetic" insights but risks a "methodological looseness" when compared to the steadier balance of irony and moral pathos found in Uriel Simon. Most critically, her reading of Jonah 4:11 as an assertion rather than a rhetorical question has been challenged (most notably by Graybill) for undercutting the narrative logic of the Ninevites' repentance and draining the ending of its force. Ultimately, while Erickson provides a brilliant lens for exposing the ethical freight of older readings, her tendency toward polemical framing makes this volume a provocative dialogue partner that is best read alongside steadier guides such as Simon, Sasson, and Graybill.

Walter Brueggemann’s 1 & 2 Kings (Smyth & Helwys) is a vivid, provocative, and often brilliant socio-prophetic reading that shows well how Kings is not mere chronicle but a theological interpretation of public life under YHWH; yet it is less reliable as a commentary than stronger alternatives because its rhetoric and political imagination often outrun the text. Departing from the archaeological, philological, and historical-critical rigor of commentators such as Cogan, Hobbs, and Wiseman, Brueggemann reads the narrative through a pronounced hermeneutic of suspicion, especially in his treatment of Solomon as an imperial, quasi-Pharaonic ruler, and frequently frames Kings through modern political and economic categories that give the volume homiletical punch but can also feel anachronistic. He repeatedly presses genuine insights into overstatement by sharply minimizing the historiographical dimension of Kings, treating chronology as largely inconsequential, presenting suspicions as conclusions, and building large ideological claims on textual silences or narrative “confusions” that other commentators explain more cautiously. The result is a work of real energy, imagination, and theological seriousness, but also one marked by occasional factual slips and logical inconsistency, including the tension between calling Kings our best timeline and insisting it is not really “history” in any meaningful sense. As a secondary, provocative reading partner it is valuable; as a primary guide to what Kings actually says and how securely one may say it, it is markedly weaker than Wray Beal, Cogan/Hobbs, House, or even the more cautious Fretheim and Nelson.

Dobbs-Allsopp is a rich and often brilliant commentary, especially for its literary sensitivity, attention to voice, imagery, and lyric form, and its refusal to soften the book’s pain and protest. My main reservation is that it sometimes presses debated positions too hard: the “Palestinian voice” reconstruction and the city-lament framework are illuminating but more certain than the evidence warrants, and his strong denial of any straightforward hope seems overstated, since passages such as 3:21–24, 4:22, and 5:21 are commonly read by other major commentators as real, if fragile, hope. In short, this is one of the most stimulating modern readings of Lamentations, but best used alongside Berlin, Hillers, House, Wright, or Lalleman for greater balance on historical reconstruction and the theology of hope.

William Johnstone’s SHBC Exodus is an original but highly idiosyncratic outlier, replacing both standard critical models and traditional readings with a “dialogical” scheme of a Deuteronomy-based “D-version” later overlaid by a priestly “P-edition.” That approach yields some provocative ideas, but also several weakly supported ones, including a seven-plague earlier narrative, conflicting Sinai chronologies treated as a “creative debate,” and a tabernacle account read less as wilderness history than as post-exilic theological imagination. His heavy use of medieval art and typology gives the commentary unusual aesthetic depth, but it also moves him further from historical-grammatical control, and his reconstruction risks circularity by treating Deuteronomy as “remembering” a version he dates later. By comparison, Propp, Childs, Davies, and Enns stay closer to established critical discussion, while Alexander, Stuart, Carpenter, Currid, Mackay, and Sarna handle the canonical text with much more restraint. The result is a clever and stimulating commentary, but also a speculative and ultimately less convincing one.

Paul House’s Isaiah is a clear, energetic, and pastorally useful commentary that does a fine job tracing the book’s theological unity and repeated movement from sin to Zion, but its most distinctive argument is also its least convincing: while House joins a small conservative minority in defending single Isaianic authorship, he goes well beyond Motyer, Oswalt, and Young by relocating much of Isaiah 40–66 from the Babylonian exile to the Assyrian era, a move that leaves him isolated not only from critical scholarship but from most conservative interpreters as well. His reading is bold and occasionally stimulating, yet it often feels possibility-driven rather than text-driven, especially in his treatment of exile language, his attempt to read Assyrian deportations where many passages fit sixth-century Babylonian and postexilic realities more naturally, and his highly idiosyncratic handling of Cyrus as an early seventh-century figure from the household of an Assyrian vassal rather than the Persian king almost universally recognized by both critical and evangelical commentators. His view that Isaiah 6 is a redirection of an existing ministry rather than the inaugural call is also possible but depends heavily on reading the book’s order as more strictly chronological than many commentators allow. Overall, this is a stimulating and worthwhile evangelical exposition of Isaiah’s message, but as a guide to historical setting and compositional history it is strained, historically eccentric, and significantly less persuasive than the stronger major commentaries.

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.