A lot of books come into our house from libraries, ordered online, gifts, picked up in charity shops, now and again from someone doing what I'm doing quite regularly now, filleting and downsizing. Once you get to a certain age and stage it's worth asking if a book is worth buying as a lifetime investment! Howver there are times when the answer to that is still, yes.
There are hundreds of books in our house, most of them in my study, which were bought with a view to future use, and in fairness most of them have been used, many of them read through, some of them still on a long term pending list.
There are books read years ago I'll not read again – they are slowly finding new homes. I've a number of books I've had for years and never opened and they sit there offended at my inattention. But there are also books I've read two or three times and opened much more than that, and some of them are now bricks in my intellectual foundations – and some of these are biblical commentaries.
This one on Revelation is the most recent acquisition. It's expensive, nearly 1000 pages, and is easily now the critical commentary that comes nearest to being definitive, certainly in my lifetime. A biblical commentary on this scale is a work of exegetical art, and executed with the consummate skill that comes from deep scholarship, long thinking, a huge capacity for organising mutli-disciplinary sources of information, and in the case of Koester, a fluid and smooth writing style. The result is an encyclopedia on Revelation, and an interpretation of the text by an acknowledged expert.
There is a section on the history of interpretation, and few documents have been subjected to such weird, wild, misinterpretations; even amongst the more responsible and disciplined approaches there are differences and collisions of ideas. What lies at the heart of this book is an ancient and strangely contemporary confrontation between good and evil, life and death, violence ond peacemaking, empires clashing in the night as Arnold would say. Yes I have other commentaries on this strange book – and I've used and will still use them – but this is the book which will gather into coherence the results of a detailed, up to date exposition that pays attention to literary, historical, theological and textual issues, and do so against the social, political and cultural backgrounds of Greece, Rome and Israel.
Leave a Reply