Those of us who buy commentaries because it is our calling to study and preach scripture, have far too many options in what has become a crowded field, (especially with Evangelical publishers). There is an ecological ethic waiting to be discovered by publishers. Way at the start of my ministry I read and have followed W E Sangster's advice never to buy commentary sets. Find the best ones in a set and create your own "Best Set". That's even more important for someone like me who reads the things, providing they are well written. Amongst the tests of a good commentary is how they deal with the hard bits! Most exegetes can do the running commentary / say something about most things approach. But who unfankles textual knots? Who hears and pays attention to theological tensions? Which commentary has the balance between raising and answering questions, and raises real questions without providing answers too controlled by unacknowledged personal agendas?
I've spent an hour or so chasing the 'test text' of the redeemer in Job
19.25. Briefly – Balentine finds the Christianisation of the text
attractive but unsupportable. Though he isn't prepared to be closed to
other interpretations – the way of wisdom, he thinks, may be to linger
within the question that refuses to be answered – who will be the
redeemer of the Jobs of this world? Amongst his more telling points –
Job has not been asking or expecting to be delivered BY God, but is
demanding to be vindicated before and delivered FROM God. All of which
sounds very Brueggemannish! He also (following David Clines and Carol Newsom)
proposes that v25 and v26a are separated from v26b and 27, so that the second
of Job's affirmations is that he will indeed see God, in his flesh,
before he dies. Thus he isn't postulating resurrection, but demanding and claiming
vindication through a redeemer-advocate who will take up his case, and before a death that now seems certain.
That is a far too limited precis – and captures none of Balentine's
subtlety and theological delicacy. Likewise, the treatment by Newsom in
the New Interpreter's is a careful and nuanced argument along similar
lines. Handel in the gorgeous aria from the Messiah may well have found a remarkable resonance for Christian
theology in the passage – but these modern commentators think the force of Job's
argument for pre-Christian readers / hearers is the sheer human
determination to speak out against any system, theological or cultural,
that unjustly inflicts suffering and is unresponsive to the cry of the
innocent. And that in the context of Job, and in the context of our modern world, there is a crucial aptness that a text of such defiant faith should be heard with its original force.
Still. Is Handel's oratorio an entirely mistaken appropriation of a text that has comforted countless Christian believers? Why should our contemporary treatment of the text be privileged over the way the Church has found in this text strong resources of pastoral support and theological vision? I've just listened again to Handel, whose rendering of the text frames it in adoration and the persistence of faith. And I confess I find no destructive dissonance between the ultimate and glorious vision of the redeemed before the Redeemer, and the urgent moral enquiry of the sufferer who refuses to have human anguish rendered meaningless by an ultimate and inscrutable silence. They are of course two very different hermeneutical methods – but must they disqualify each other?
The text is even further enhanced – and removed from strict context – by Charles Wesley – and then rendered even more creatively by Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band. Maddy Prior's voice does something entirely different from the soprano performing Handel's oratorio – there is an intimacy and personal responsiveness that takes seriously the first person singular…"I know…." When cleansed of its dogmatic stridency, "I know…" is personal appropriation of mercy and grateful affirmation of faith in the grace that redeems – or so Wesley.
As one who invests personally – in money and study time – on what I try to ensure are good commentaries, I fully sympathise with
the problem of choosing books wisely and within a tight budget. I've had to
do it all my life! So. I still think Balentine's is a magnificent
example of the commentary genre that does what I most want – wrestle
with the text, honestly, skillfully, creatively and with theological
sensitivity. Carol Newsom's work is bound with Clinton McCann on Psalms in volume
IV of the New Interpreter's Bible and that volume costs about the same
as Balentine, though it is one of the key volumes in the NIB. This isn't helping is it? I would find it very hard to do
without either now – but if the NIB is in a library near you, why not
treat yourself to Balentine. But I can hear at least one friend who is an OT scholar muttering about Clines' three volume masterpiece – and I just wish ……..