1 & 2 Kings
by Walter Brueggemann
Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary. Smith & Helwys, Macon, 2000. 645
pp. $65.00 (cloth). ISBN 1-57312-065-0.

PUBLISHER AND AUTHOR HERE COLLABORATE in producing an entirely new kind of biblical commentary. The result is splendid, and both are to be congratulated. The intention of the series, of which this volume is the first to appear, is to provide serious, non-specialist students of scripture what they look for in commentaries but rarely find: scholarly interpretation of the ancient text, with some of the connections of the text to the contemporary world spelled out, with the visual imagination of readers stimulated and fed, and with special points and meaningful analogies from moral and political life underscored graphically as sidebars. Such a commentary series requires space; collaboration among writer, editors, and publishers; and the contribution of specialists in art and book design. All of these have been provided in this long and bulky work on the books of Kings.

Brueggemann’s knowledge, theological and moral passion, and hermeneutical skill are all in evidence and fully coordinated in this stunning commentary. He knows the biblical text of 1–2 Kings intimately, as well as the scholarly literature on the book, and he brings to the writing a lifetime of experience in drawing the ancient text into conversation with contemporary theological and moral questions. He also sets the books of 1–2 Kings into relation with the book of Deuteronomy and its interpretive world, a world he also knows intimately.

Brief comments on three sections of the commentary may indicate how well the intentions of the series are being realized. At the beginning, Brueggemann retells the story of 1–2 Kings in such a way that analogies flood to the reader’s mind: sexual politics, Saturday night massacres, ruthless elimination of one’s enemies, gains and losses in the introduction of new forms of leadership. Artwork depicts the prophet Nathan with David, Solomon’s anointing as king, and Marlon Brando as the Godfather plotting next steps. But Brueggemann regularly draws the analogies himself, moving back and forth between the world of the Bible and our own world.

A second treatment, commenting on the enormously rich chapter 22 of 1 Kings, once again lays out the scene and its personalities with stark clarity, and shows how prophetic leadership can be corrupted in the interests of power politics but can sometimes stand firm against such pressure. (Missing from this excellent treatment is the impressive way in which the chapter illustrates the biblical tests of true prophecy: true prophets tend to say what people don’t want to hear; their words prove to be true; and they have visions that they are ready to discuss, explain, or even re-evaluate.) Here too the artwork is excellent: a haunting presentation of King Ahab in his chariot, bleeding to death, but refusing to stop the conflict or withdraw for medical attention.

The commentary ends with a penetrating analysis of King Jehoiachin’s residence at the Babylonian court, showing what it meant and means for the Jewish community in exile, and for Christians as well, to accept exile as final. The author quotes George Steiner, who suggests that Jews in foreign lands may be destined to be guests whose task it is to make that society better than it is, while being ready simply to leave when the society seems irreformable: “[M]orality must always have its bags packed.”

The volume includes a bibliography, a subject index, indexes of modern authors, the sidebars, and biblical texts. The type is large and readable, although the colored type in the sidebars may be difficult for persons with limited vision. Such a large book needs a strong binding, and that too the publisher has provided. Author and publisher have produced an extraordinarily attractive and luminous commentary form. Let us hope that coming volumes maintain the standard set here.

Walter Harrelson
WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY DIVINITY SCHOOL
WINSTON-SALEM, NORTH CAROLINA

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Proverbs
by Leo G. Perdue
Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. John
Knox, Louisville, 2000. 289 pp. $29.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-8042-3116-8.

PERDUE ORGANIZES HIS ANALYSIS of each unit of proverbs around four helpful categories: date and provenance, literary structure and interpretation, conclusion, and theology. The most significant contribution Perdue makes to the study of Proverbs relates to the first category, date and provenance.

The canonical book of Proverbs developed over several centuries, beginning as early as the tenth century B.C.E. and continuing into the Persian period during the fourth century. The sages did their work in various social contexts. Contrary to popular conception, Perdue argues, the proverb collections (including two-line sayings) “do not transcend the historical and social settings that produced them” (p. viii). The interpretive process must honor the original context that produced the sayings.

While acknowledging a variety of social settings for wisdom, Perdue locates the primary setting of Proverbs in the early Persian period. The final compilation of the collection took place in the new colony of Judah under Persian rule. The Jews who returned to Palestine were the ones who secured positions of power. Out of this group arose the sages who were responsible for the book’s final editing. “While the sages did not set forth an explicit exhortation to support the Persian rulers and their empire, their moral teachings, on the whole, were conservative, not skeptical, and certainly not revolutionary” (p. 131).

Conflict arose between sages who held to the present social order under Persian rule and visionaries or revolutionaries who looked for a new social order brought on by YHWH to overthrow the present. This is the political tension that lies behind the canonical book. Therefore, references to fools and scoffers in Proverbs primarily refer to the ones who did not buy into the social world of Judah as a Persian colony. The wicked are the politically marginal who are out to change the status quo (p. 162). So, for example, those who ambush and rob the innocent (1:8–19) do so out of political motivation. They consist of militant bands of revolutionaries trying to overthrow Persian rule, or they already hold positions of power and exploit that power by plundering others (p. 80). In regard to the instructional purposes of chapters 1–9, Perdue concludes, “The fate of Judaism in the early Persian period depended on the choices its youth would make” between Wisdom and Folly (p. 155).

The sentence literature (chs. 10–29) originated in multiple settings over a period of centuries, including such settings as the family, the court, royal schools, temple schools, and wisdom schools. The final editing, however, occurred during the Persian period. Perdue believes the folk wisdom that originated in the familial context did not make it into the canonical collection (p. 17). The proverbial material in the book displays a level of literary sophistication beyond what the home was capable of producing. The only residue left of the familial setting is the emphasis placed throughout Proverbs on the role of the mother. For Perdue the royal court and the school settings dominate the social milieu of the sentence literature.

With each chapter unit and sub-unit in the sentence literature, Perdue identifies the dominant thematic voices. These themes include characteristics of the righteous wise and the wicked fools, the proper use of language, wealth and poverty, and sapiential virtues and vices.

Perdue makes a valuable contribution to the study of Proverbs with his efforts to locate the collections within a specific social and historical context. But the strength of the commentary also becomes its weakness. The various collections and individual sayings come from diverse backgrounds that span several centuries of Israel’s life. The volume, however, collapses this rich diversity into one uniform setting, filtering all the proverbial material through a single interpretive lens. The larger socio-political issues of the day drown out the quieter voices of the individual proverbs.

Regarding the posture of the sages in the educational process, Perdue rightly affirms wisdom’s interactive nature. As a way of study, wisdom was not a closed but an open system. It was dynamic in the way it engaged others and its surrounding environment. The sage “invites engagement, testing, reformulation, and even negation” (p. 43). To follow the teachings of the sages means to develop a perspective of critical inquiry and thus to challenge the status quo when experience and reflection lead a different direction. Such a sapi-ential posture, however, appears to run counter to the task of the sages during the Persian period, which was to affirm and maintain the political status quo (pp. 157–58). “The conservatives ages of colonial Judah” (p. 157) appear to be anything but open and engaging.

The volume falls short of offering suggestions for teaching and preaching Proverbs to a contemporary audience, one of the purposes of the Interpretation series. The theological sections, designed to suggest relevancy (p. viii), do not measure up. The strength of the work lies in its illumination of the sociopolitical contexts of the various collections as they addressed colonial Judah during the early Persian period. The multifaceted nature of wisdom research today makes it imperative that the informed teacher or preacher seriously consider Perdue’s viewpoint.

Dave Bland
Harding University Graduate School of Religion
Memphis, Tennessee

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Mark 1–8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary
by Joel Marcus
Anchor Bible 27. Doubleday, New York, 2000. 569 pp. $42.50 (cloth).
ISBN 0-385-42349-7.

AT LAST THE EDITORS OF THE ANCHOR BIBLE series have given us a usable commentary on Mark. Marcus begins with a discussion of authorship, concluding that the gospel may have been written by John Mark of Jerusalem, an associate of the Pauline mission with no special relationship with Peter (contra Papias), though Marcus has to admit that such an identification is “not proven” (pp. 17- –24). The gospel was written for a particular Christian community (pp. 25–28, contra Bauckham) that was experiencing persecution (pp. 28–29), not in Rome (pp. 30–33), but in Syria (pp. 33–37) during or immediately after the First Jewish War (pp. 37–39).

After a review of the arguments, Marcus affirms the two-source hypothesis (pp. 40–47). Secret Mark, “if it ever existed” (p. 51), was later than canonical Mark and the author of Mark “probably did not know Q” (p. 53). John is not dependent on Mark or the other synoptics (pp. 53–54). The present Gospel of Thomas is dependent on the Synoptics but may contain some pre-Synoptic traditions (pp. 54–56).

The author is responsible for the present order of materials. He was “a creative (contra Pesch and Gundry) shaper of inherited traditions” (contra Kermode, Kelber, Tolbert, Mack) (p. 59). With respect to genre, Marcus is vague. He uses the phrase “like other Hellenistic biographers” (p. 62) when speaking about the author, but in his discussion of genre, he leans toward seeing Mark as liturgical drama or dramatic liturgy (pp. 64–69).

Mark is apocalyptic literature in the sense that the author expects Christ to return soon (pp. 71–72), and the gospel participates in the divine warfare motif. Human beings are in cosmic bondage and need liberation from the forces opposed to God’s sovereignty (pp. 72–73). Marcus sees some Pauline influence on Mark, but not as much influence as is seen in the deutero-Pauline letters (pp. 73–75). Mark does not inveigh against the theology of a faction within his community, but he does provide correctives to what he perceives as failures to grasp the radicality of the gospel of Jesus (pp. 75–79).

Three appendices deal with controverted aspects of Markan research. In “The Scribes and the Pharisees” Marcus reviews recent debates on the characteristics of the two groups and concludes that there is “a compelling case for identifying most pre-70 scribes as members of the priestly orders—who might also be Pharisees” (p. 524). He thinks that Mark’s placement of most of Jesus’ encounters with Pharisees in Galilee and most encounters with scribes in Jerusalem may reflect the historical reality. “The Messianic Secret Motif ” is an excellent short presentation of the state of the question, with a conclusion that is admirable for its lack of systematic precision.

Marcus’s treatment of the difficult question of the Markan understanding of “Son of Man” is very well argued. “Son of Man” is not a corrective to the christology of miracle-working opponents (p. 532). Rather, Mark’s usage participates in the development of Daniel 7 in the direction represented by the Similitudes of Enoch. “Son of Man” is a designation for a heavenly apocalyptic figure who functions as revealer, redeemer, and judge (p. 530).

Readers familiar with Marcus’s scholarship will recognize his emphasis on the “new exodus” motif in the gospel and his magisterial grasp of the rabbinic materials and the literature of Second Temple Judaism. He does not do as well with the Hellenistic materials, giving the impression that the Gentile majority in Mark’s audience (pp. 231–60 and passim) would have been well-schooled in the nuances of scribal exegesis. This is unlikely, but Marcus does not discuss the tension between the evangelist’s having to explain basic Jewish ritual practice (7:3) and being able to employ the most subtle allusions to non-canonical Jewish literature. To be fair, no other Markan scholar has dealt adequately with this issue.

To his credit, Marcus does not attempt to minimize the gospel’s apocalyptic outlook. He refuses to shrink either from the plain sense of the parable theory in 4:10–12 or from the positive assessment of supernatural power evident in the Markan miracles and exorcisms. He succeeds in presenting a reading of the gospel that is theologically coherent in its own right, even if the twenty-first century reader may not approve of Mark’s worldview and theological emphases.

This volume presents a sustained reading of a gospel as narrative. Marcus has a sense for how the story runs and how the evangelist molds his received traditions into a coherent and captivating whole. Unfortunately, the format of the series almost obscures Marcus’s achievement. The traditional fragmentation of the commentary format conspires against both gospel writer and commentator. We will continue to need thorough and detailed commentaries , but surely a way of organizing the material could be found that would relegate the notes to their proper status. The discussions of redaction and historicity that begin each section of Comment are distracting to a reader who is attempting to follow the commentator ’s interpretation of a text which originally lacked even paragraphs, let alone the myriad other ways we chop it into pieces.

Throughout the volume Marcus displays an interest in the use of the gospel in Christian communities in the present that will be welcomed by preachers, illustrating Markan emphases with various writers, from Julian of Norwich to Emily Dickinson. We have every reason to look forward to the second volume.

Sharyn Dowd
BAYLOR UNIVERSITY
WACO, TEXAS

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The First and Second Letters to Timothy
Jerome D. Quinn and William C. Wacker
Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2000. 988 pp. $65.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-8028-2443-9.

QUINN’S COMMENTARY, PUBLISHED posthumously with editorial assistance and final additions by William Wacker, completes a lifetime of important contributions to New Testament and Early Church studies on these important, though often overlooked letters. Bucking their canonical arrangement, Quinn convincingly insists that Titus originally introduced the Pastoral corpus. First Timothy expanded on Titus, and 2 Timothy concluded the unit in testamentary form as a presentation of the legendary apostle’s last words and wishes. This reorientation characterizes even the smallest parts of Quinn’s work. Both in its parts and as a whole, the volume rewards its reader with fresh perspectives on these letters and the ancient church.

To pick up this volume is to feel the weight of Quinn’s untiring research in the Pastoral Epistles and their second-century historical context. He read extensively, and the work reprints a bibliographic key of more than fifty pages from his 1990 Anchor Bible volume on Titus. In addition, the book is a storehouse of Greco-Roman, early Jewish, and early Christian literary references, which Quinn carefully relates to the language and theology of 1 and 2 Timothy. As such, the commentary is much more than a reference on these two letters. It lays bare the historical, social, and literary context of the church in the second century.

Quinn’s work provides a new translation of the Greek texts of 1 and 2 Timothy into English, along with critical notes, followed by more extensive commentary. In many commentaries of this type the critical notes are simply a technical philological and syntactical apology for the commentator’s translation. This volume represents an exception. While these elements are surely present, Quinn uses the notes to illustrate the contours and features of the epistle writer’s words and their implications for life within the early church. The nature of ordination, church offices, prayer, hymnody, male and female dress, the ordering of Greco-Roman households, and the economic situation of widows within second- century Asia Minor all receive detailed attention in Quinn’s discussion of the translation. To this extent, the commentary is an exquisite resource for learning more about the early church. Each word of the text, it seems, provides Quinn with an opportunity to teach, and teach he does, drawing on a lifetime of study in the texts and traditions in and around these letters. Quinn’s translation of the texts challenges the reader with fresh insights and interpretations to some problematic passages. For example, in the infamous “Let a woman learn in silence” and “I permit no woman to teach” texts of 1 Tim 2:11–12 (NRSV), Quinn contextualizes the term for women and renders this translation: “Let a married woman quietly learn in the assemblies of worship and quite obediently. Moreover, I do not allow a wife to teach in the public worship and to boss her husband. That is learning quietly.” While hardly turning the text into a feminist manifesto, Quinn carefully nuances the language to reflect the larger issues of marriage, and the variety of other vocations women had within the church of the Pastoral Epistle writer (e.g., women ministers in 1 Tim 3:11 and widows in 1 Tim 5:3–16).

As the notes are rich with commentary on the text and connections to word usage in other literature, the “comments” sections take a broader perspective and assess the rhetorical function of each small unit within the whole of the respective letter. In addition, common themes both within the Pastoral letters and in all of the Pauline tradition (canonical and extra-canonical) are examined.

The shortcomings of the volume may be related to its posthumous publication. The introduction, while clear, is disproportionately short in relation to the commentaries on the texts and is, as Wacker notes in the preface, a reprint from the Titus volume. The treatments of such issues as reception of the letters into the canon, the genre of pseudepigraphy in the Greco-Roman literary milieu, and the internal structure of the letters are judicious, but leave the reader wanting more information. The depth of the commentary and notes certainly provides much of this, and one wonders if Quinn might have opted to incorporate some of these pieces into an introductory synthesis.

Msgr. Quinn published his scholarship under the Imprimatur, a statement that the work has been reviewed and found to contain nothing contrary to Catholic teaching. Such a stricture might lead some to suspect that a work that examines the origins of the early church to the extent that this commentary does might be less than thoroughly critical. Interestingly, in the preface to his commentary on Titus, Quinn jokes that when he took the Anchor Bible assignment in the 1960s he was sure that these little texts in the back of the Bible would not generate much controversy. He could not have been more wrong. Yet Quinn’s masterful research and writing examine the texts in such a way that the deep controversies of the early church are not denied, but rather come alive. The book provides an opportunity to reflect on the complexities of the early church and to relate them to contemporary contexts of doctrinal debate. It is for this reason that the texts of the Pastoral Epistles, and Quinn’s helpful contextual illumination of them, are important reading for practitioners of Christian ministry today.

Deborah Krause
EDEN THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI

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