The HarperCollins Study Bible
The
Publisher and the Society
[Written in
2011.]
The most distinctive feature of the
HarperCollins Study Bible is the collaboration between a major publisher and
the professional scholars of the Society of Biblical Literature. Each member of this partnership brought a
distinguished and venerable heritage to their common enterprise.
Outline of the Review
HarperCollinsThe Society
The Collaboration
On the Way to the Study Bible
An Earlier Detour
The Mainline Project
The First Edition (1993)
The General Editor
The Associate Editors
The Revised Edition (2006)
The General Articles
Samples of Interpretation
Genesis Revisited
The Exodus and History
Leviticus and the Holy
The Book of Kings and Its “Message”
The Unity of Isaiah
Matthew Joins the Empire
Mark, Well Introduced
Paul’s Letters
Revelation
Some Evaluative Comments
HarperCollins
Harper Brothers was a major publisher of books and magazines in
[Picture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Harper_brothers.jpg]
In 1962 the firm merged with Row, Peterson and Co. to become Harper & Row. Their first study Bible was published at just that time. (See below about this work, edited by Harold Lindsell.)
The Collins part of the
HarperCollins combination was a British firm, William Collins and Sons, founded
in Glasgow , Scotland ,
in 1819. It featured dictionaries and
religious books in the nineteenth century, and added popular juvenile and crime
fiction in the twentieth, with collections by Agatha Christie and Rex Stout
(Nero Wolfe), later acquiring the rights also to the works of the religious
writer C.S. Lewis.
In 1987, Harper & Row was
acquired by News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch’s vast media empire, and in 1990
William Collins and Sons was added to create the umbrella group HarperCollins,
a worldwide book publishing enterprise using many different “imprints.” Among these “imprints” is Zondervan, the
religious publishing firm that held the rights to the New International
Version (NIV) of the English Bible after 1973.
Zondervan was acquired by the Murdoch group in 1988.
(See the HarperCollins Company website at www.harpercollins.com/ ).
(See the HarperCollins Company website at www.harpercollins.com/ ).
The Society
The 1880s marked a great upsurge
in higher education in the United States ,
especially in newly institutionalized graduate education. While earlier periods had seen clubs and
societies dedicated to shared cultural and artistic pursuits, the 1870s and
1880s saw the rise of professional societies for the promotion of particular
academic disciplines.
The American Philological Association was founded in 1869, the American Social Science Association in the same year, the Archeological Institute of America in 1879, the Modern Language Association in 1883, and the American Historical Association in 1884. The rise of many academic empires lay in the beginnings of such societies, and the Society of Biblical Literature was right in the middle of the action.
The purpose of the Society was to promote rigorous standards of scholarship in the teaching of the Bible, especially in colleges and seminaries. The Society began inNew
York in 1880, initially proposed by Professor
Frederic Gardner of Berkeley Divinity
School in Middletown ,
Connecticut . (For all this see, Ernest W. Saunders, Searching the Scriptures: A History of the Society of Biblical
Literature, 1880-1980, Scholars Press, 1982. Available on line [www.sbl-site.org/aboutus/history].)
Prominent members at the beginning were Philip Schaff (in whose office the planning meeting was held) and Charles Augustus Briggs (later of Briggs Heresy Trial fame), both of Union Theological Seminary in New York, and James Strong of Drew Theological Seminary in New Jersey (the Strong of Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance fame). Eighteen scholars attended the first meeting in June of 1880, but by year-end forty-five members were registered and in the following year the publication of the Journal began, giving to scholars at large the papers delivered at the meetings. A pattern was established of semi-annual meetings, in June and December, times geared to breaks in the academic year.
The American Philological Association was founded in 1869, the American Social Science Association in the same year, the Archeological Institute of America in 1879, the Modern Language Association in 1883, and the American Historical Association in 1884. The rise of many academic empires lay in the beginnings of such societies, and the Society of Biblical Literature was right in the middle of the action.
The purpose of the Society was to promote rigorous standards of scholarship in the teaching of the Bible, especially in colleges and seminaries. The Society began in
Prominent members at the beginning were Philip Schaff (in whose office the planning meeting was held) and Charles Augustus Briggs (later of Briggs Heresy Trial fame), both of Union Theological Seminary in New York, and James Strong of Drew Theological Seminary in New Jersey (the Strong of Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance fame). Eighteen scholars attended the first meeting in June of 1880, but by year-end forty-five members were registered and in the following year the publication of the Journal began, giving to scholars at large the papers delivered at the meetings. A pattern was established of semi-annual meetings, in June and December, times geared to breaks in the academic year.
Until the middle of the twentieth
century the Society was heavily oriented to the northeastern region of the United
States , though other regional meetings were
initiated early on. In the post-World
War II explosion of higher education, membership greatly expanded, regional
meetings proliferated, and publications by the Society multiplied. In the 1960s, tax-supported universities
began to teach religion as an academic discipline, and Biblical scholars were
in more demand as teachers of religion.
In this context, the Society became significant not only as an exchange
of scholarship but also as a market for academic appointments.
In the later twentieth century the
Society became the platform for many nearly-autonomous specialized groups,
focusing on narrower and narrower areas of study. The most prominent of these was “the Jesus
Seminar,” which eventually spun off its own organization and publishing
house.
The current Society is a renowned
international body with 8,700 members, 30% of which are from outside the United
States , 23% of which are women, and 28% of
which are students. (See the 2010 Annual
Report [www.sbl-site.org/assets/pdfs/SR2010.pdf].) They gather in eleven
regional meetings in North America as well as at the giant
Annual meeting in November of each year.
The prestigious Journal of
Biblical Literature is in its 130th year of publication. It now publishes only scholarly articles (not
reviews) each quarter, with the large volume of book reviews covered in a
separate publication, the Review of
Biblical Literature, new installments of which are available to members by
email every couple of weeks.
The Collaboration
The collaboration between Harper
and the Society of Biblical Literature actually predates the formation of
HarperCollins. It began with Harper’s Bible Dictionary, published by
Harper & Row in 1985. (A revised edition
of the Dictionary was published by
HarperSanFrancisco, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 1996.) That Dictionary was presented as an entirely
new work created by the Society of Biblical Literature, which holds the
copyright.
This dictionary stands as the
latest in the long line of Harper’s Bible dictionaries that have provided help
in understanding the world of Scripture.
This is, however, a totally new edition. ...It also represents a unique
venture in the field of publishing since it is the result of a cooperative
project between a major learned society, the Society of Biblical Literature
(SBL), and a major publishing house, Harper & Row. In this joint effort, the Society of Biblical
Literature has assumed responsibility for the content of the Dictionary, while
Harper & Row has handled matters of format and editorial style. This has assured the widest circulation
[Harper’s part] of what is surely the most authoritative volume in its field
[SBL’s part]. (From Preface to the 1st
ed., The HarperCollins Bible Dictionary,
rev. ed., Paul J. Achtemeier, gen. ed, 1996, p. xix.)
The success of the collaboration
between the publisher and the Society prompted them to go forward with a second
enterprise, Harper’s Bible Commentary,
James L. Mays, gen. ed., Harper & Row, 1988. (The revised edition of 2000 was entitled The HarperCollins Bible Commentary.) This work provided general articles on the
Biblical world, on major parts of the Bible, and individual commentaries on all
the books of the Hebrew scriptures, the Apocrypha, and the New Testament. The Commentary
is linked throughout by cross references to the articles in the Dictionary, making the volumes as
complementary as possible.
This collaboration brought
together the major association of Biblical scholars in North America
and a publisher with outstanding experience and competence in designing and
publishing resources for Biblical study.
The orientation and viewpoint of these scholarly volumes (and thus
of the Study Bible yet to come) is expressed at the beginning by Paul
Achtemeier:
The 179 scholars who have
contributed their knowledge and skills to this [Dictionary] come from some
seven countries, and are acknowledged experts in the fields about which they
have written here. They were chosen
because of their knowledge and their ability to communicate to scholars and
nonscholars alike.... The authors do not, however, write from any confessional
perspective, but rather from the broad perspective of expert biblical
knowledge. Their intention is not to
convert the reader to a particular religious point of view, but rather to
provide information and to aid understanding.
(Preface of 1985, Dictionary,
p. xix.)
This scholarly objective, as
distinguished from a religious confessional one, is a primary feature of all
the works in the HarperCollins–SBL collaborations.
On the Way to the Study Bible
An Earlier Detour. Three
decades earlier, the idea of a Harper Study Bible had taken an entirely
different route. Right after Harper
& Row was formed in 1962, it published the Harper Study Bible, Revised
Standard Version, Prepared and Edited by Harold Lindsell, 1964. Harold Lindsell was a prominent Evangelical
Protestant, who had been a founding faculty member of Fuller Theological
Seminary in Southern California in 1947, and had risen
to be Vice President of the Seminary in 1964.
Lindsell had spent six years creating this study Bible, dividing the RSV
text into small units with topical headings, creating a marginal
cross-reference system, writing introductions to all the Biblical books, and
providing annotations running throughout.
Unlike the later HarperCollins
Study Bible, the Lindsell Harper Study
Bible was deliberately confessional.
...[T]he Harper Study Bible is
amplified by hundreds of interpretive notes written from the standpoint of
conservative theological scholarship.... Major doctrines of the Christian faith
are frankly set forth, obscure passages are brought to light, terms are
defined, and parables are clearly explained.
(Harper Study Bible, Harper
& Row, 1964, pp. xiii-xiv.)
Unlike other Evangelicals of his
time, Lindsell apparently had no fear of the Revised Standard Version (soon to
be replaced for Evangelicals by the New International Version [NIV]). He set out to make the dreaded RSV an
instrument of God’s Word for Evangelical students of the Bible. (A reissue of the Lindsell Harper Study Bible with the New Revised
Standard Version text is listed as a Harper item in 1991.)
However sales and acceptance went
with the 1964 Study Bible, Harold Lindsell gained major public notice with his
book Battle for the Bible (Zondervan,
1976), which set Evangelicalism aflame over the issue of “inerrancy” of the
Bible. The future of Harper and its
Study Bible lay elsewhere, however, with a different collaboration of the Publisher with
the world of Biblical scholarship.
The Main Line Project. The
HarperCollins Study Bible was originally planned as a third member of the
collaborative work between the Society and the Harper publishers, though a
couple of matters changed along the way.
First, HarperCollins was formed.
There was new overall management and changes of names and personnel. It must have been clear, however, that Harper
& Row had a couple of winners going in the religious field with their Dictionary and Commentary, and the obvious continuation to the
next stage was not interrupted.
However, a new mainline Protestant
version of the English Bible had appeared just at the time HarperCollins came
on the scene. The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) had been released by the
Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ
in the USA . Like its predecessor, the Revised Standard
Version, the NRSV quickly became the standard English Bible, not only for great
numbers of Protestants (meaning most non-Evangelicals), but also for large
parts of the academic world as well. The
Harper Bible Dictionary and Harper Bible Commentary, in their first editions, had
been geared to the RSV, but the now-to-be-completed Harper(Collins) Study Bible
would be based on the new version, the NRSV.
The General Editor of the Study Bible explained the value of the NRSV as follows:
The General Editor of the Study Bible explained the value of the NRSV as follows:
The NRSV is selected for this HarperCollins Study Bible for several
reasons... First, the declared intention
of the Translation Committee to produce a translation “as literal as possible”
makes this version well adapted for study. For example, careful reading is enhanced when
we can observe such things as the recurrence of certain key words; if these are
rendered into our language with some consistency, the task [of performing a
word-study, for example] is obviously easier.
Second, the NRSV was designed to be as inclusive as possible, in two different senses. It includes the most complete range of
biblical books representing the several differing canons of scripture... In addition, it avoids language that might
inappropriately suggest limits of gender.
(“Introduction to the HarperCollins Study Bible,” 1st ed., p.
xvii.)
The First Edition (1993)
The HarperCollins Study Bible was first
published in 1993, four years after the appearance of the New Revised Standard Version. HarperCollins thus beat Oxford University
Press with a study Bible based on the NRSV by eight years—Oxford only producing The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Third Edition, in 2001. This was a valuable lead in the academic
market for textbook Bibles. While the Revised
edition of the Study Bible, published in 2006, is the focus of this review, the
first edition was the major creation, and its editors (not continued in the
Revised edition) played the chief role in selecting contributors and overseeing
their work. (The original editors will
be discussed here; contributors will be discussed under the Revised Edition
below, since most of them remained the same and often their work was hardly
changed in the Revised Edition.)
The General Editor. The
master overseer was Wayne A. Meeks, a
widely known and esteemed New Testament scholar at Yale
University . Meeks grew up in Alabama ,
majored in Physics in college and graduated from Austen Presbyterian
Theological Seminary in 1956. After four years as a campus minister, he earned
M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in New Testament at Yale
University . He had brief teaching positions at Dartmouth
College and Indiana University before becoming a professor in the Religious
Studies Department at Yale (not the Divinity School), eventually occupying the
Woolsey Professorship of Biblical Studies.
He became emeritus in 1999 and has since been visiting professor at
several prestigious institutions. See his
perceptive autobiographical statement about the world of religious studies
during his career, which he gave in an interview recently at Smith
College , where he is currently
visiting “Neilson Professor.” (See https://religiousstudies.yale.edu/people/wayne-meeks ) [Smith website for 2010 no longer available.]
Meeks’ scholarship focused on the
early Christian social world, and his most famous work is The First Urban Christians: the Social World of the Apostle Paul,
Yale University Press, 1983, translated into Spanish, Japanese, Italian,
Portuguese, Korean, and German, with a second English edition in 2003. Other works pursued the same line of inquiry,
The Moral World of the First Christians
(1986) and The Origins of Christian
Morality (1993). These were the
studies he was engaged in at the time he edited the HarperCollins Study
Bible. His most recent major work is Christ Is the Question, redirecting
recent preoccupations with the historical Jesus (Westminster John Knox,
2006).
By the 1980s Meeks was a prominent
and respected figure in the academy, serving as President of the Society of
Biblical Literature in 1985. He was an
excellent choice for general editor of the new SBL-HarperCollins project. His only contribution as writer was the
careful and balanced, “Introduction to the HarperCollins Study Bible,” but the
recruitment of contributors and seeing their work through the editorial process
was a major behind-the-scenes task.
The Associate Editors. Much
of the direct contact with contributors was done by the four Associate Editors,
each of whom was responsible for a section of the Bible.
Jouette M. Bassler, Professor of New Testament at Perkins School of Theology (Southern Methodist University), assisted with the New Testament contributions. She had done her Ph.D. at Yale in Pauline studies, her dissertation published in the SBL dissertation series in 1982, Divine Impartiality: Paul and a Theological Axiom. She was thus well-known to Wayne Meeks. She edited several volumes on Pauline Theology in the SBL Symposium series, and, after the Study Bible had come out, she served as editor of the Journal of Biblical Literature from 1995 to 1999. She was presented with a fine celebration volume at her retirement, The Impartial God, edited by Calvin J. Roetzel and Robert L. Foster (Sheffield : Phoenix ,
2007).
Jouette M. Bassler, Professor of New Testament at Perkins School of Theology (Southern Methodist University), assisted with the New Testament contributions. She had done her Ph.D. at Yale in Pauline studies, her dissertation published in the SBL dissertation series in 1982, Divine Impartiality: Paul and a Theological Axiom. She was thus well-known to Wayne Meeks. She edited several volumes on Pauline Theology in the SBL Symposium series, and, after the Study Bible had come out, she served as editor of the Journal of Biblical Literature from 1995 to 1999. She was presented with a fine celebration volume at her retirement, The Impartial God, edited by Calvin J. Roetzel and Robert L. Foster (
Werner E. Lemke, Professor of Old Testament Interpretation at Colgate
Rochester Divinity
School , was one of two Associate
Editors responsible for the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Lemke had come from Germany
as a child, took a B.A. at the University
of Illinois in Chicago ,
a B.D. at North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago ,
and did his doctorate in Theology at Harvard
University , studying with G. Ernest
Wright and Frank M. Cross. He taught at
Colgate Rochester from 1966 until his retirement in 2003. Lemke had done archeological work at the Gezer
site in Israel ,
and was a contributor to the HarperCollins Bible Dictionary. Beside his editorial work on the Study Bible,
he contributed the introduction and notes to the book of Lamentations.
Susan Niditch, Samuel Green Professor of Religion at Amherst
College , was the second Associate
Editor on the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.
Ms Niditch graduated from Radcliffe
College in 1972 and completed a
Ph.D. in Old Testament at Harvard University
in 1977. She has concentrated especially
on folklore, as in Underdogs and
Tricksters: A Prelude to Biblical
Folklore, Harper & Row, 1987, and right after the HC Study Bible came
out she published War in the Hebrew
Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence
(Oxford UP, 1993), Oral World and Written
Word (Westminster, 1996), and Ancient
Israelite Religion (Oxford UP, 1997).
Most recently she has done a major commentary on Judges (Westminster
John Knox, 2008) and more folklore motifs in “My Brother Esau Is a Hairy Man”:
Hair and Identity in Ancient Israel
(Oxford UP, 2008).
Eileen
M. Schuller. The full version of the
New Revised Standard Version of the Bible included the Deuterocanonical/Aprocryphal
writings contained in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles, and these
were included in the HarperCollins Study Bible.
The contributors of introductions and notes to these writings were
overseen by Associate Editor Eileen M. Schuller. At the time the Study Bible was begun, Eileen
Schuller was a newly-appointed Associate Professor of Religious Studies at McMaster
University in Ontario ,
Canada – full professor
in 1996. She had done her undergraduate
work at Alberta in Classics, a
Master’s in Near Eastern studies at the University
of Toronto , and her Ph.D. at
Harvard, concentrating on Dead Sea Scrolls.
She had taught at the Atlantic School of Theology in Halifax
before going to McMaster. Before the
Study Bible she had published Non-Canonical
Psalms from Qumran (Harvard Semitic Studies, 1986) and Post-Exilic Prophets, a popular survey (Michael Glazier,
1988). She has recently published a
major review of her main area, The Dead Sea Scrolls:
What Have We Learned? (Westminster
John Knox, 2006).
The Editorial Board of the Study
Bible also included a “Consulting Editor,” James
Luther Mays, emeritus professor at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia . Mays was widely experienced in such
publications and was a kind of dean of Old Testament studies in the Society of
Biblical Literature, having been President of the Society in 1986, immediately
following Wayne Meeks’ term as President.
He was presumably a voice of wisdom and counsel along the way for the
editors engaged in the main enterprise.
The Revised Edition (2006)
There were 61 contributors to the
first edition of the HarperCollins Study Bible of 1993. Twenty of them had also been contributors to
the Harper Bible Commentary of 1988,
though often to different Biblical writings than they dealt with in the Study
Bible.
The Revised Edition of the Study Bible, 2006, saw 18 new contributors, most of whom only reviewed and revised the work of other contributors to the first edition. There was major continuity from the First to the Revised Editions, many contributors choosing to make no changes in their work, though a few did some serious rewriting (for example, Matthew) while the work of others was substantially revised by new contributors (for example, Joshua, Daniel, Mark).
The Revised Edition of the Study Bible, 2006, saw 18 new contributors, most of whom only reviewed and revised the work of other contributors to the first edition. There was major continuity from the First to the Revised Editions, many contributors choosing to make no changes in their work, though a few did some serious rewriting (for example, Matthew) while the work of others was substantially revised by new contributors (for example, Joshua, Daniel, Mark).
The old editorial team was not
revived for the Revised Edition. Instead,
all editorial work was done by a new General Editor, Harold W. Attridge. As if
Attridge had nothing to do! He had
earned graduate degrees from the University
of Cambridge (Marshall
scholar) and Harvard University
before teaching at Perkins School of Theology (1977-1985) and the University of
Notre Dame, where he became Dean of the College
of Arts and Letters
(1985-1997). While there his most
prestigious publication came out, Hebrews,
in the Hermeneia series (Fortress Press 1989).
From Notre Dame he moved to Yale
Divinity School
in 1997, served as President of the Society of Biblical Literature in 2001, and
became Dean of the Divinity School
in 2002. His editorship of the Revised
Edition of the HarperCollins Study Bible was carried out amid his deanship
responsibilities. There were no
Associate Editors, and the task consisted of seeing if the original
contributors were able or interested in revising their work, or in seeking new
contributors to do such revising as was necessary. And then – of course – reviewing and revising
the new contributions.
General Articles
In the original HarperCollins
Study Bible there was only one general article, Wayne Meeks’ “Introduction.” This essay made it clear that the objective
of the Study Bible was to enable the reader to “read” these ancient texts,
starting with the translation, the diversity of the contents of the Biblical
books, and proceeding to simple explanations of modern critical study of the
scriptures, something about the communities that nurtured the scriptures, and
the Society of Biblical Literature. This
essay was kept unchanged in the Revised Edition.
The original Study Bible was
probably planned with the old idea in mind that it was a partner with the HarperCollins Bible Dictionary, if not
also with the Bible Commentary. So viewed, the Study Bible did not need its
own general articles; they were already in the Dictionary.
By the time of the Revised Edition, it was decided to add some general articles, and the Revised Edition of the Study Bible has the following essays at the beginning: (1) “Strategies for Reading Scripture,” by John Barton, just over four pages; (2) “Israelite Religion,” by Ronald Hendel, five pages; (3) The Greco-Roman Context of the New Testament,” by David E. Aune, almost eight pages; (4) “The Bible and Archeology,” by Eric M. Meyers, five pages; and (5) “Archeology and the New Testament,” by Jürgen Zangenberg, five pages. These articles are orientations to large complex areas. The article on Israelite Religion is pretty vanilla and fails to catch most of the drama the subject is loaded with.
By the time of the Revised Edition, it was decided to add some general articles, and the Revised Edition of the Study Bible has the following essays at the beginning: (1) “Strategies for Reading Scripture,” by John Barton, just over four pages; (2) “Israelite Religion,” by Ronald Hendel, five pages; (3) The Greco-Roman Context of the New Testament,” by David E. Aune, almost eight pages; (4) “The Bible and Archeology,” by Eric M. Meyers, five pages; and (5) “Archeology and the New Testament,” by Jürgen Zangenberg, five pages. These articles are orientations to large complex areas. The article on Israelite Religion is pretty vanilla and fails to catch most of the drama the subject is loaded with.
Samples of Interpretation
(From the huge range of
possibilities here, topics are selected that are mostly different from those
discussed in reviews of other study Bibles.
NOTE: page references are to the
Revised Edition of 2006, unless otherwise stated.)
Genesis Revisited. Only one
of the contributions to the First Edition of the HarperCollins Study Bible was
completely replaced in the Revised Edition, the treatment of Genesis. The introduction to Genesis in the First
Edition had become embroiled in analyzing “symmetries” in the literary
composition of the book and seriously neglected the usual kinds of information
and discussion needed. In the Revised
Edition, Ronald Hendel, Professor of
Hebrew Bible at University of California
Berkeley , provided an introduction with sections
on “The Genesis of Genesis” on sources and composition, and “Science, History,
and Genesis” on the nature of the ancient lore contained in Genesis. The revision was an important improvement.
The Exodus and History. The
introduction and notes on Exodus were virtually unchanged in the Revised
edition of the Study Bible. They were
done by Edward L. Greenstein, then
Professor of Bible at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. (He was at JTSA from 1976 until 1995, when he
became Professor of Biblical Studies at Tel Aviv University in Israel.)
Prof. Greenstein emphasized that the “Biblical Context” of Exodus was covenant law and repeated covenant commitments inIsrael ’s
history. On the “Historical Context,” however,
he recognized that multiple sources and a lot of legendary enhancement had gone
into the text. “Comparison of Exodus
with folklore and myth suggests the story is already the stuff of legend. Historical reconstruction is accordingly
obstructed by a centuries-long process of literary formation that can hardly be
retraced” (p. 84). Internal Biblical
references to the Exodus are relatively consistent, but external evidence of
its historicity is lacking.
Prof. Greenstein emphasized that the “Biblical Context” of Exodus was covenant law and repeated covenant commitments in
External considerations lead many
to place the historical exodus in the late thirteenth century BCE during the
long reign of Rameses II, when numbers of Western Semites
are known to have inhabited the Nile Delta and when conflicts with foreign
labor are reported. But there is no
archeological record of the exodus in Egypt ,
and historical references in Exodus are slim, vague, or problematic. On the other hand, a relatively large number
of Egyptian personal names are found within the tribe of Levi (e.g., Moses,
Aaron, Miriam, Merari, Putiel, Phinehas, Hophni). There is therefore a basis to surmise that
ancestors of some Israelites, and particularly those associated with the
priestly tribe, came out of Egypt . (Page 84.)
Leviticus and the Holy. The
editors recruited a scholar “considered the world’s leading expert on
Leviticus” (Wikipedia on “Jacob Milgrom”) to treat that Biblical book in the Study
Bible. Jacob Milgrom grew up in New York ,
studied at Brooklyn College
and at Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and then spent most of his long
career at the University of California
at Berkeley , where he headed the
Department of Near Eastern Studies. He
retired from Berkeley in 1994, emigrated
to Israel , and continued
publishing his major works. These were
the three-volume commentary on Leviticus in the Anchor Bible series (1998,
2000, 2000) and the more popular version, Leviticus: A Book of Ritual and Ethics (Fortress
Press, 2004).
By the time Milgrom did the
introduction and notes for the Study Bible his views on Leviticus were fully
developed. Thus the reader gets a
succinct version of those mature conclusions.
Leviticus consists of P (Priestly) tradition, chapters 1-16, and H (Holiness)
tradition, chapters17-27. While both
traditions are about holiness in Israel ,
P is fundamentally about holiness for priests
while H is fundamentally about holiness for the people!
For P, spatial holiness is limited
to the sanctuary; for H it is coextensive with the promised land. As for the holiness of persons, P restricts it
to priests and Nazirites...; H extends it to all of Israel . This expansion follows logically from H’s
doctrine of spatial holiness: since the
land is holy, all who reside on it are to keep it that way. All adult Israelites are enjoined to attain
holiness by observing God’s commandments, and even resident aliens must heed
the prohibitive commandments, the violation of which threatens to pollute the
land for all (e.g., 18:26).
...Pollution for H is
nonritualistic [i.e., caused by violating commandments rather than by
impersonal ritual circumstances], as shown by ... the fact that the polluted
land cannot be expiated by ritual.
Violations irrevocably lead to the expulsion of its inhabitants (18:24 -29; 20:22 ). [Concerning the editing of P and H], the pervasive
intrusion of H characteristics into the P text points to the strong possibility
that H is not only subsequent to P but is also P’s redactor. (Page 151.)
The Book of Kings and Its “Message.” This book is a fulcrum in the Deuteronomistic
view of Israel ’s
history and cries out for clarity in how Israel
failed in its historic destiny. The
reader gets only limited help in the HarperCollins Study Bible.
The book of I and II Kings (there was only one scroll until it was translated into Greek) is annotated by Robert R. Wilson, noted Old Testament scholar atYale Divinity
School from 1972 on. The problem here is that the reader gets
little help with the larger units of the work. The whole of Kings has three parts:
Solomon, the Divided Kingdoms ,
and Judah Alone. Each of these parts
also has major sections: Solomon (I
Kings 3-11) has an A, B, C, B’, A’ layout with the Temple
at C; play on Solomon’s wealth, wisdom, and administration in the B and B’
sections; and the A section is Divine Favor (chapter 3) and A’ is the Divine
Disfavor (chapter 11). This puts the
“bad” part of Solomon’s reign at the end.
A similar treatment of the mass of materials dealing with Elijah,
Elisha, and Jehu would help (I Kings 17-II Kings 10). The LARGER units of narrative need to be
highlighted, not just a continuous string of chapter and half-chapter
units. (The introduction has no outline
of the book.)
The book of I and II Kings (there was only one scroll until it was translated into Greek) is annotated by Robert R. Wilson, noted Old Testament scholar at
It is appropriate to note here
that there is no standard format for the topics and sections included in the
introductions to the Biblical books.
Kings has three headings in the introduction (Revised Edition): Name and Canonical Position, Literary
Character, and Message. “Message” is a
surprising term here. What does
“Message” mean in this context? The word
evokes overtones of “sermon,” message to be taken into one’s religious
life. Is that what the Society of
Biblical Literature really wants to offer its academically-attuned
readers? Probably not. The term is probably an echo from the
religious past of these Biblical scholars.
(Other terms used in introductions probably with a similar meaning are
“Theology,” “Significance,” and even “Content.”)
“Message” is not used in all, or
even most introductions to Biblical books.
It is found in Joshua in the form “Content and Message,” here in Kings
simply as “Message,” and otherwise in the Old Testament only in prophetic
books: Ezekiel, Joel, Amos, Obadiah,
Micah (“The Message”), Nahum, Zephaniah, Haggai, and Malachi. People are accustomed to prophetic books
having “messages.” In the Apocrypha only
III Maccabees has a “Message and Outlook.”
In the introductions to New Testament books, surprisingly no Gospels or
Pauline letters have “Messages”; only the Catholic Epistles of James and I, II,
and III John. These various “Messages”
are probably hangovers from confessional days still around at the academic
morning after.
Nevertheless, there is an
important message for the academic scholar in the book of Kings: the point should be driven home repeatedly
that the centralization of all sacrifice at Jerusalem—for which all Judean
kings are held responsible but only Hezekiah and Josiah achieve—was socially
and politically impossible until Judah was a minor little state. The entire book is structured around a
utopian demand; it is projecting a late Judean cultic and political program,
and a radical one at that, back onto the previous periods of the monarchy. It was an actual program in Josiah’s time,
but the commentator should not give credence to the condemnation of the ages of
Solomon or Jeroboam or even of Ahab by blandly accepting that late Judean
doctrine.
The Unity of Isaiah—editing or a common tradition. The long-standing modern division of the book
of Isaiah into at least three parts, First, Second, and Third Isaiah, is
treated in the Study Bible by J.J.M.
Roberts, William Henry Green Professor of Old Testament (Emeritus in 2006)
at Princeton Theological Seminary.
Roberts had long been an advocate of the importance of the Zion
tradition in Israelite religion, and the book of Isaiah is heavily laden with
that ancient urban-oriented complex. In
the Revised Edition, Roberts adds a new section to his introduction to Isaiah,
entitled “An Overarching Unity.”
In the ten to fifteen years since
the first edition of the Study Bible much ink had been shed arguing for various
kinds of unity between the “first” Isaiah and the later parts of the book. Here Roberts listens to such arguments for
unity and gives his own assessment.
...[T]he evidence for a thorough,
intentional, coherent editing of the book as a whole is not very
persuasive. Such reconstructions [which
propose strong editorial unity throughout the book] are far more hypothetical
than the reconstructions of traditional historical criticism.... Thus the
opinion reflected in these notes is that the overarching unity of the book owes
more to a common theological tradition in which all the authors stood than to
any consistent and coherent editing the book has undergone. The common theological tradition and the fact
that the later authors were responding to and commenting on the earlier oracles
in the book are sufficient explanation for the overarching unity. (Page 914.)
Roberts retained the three
sections of his old introduction, one each on First, Second, and Third Isaiah.
Matthew Joins the Empire. Between the First Edition of the Study Bible
and its Revision in 2006, Denis Duling,
Professor of Religious Studies at Canisius
College in Buffalo ,
New York , discovered that Matthew had a lot – if not to say, at least to
“imply” – about the Roman Empire . Between 1993 and 2006 others had been
advancing the thesis that Matthew had an extensive subtext about the Empire,
particularly Warren Carter in such publications as Matthew and Empire: Initial
Explorations (Trinity Press International, 2001) and Matthew and the Margins: A
Sociopolitical and Religious Reading (Orbis Books, Maryknoll ,
NY , 2003).
In 1993 Denny Duling had provided a helpful and well-balanced
introduction to Matthew, which had little to say about the Roman
Empire . However, by 2006 we
get the following additions to the introduction:
The Gospel of Matthew was written
by a subject of the Roman Empire , which can be described
as a hierarchically ordered, commercialized, advanced agrarian (peasant)
society with no middle class. [Several sentences describe the ruling classes,
the underclasses, the “expendables,” subjection of women and children, rule by
“client” kings, etc.]
Political resistance to Rome in the
Gospel is not overt, but nonetheless suggestively implied: Jesus descends from King David...and is the
promised Messiah;... he is a threat to Rome’s official ruling Herodian kings
(ch. 2); his message is about the kingdom of heaven...; his predecessor, the
prophet John the Baptizer, is executed by Rome’s appointed representative,
Herod Antipas...; and, most important, his execution is by crucifixion..., a
Roman penalty mainly for political rebels.
In short, though the Matthean plot is not overtly political, economic
and political issues of the larger Roman Empire are not
far under the surface and should not be ignored in considering the
circumstances of the Gospel’s composition.
(Pages 1666-67.)
Thus does another fad take up a
lot of space in the Revised Study Bible.
Mark, Well Introduced. Some
of the introductions of the original Study Bible were revised in 2006, not by
the original contributors but by new ones.
An example of an excellent job of rewriting by another hand is the
introduction to the Gospel According to Mark. The revision was done by Adela
Yarbro Collins, Buckingham Professor of New Testament Criticism and
Interpretation at Yale Divinity
School . (She had previously been at Notre Dame and
then the University of Chicago Divinity School.)
Ms Collins left the structure of the introduction in place but rewrote most paragraphs, many very substantially. Her work replaced general and flowing statements with precise and carefully referenced ones. At the time she did this revision she was finishing a landmark commentary on Mark in the Hermeneia series (Fortress Press, 2007), and the decade of probing issues and settling on mature views about the genre of Mark, about its setting and occasion, and about its style and composition gives her introduction to the Revised Edition polish and authority. She did add one new section, Relation to Other Gospels, in which she discusses and defends the Two-Source Theory, and assesses similarities and differences between Mark and John. Her rewriting of these topics turned a satisfactory introduction into an excellent one.
Ms Collins left the structure of the introduction in place but rewrote most paragraphs, many very substantially. Her work replaced general and flowing statements with precise and carefully referenced ones. At the time she did this revision she was finishing a landmark commentary on Mark in the Hermeneia series (Fortress Press, 2007), and the decade of probing issues and settling on mature views about the genre of Mark, about its setting and occasion, and about its style and composition gives her introduction to the Revised Edition polish and authority. She did add one new section, Relation to Other Gospels, in which she discusses and defends the Two-Source Theory, and assesses similarities and differences between Mark and John. Her rewriting of these topics turned a satisfactory introduction into an excellent one.
Paul’s Letters. The major
letters of Paul are well-worked territory in New Testament studies. Leander
E. Keck, a colleague of Wayne Meeks at the Yale
Divinity School
(Winkley Professor of Biblical Theology, emeritus in 2006) did Romans with only
modest changes in the Revised Edition. Victor Paul Furnish, University
Distinguished Professor of New Testament at Perkins School of Theology, a
colleague of Associate Editor Jouette Bassler, did Paul’s First Letter to the
Corinthians, altering the introduction in the Revised Edition only by the
addition of a single paragraph on “Significance.”
Revelation. One of the
leading scholars on the New Testament and Greco-Roman literature was recruited
to do Revelation in the Study Bible: David E. Aune. Aune had been Professor of New Testament and
Christian Origins at Loyola University of Chicago when he first did the book of
Revelation for the Study Bible. He was
in the Department of Theology at Notre Dame when the Revised Edition came
out. Aune had concluded some of the
issues of the composition of the book of Revelation by seeing two editions of
the work.
In the light of conflicting
evidence for the early and late date of Revelation, it seems likely that the
book was actually composed and assembled in stages over many years and was only
completed in its present form toward the end of the first or the early second
century CE. Though certainty is not
possible, the first edition of the book probably consisted of 1.4-11; 4.1-22.5,
to which 1.1-3; 1.12-3.22; 22.6-21 were added in a second edition. (Page 2087.)
The full versions of his arguments
were presented at length in his three-volume commentary on Revelation published
in the Word Biblical Commentary series
(Nelson, 1997-1999).
Some Evaluative Comments
The HarperCollins Study Bible is the work of eighty or so
established scholars from the Society of Biblical Literature. It represents the best that professional
Biblical scholarship can bring together in a single enterprise (though keeping
updated is a perpetual challenge for scholars).
In book after book, one can be confident that the presentation here
would be accepted in any mainline academic discussion. The model clientele for this work is students
in colleges, universities, and seminaries.
Personal note: For years
this was my Study Bible of choice. I
literally wore out a copy of the First Edition of this work when I was doing
lectionary studies from 2003 to 2005.
After three years of heavy use at the desk—no carrying around—the binding
began to dissolve and hunks of pages fell out.
I mainly used the translation, which I was constantly checking against
other things, but the notes at the bottom were my quick reference for other
passages I knew about but needed exact citations at the moment. I used the introductions, of course, which
were usually familiar territory but you never know when a new wrinkle or a
surprise will show up. That is my
testimonial to the usefulness of the HarperCollins Study Bible.
This Study Bible has most of the
features common to such works today:
Besides the essentials—the text, the introductions, the notes—it has a
time-line of ancient Mesopotamia to the Roman Empire (pp. xxxiv-xxxv); it has
forty or so illustrations, in-text maps, and tables (listed on p. xxix); it has
eighteen color maps at the back (if they haven’t fallen out; the color maps are
always the first hunk of pages to go). On
charts, it is a little surprising to still find the old W.F. Albright dates in
the Chronology of the Kings of the Divided Monarchy (p. 500). There have been many more recent chronologies
and almost no one uses 922 BCE as the starting point of the divided monarchy
any more. The Revised Edition added a
concise Concordance to the NRSV, containing 75 pages of triple-column tiny-print
entries.
I am ambivalent about the General
Articles added to the Revised Edition, especially the Religion of Israel
item. These articles look duty-driven to
me: this is something we have to have,
get someone to write them. However,
Aune’s article on the Greco-Roman world is an excellent piece, in part because
it is longer than the others. The
original HarperCollins idea may have been better: read about these things in the HarperCollins
Bible Dictionary.
On the selection of
contributors: After I have completed
this review, I have a strong sense that the old original bias of the Society of
Biblical Literature still broods over this work. The northeastern United
States (with southeastern Canada )
is much more heavily represented than the rest of North America ,
either in the present locale of the scholars or as the location of their
graduate studies. One could almost say
the HarperCollins Study Bible is the work of Yale
University , its graduates and
friends.
Along the same line, when compared
with the recent editions of the Oxford Annotated Bible, the HarperCollins work
seems to represent a much higher percentage of seminary faculty, as opposed to
colleges and non-seminary graduate schools.
As with the northeastern bias, one may suppose that that’s where the
quality workers are, but especially when one considers that faculty members of Evangelical
seminaries are entirely omitted from the
Study Bible, it seems likely that the Society includes a higher percentage of
non-seminary faculty than is represented in the HarperCollins Study Bible.
Also concerning selection of
contributors, the editors recruited Jewish members of the Society to do major
works in the Hebrew Bible: Genesis,
Exodus, Leviticus, Ruth are all done by Jewish scholars. (I have deliberately not attempted a complete
count of contributors by religious tradition, but those stood out.)
Finally, some words about the
mechanics of the finished product. As with other recent revised editions of
study Bibles, the Revised Edition of the HarperCollins has sacrificed
legibility and ease of use in order to cram more smaller print text onto the
page. The main fonts may be smaller only
in certain areas, but there is much less white space on the pages of the
Revised Edition. The margins are
typically a half-inch or less. No making
notes in the margins here!
The Revised Edition ends its text,
before the Concordance, on page 2120, whereas the First Edition ended the same
text on page 2346. And this is not
because there were any substantial omissions from the First to the Revised; the
reverse was the case. I found no
introductions that had been shortened, but many that had been increased in
length. The margins, and size of font in
some places, have been squeezed to reduce the number of pages by 225, while the
actual text has increased.
Miniscule margins, tiny print, thinner paper: these are the prices we pay to keep the cost of the Study Bible down and the publication viably competitive.
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