Some Observations on Commentaries

I wrote two sermons yesterday and one this afternoon.   My hopes to write the fourth (and final) this evening have run aground on 2 Chronicles 32:24ff.   I can’t figure it out and the dozen or so commentaries I’ve checked so far aren’t even asking the right question, let alone answering it.

But I was struck by a few things in tonight’s study.   First, Chronicles has really not done well by commentators.   Often the two books are covered in a single commentary, which is really unbelievable considering how many chapters are in Chronicles (65).   The book is quite the stepchild.

But that raises, second, another issue.   I went to www.bestcommentaries.com to see what I might be missing.   Along the way I came to the conclusion that another commentary should never be written.   That sounds at odds with what I wrote above, but just peruse the list of commentaries written on any given book.   Then, look at all of the forthcoming commentaries.   Truly amazing.   I really don’t think another book-length commentary not already in process is necessary.   If there’s something new, put it in an article.   It’s highly unlikely that you have that much new to require a book.   What pushes all of this?   Obviously publishers make money.   And professors get to stuff their resumes.   But we don’t need at least half of what’s being produced.

My third observation concerns Anchor Bible commentaries.   This series actually gave a separate volume to 1 and 2 Chronicles.   But the type is so big, the margins so wide, and the translation occupies a huge part of the content.   You can see something similar in the AB commentary on Matthew, written by Albright and Mann (and purchased by me for 25 cents once in Pennsylvania; I thought I had gotten a real steal!).   Chronicles was published in 1965 and Matthew in 1971.   Matthew’s 28 chapters gets 350 pages, and they really could fit in less than half of that.   By contrast, compare the AB volume on Amos, written by Andersen and Freedman and published in 1989.   Within those 18 years, AB changed their style dramatically, and Amos’s nine chapters gets nearly 1,000 pages.   Sometimes you hear that a series is “uneven”; well, I think that AB is the definition of “uneven.”

I haven’t done a poll in a while, so here’s one for fun.