Fascinating! I can’t think of any better way to describe this book. For that matter, I’m glad to see it come along. It’s really needed. So many of the books on typology I’ve encountered have only been a listing and description of the author’s favorite types however fanciful they might be. Usually, for the record, they were extremely fanciful. In many cases, several of the types discussed had never been thought of by anyone else before. There’s you a red flag. Because of these excesses, many cast a suspicious eye at all types. What we needed was a work championing legitimate types while explaining some criteria to determine that legitimacy. This book steps into that gap and shines.

James Hamilton is an ideal author to tackle this subject. To be honest, I’ve become quite enamored with him since I was blown away by a recent commentary on the Psalms he did. His reverence and love of Scripture is almost an anomaly in the scholarly world. Others like him walk gingerly around these issues. Not him. For him, the Bible is a book to be trusted that can speak for itself.

Specific to this title, he sees clear authorial intent behind typology. These types weren’t random, nor were they worked out by us later. They were originally intended. Rather than finding them, we have more often lost them as we have gotten away from seeing the brilliant design behind biblical writings. In chapter one he shows these micro-level clues. Mainly we offers historical correspondence followed by escalation in significance as these types recur. He then tells us how to spot that historical correspondence by catching key terms, quotations, repeating of sequences of events, and similarity in salvation-historical or covenantal import ( his words). Finally, and I was expecting it all along, he adds “God-ordained” to his author-intended historical correspondence. I agree right down the line.

In something of a quirky design, he suggests that you read the last chapter next. You’d better. He organizes his material in this book as a chiasm. He rightly contends that that is a common design in the Bible and, I guess, he wants to show us what it looks like and that he knows how to do. Read the last chapter second and then go back to chapter two and the chiasm will be no detriment to you at all. That last chapter flips the promise-shaped typology discussion to the macro level.

Chapters 2-6 are types involving key persons while 7-10 are of key events. He takes what he showed us in chapters one and eleven and works out the clues that prove that these are the author-intended types in the Bible. The connections he mines are so rich that we finally get the types that will open up the Bible as God intended. Mark this book down as a must-have. You’ll, for sure, be the loser if you let this one get by you.

I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.