This commentary is quite in-depth and clearly must be rated a substantial commentary. It’s in the critical lane as you would expect from this series, yet not as critical as some that preceded it. The earlier volume on Chronicles in this series had quite a following in some circles, and Jonker seems to respect and revere it. In fact, one of the strengths of this book for scholars is how well it synthesizes scholarly work that went before it. If that’s what you’re after, you are going to love this volume.

For me, the commentary far exceeded the Introduction. The author seemed to miss the most pressing items. There was more needed on the history of the times (distinguish that from the supposed history of its writing). Structure could have been more imaginatively presented, though it was quite well reviewed in the smaller chunks as it was encountered in the commentary. The section on theology was fairly good, but could’ve been longer. To be fair, my more conservative stance might naturally make me not like some of the material in the introduction.

In the commentary itself, I must give a much higher recommendation. Clearly, its greatest strength was exegesis. It really dug in and offered help on many points. The author notices lots of details in the text that could easily be overlooked. You will find an excursus or two along the way, and even a chart, but the exegesis is where the gold resides. I’m sorry to put all the eggs of this volume in one basket, but that’s just how I see it. Since that, however, is what most readers are looking for, we will still have to say this is a great volume.

Every section in the commentary has a translation, some technical notes, a section on form and structure, one on sources, and finally the commentary itself. All of those sections were pretty good except the section on sources didn’t move the needle much for me.

 To my mind, this volume is easily in the top 10% of those we get in this series. The critical stance may not be to your liking, but there is lots of good to find besides those thrusts. I’m pretty impressed with this one. 

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