Abstract
The Story of God Bible Commentary series is edited by Tremper Longman III and Scot McKnight. It has the vision of helping pastors and “lay” people first, to read the Bible with understanding; and second, to understand its continuing significance in the twenty-first century (as described in the foreword by Tremper Longman and the other series editors, p. 13). The author of this volume, Lissa Wray Beal, is professor of Old Testament at Providence Theological Seminary in Otterbourne, in Manitoba, Canada.
Each commentary in the series has the same format. Each gobbet of text is subdivided into sections, roughly of chapter length, and dealt with in three ways, each approach building on what has gone before: Listen to the Story, Explain the Story, and Live the Story.
First is the introduction. Sadly, such preparatory material is sometimes overlooked by readers of commentaries, who may wish to dive directly into their text of study. To do so here, however, would be a mistake. Occupying a manageable thirty pages, the introduction moves quickly over questions of dating and authorship, which are of little relevance to most people in the target audience. It deals helpfully and in more detail with the literary genre and features of the text, before moving on to historical and theological considerations.
Without presupposing all that will follow, Beal offers helpful pointers to how to handle what are some of the most ethically challenging narratives of the Bible. She then follows the introduction with a list of sixteen recommended resources for further study.
The commentary proper then begins. The first part of each section, entitled Listen to the Story, reproduces the full biblical text (NIV, 2011), followed by the itemization and discussion of related biblical and extra-biblical passages. While the series editor suggests that this will relate to “any earlier Scripture passage which informs our understanding” (p. 15), I was pleased to find that Beal has not limited herself to prior texts. (Determining the priority of a text is a difficult and somewhat speculative exercise, in any case.) Thus, for example, her discussion of Joshua 5:13–6:27 (the destruction of Jericho) is linked with passages from Exodus, Judges, Genesis, Numbers, 1 Chronicles, and Deuteronomy (p. 126). Connecting the narrative in a forward and backward direction enables it to be placed in its canonical context, and its connection to the deep themes of the Bible to be considered. I found this section to be a particularly helpful part of the commentary. Beal's thorough research has uncovered fruitful intertextualities that I had not previously identified, and this is a resource that I will value having on my shelf. In addition to intra-biblical intertextuality, there is also a discussion of extrabiblical sources which shed light upon the biblical text. For example, the Ugaritic text known as the Kirta epic describes a military action structured around a seven-day march and siege. The common link between this and the campaign against Jericho, of course, is that this action aligns military effort and sacred time (p. 130).
Building upon all of this, the second approach to the text is entitled Explain the Story. Here, Beal comments on the text in useful but not overwhelming detail. She bases her remarks on the NIV (2011), but also pays attention to the underlying Hebrew, and sometimes offers her own translation where this would elucidate her point. Her commentary focuses on the final form of the text, although informed by “behind the text” considerations, many of which have been outlined in the first section. As such, it is well-equipped to identify the literary features of the passage, and thence to draw out the important elements that the writer is seeking to communicate. Beal is particularly careful to draw out the theological concerns raised by the text, and to view the narrative both in regard to its original intended readers, and to read as a Christian. There are many helpful insights along the way.
The contemporary application of the Old Testament (in sermons and such-like) is a narrow path, and in practice I think that interpreters often fall into one of two ditches. The first ditch is interpretive nihilism: a resigned shrug that consigns the Old Testament solely to the old covenant and excludes the possibility of its addressing the Christian because of the limited horizon of the text. The other ditch is where elements of the text are extracted wholesale from their contexts and dropped into the twenty-first century world. With this error in view the title of the third section, Live the Story could strike fear into the heart of the reader, given some of the subject matter and the uses to which it has been put over the years. Beal is far too experienced and sensitive a commentator to fall into either of these ditches. Rather, she charts a course that projects itself through the Christ event, directed towards the eschaton, and positions the book of Joshua on that trajectory. She is not afraid to speak of typology, by which she does not mean a naïve “drag and drop” of the Old Testament story onto the life of Christ, which extracts the character or pericope from its context. “None of these typological associations detracts from the reality of the person and ministry of Joshua” (p. 49). Rather, typology as Beal uses the term serves as an indication of the ways in which the earlier story and character angle themselves towards the one who fulfils the law and the prophets in every respect.
The book concludes with a scripture index, a subject index, and an author index.
The conquest of Canaan by Joshua and the people of Israel is a thorn in the interpreter's side which will not go away, and this angst is felt within the churches at grass-roots level, too. While this book will not – nor claims to – answer all these questions, careful, well-informed study of the text is a pre-requisite to any approach which seeks to address the issue. Beal's work is written with a scholar's mind and a pastor's heart, and will prove an enormously valuable resource for scholars and pastors alike.