On the Cambridge Companion to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament

This is a strong collection of essays on the Old Testament; the authors are all scholars, and they balance academic research with religious concern nicely. The chapters fall into five sections: Text and Canon, Historical Background, Methods and Approaches, Subcollections and Genres, and Reception and Use. All of them have interesting, learned chapters, though I spent the most time in the fourth, which sorts the Old Testament books into buckets — the Pentateuch, the historical books, short stories, apocalyptic writings, apocrypha, and so on. The section on reception was especially interesting, particularly R. W. L. Moberly’s chapter on the role of the Old Testament in Christianity, which argues that Christianity has an unsettled relationship to the Hebrew texts: Jesus claimed to “fulfill” Biblical law, yet, thanks to Paul, the tradition diverged significantly from it. The section on methods was illuminating too — we tend to picture “the historical-critical approach,” but there’s no single way into the text; narratology matters, as does sociological analysis, among many others. The weakest section was on historical context, which is understandable, since the book treats the Hebrew Bible as text rather than as objective record of the past — still, it would have helped to flesh out the chapters on the Ancient Near East, to situate the rest. Altogether it’s a good introduction to one of the most significant texts in human history, probably pitched at the upper-undergraduate level but approachable to anyone with a rudimentary grasp of Judaism and Christianity.