Review in: JOURNAL
OF THE EVANGELICAL THEOLOGICAL SOCIETY 42/3
Review door: Richard
S. Hess
Joshua: A Commentary. By Richard D. Nelson. OTL. Louisville:
Westminster John Knox, 1997, xviii + 310 pp., n.p.
In 1972 J. Alberto Soggin published his commentary
on Joshua for the Old Testament Library series. Its learned summary and
discussion of a wide range of continental scholarship on the book made it a
valuable addition to commentaries on Joshua at that time. Furthermore, it
balanced the more historical and archaeological emphasis of the work of Boling
and Wright with a contribution of classic liberal Protestantism.
A quarter century later a new commentary
in the same series reflects the need to keep up with the changes that have
taken place in Joshua studies and the Deuteronomistic history, as well as the
need to provide an up-to-date English language commentary on a book marked by
the absence of such commentaries. This is evident from the bibliography, which
lists eleven commentaries on Joshua. Only two have appeared within the last fifteen
years and these are both German (Fritz and Görg). Nelson omits my own 1996 contribution
to the Tyndale Old Testament Commentary series.
Three major areas of positive contribution
should be noted. (1) Nelson continues the approach of Soggin by interacting
with a variety of published authors who support his critical approach. Although
more focused on English-language and especially American studies, the review of
scholarship is helpful. (2) Nelson’s own previous work on the Deuteronomistic
history enables him to clarify the text of Joshua in the light of this
literary-critical theory. Nelson again and again confidently distinguishes pre‑Deuteronomistic
sources from those that are Deuteronomistic. Indeed, so assured is the
discussion of this view that here (and in many other writers who subscribe to
Deuteronomistic redaction[s]) the evidence for such distinctions is often
assumed rather than presented. (3) Nelson has provided a systematic comparison
of the Old Greek version of Joshua with the Masoretic Text. This is invaluable.
With the long-awaited publication of the final part of Margolis’ The Book of Joshua in Greek, it is now possible to compare these two
ancient traditions. While often favoring the Old Greek, Nelson nevertheless
provides a consistent comparison of the pluses and minuses of these two textual
traditions, although he does so only in English translation. Nevertheless, this
is probably the single most valuable contribution of Nelson’s commentary and
one that will allow it to be profitably consulted by all who wish to study the
book according to its earliest manuscript traditions.
The weakness of this commentary is its
pervasive refusal to interact with alternative opinions or methods of
interpretation. This is especially a matter of concern when Nelson addresses
questions of historical and archaeological significance. The following examples
of this problem will illustrate the concern. (1) Nelson asserts, regarding the
appearance of hundreds of small settlements in the Israelite hill country ca.
1200 BC and usually identified with Israel, “there
is no reason to see these pioneers as infiltrators or invaders from somewhere
outside Palestine” (p. 3). However, this ignores substantial contrary
opinion by archaeologists and historians such as L.E. Stager, who asks where so
many people come from (too many to be explained by the sedentarization of
nomads local to the hill country or their neighbors in the lowlands), and A. F.
Rainey who notes that the Jordan River was no boundary to nomadic groups who
crossed back and forth right up to the present century. (2) Nelson asserts that
the large mounds of Jericho, Ai and Hazor attracted conquest traditions to
explain their presence and that “The original social location of these stories
in a peasant society may be indicated by how often ‘kings’ serve as
antagonists” (p. 10). This etiological approach fails to address the fact that
these and other settlements in Palestine were ruled by “kings” throughout the
second millennium BC, whether the king of Hazor (logogram,
LUGAL) in the fourteenth century BC. Amarna letters, or the kings mentioned
in the earlier execration texts and the Tell er-Rumeideh tablet. These kings
constantly served as antagonists according to the picture portrayed by the
Amarna correspondence.
Nelson’s
discussion of the boundary descriptions and town lists (pp. 11–12, 185–186)
ignores the appearance of these forms in treaty documents and administrative lists
from the second-millennium BC West Semitic world (see especially
those at Ugarit and Alalakh, but also the recently discovered administrative
text from Hazor.) His own attempt to assign them to artificial scribal
compositions and student exercises is remarkable, since there are no extant
examples of boundary descriptions or town lists used for this purpose (even
though many examples of student exercises and scribal compositions do exist).
Examples
could be multiplied but they would only reinforce the point that in terms of
exegesis this commentary must be used with caution. It does not demonstrate an
acquaintance with the broader range of ancient and modern literature that lies
outside its own method of analysis.
Richard S. Hess
Denver Seminary, Denver, CO
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