Review in: The Expository Times 1999 110: 259
Review door: Robert P. CarrollGevonden op: http://ext.sagepub.com/content/110/8/259.3.full.pdf+html
EZEKIEL
COMPLETED
I reviewed the
first volume of Daniel I. Block’s massive NICOT commentary on Ezekiel in The
Expository Times 109 (1997/98), 309; the ink was hardly dry on that review when
the second volume The Book of Ezekiel: Chapters 25-48 (NICOT; Eerdmans, 1998,
£32.99, pp. xxiii + 826, ISBN 0-8028-2536-2) landed on my desk. It is a massive
work and its 1750 pages make it longer even than Walther Zimmerli’s magisterial
commentary on Ezekiel in the BKAT/Hermeneia series - it is an arguable point
because the Hermeneia series uses double columns of print, but my sense of the
matter is that Block is bigger if not better than Zimmerli. As a completed
commentary I would want to add to the critical remarks made in my review of the
first volume a rider to the effect that the commentary is itself a magnificent
achievement, full of information and exegetical insights, well worth reading
and pondering by fellow exegetes, whatever their theological hue or ideological
commitment. I still find the overt Christianizing of Ezekiel’s message
difficult to swallow, especially at the end of this century which has seen so many
of the old supersessionist chickens come home to roost in the destruction of
the European Jews. I also find that Block’s reading of chapters 40-48 as having
’theological implications for the modem reader’ which are ’compelling’,
representing ’a profound theology of land’ somewhat naive, even disingenuous,
when today Israeli and Palestinian communities are locked in a struggle for land in the Middle East. Surely
the continued say of scripture needs desperately to be updated, criticized and
challenged by the further light afforded by modernity and the long
reception-history transformations of scripture. I think I would want to
recommend this twovolume work to contemporary readers as a good long read, but
with a caveat about the need for taking the text more seriously and less
seriously than Daniel Block does - if you get my meaning!
ROBERT P. CARROLL,
UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW
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