Korte review in: The Expository
Times 2001 112: 280
Korte review door: de
Editor.Gevonden op: http://ext.sagepub.com/content/112/8/280.full.pdf+html
The Westminster
Bible Companion series is addressed primarily to the laity. Ellen F. Davis
contributes Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs (Westminster John Knox
Press, 2000, £9.99, pp. x + 306, ISBN 0-664-25522-1). While fully accepting the
distance between the world of these wisdom books and the present day, Davis impressively
brings out the meaning that they can have for the modern world. Accepting the
impossibility of commenting on every proverb within the length and purpose of
the commentary, she deals selectively with the proverbs in chapters 10 to 29
and offers ’meditations’ to stimulate the reader’s own ’theological retlection’.
Interestingly, she regards the proverbs as popular sayings, reflecting the
common sense of the faith community. The
main feature of Ecclesiastes which Davis brings out is humility, and she sees
the value of the book as providing ’a kind of preface to the New Testament’,
keeping us from hearing the gospel as ’a fairy tale about a fantasy world’. The
imagery of the Song is brought out to the full (perhaps too close to allegory)
as Davis seeks to discover its theological message as offering an answer to the
tragic history of the failure of human love and responsiveness to God. The book
depicts ’the reversal of that primordial exile from Eden’. This is a striking
commentary which deserves to be on the shelves of every minister as well as being
read by the laity.
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