Out of the Best Books- Talking about (Bible) Commentaries at Institute

Other LDS posts on commentaries
Julie Smith, “In Defense of Commentaries”

Previous thoughts and experiences of mine.

Recommended commentaries
Bestcommentaries.com is VERY thorough (this appears to have an evangelical orientation, but is still useful)

My recommended commentaries?
For the Book of Mormon, I can’t really recommend anything of length but Brant Gardner’s Second Witness. The draft used to be online, and my parents have the whole thing. It’s really opened their eyes to what a good commentary can do.

For the Bible, let’s break this down into groups.

Study Bibles– NIV Study Bible, Jewish Study Bible, Oxford/Harper Collins Study Bible. In spite of some positives, I cannot recommend the new and increasingly-popular ESV Study Bible, as I think it has some serious flaws on several levels. Moreover, most LDS would probably not appreciate the explicit anti-Mormon commentary in several places. (Bridget of Clobberblog “used to enjoy the ESV, but I decided that it was the abusive boyfriend of evangelical translations and broke up with it.”)

One-volume commentaries– Harper’s Bible Commentary, Oxford Bible Commentary. Jehovah and the World of the Old Testament (Very general, but excellent considering the source; See my review here.) And though they’re technically textbooks, these can also function as one-volume commentaries- Coogan’s The Old Testament, a Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures, Collins Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, and James Kugel’s How to Read the Bible- A Guide to Scripture Then and Now.

Multi-volume commentaries tend to be of uneven quality, since different volumes have different authors. Moreover, my recommendations are somewhat limited by my exposure to particular volumes in a series. I’m going to star these by how useful/accessible I think they’d be to the average LDS person. Many of them offer a downloadable pdf sample somewhere online.

** JPS Torah Commentary (9 volumes);
Anchor Bible Commentary (technical and academic); Hermeneia;
*Word Biblical Commentary;
New International Commentary;
***NIV Application Commentary (Its focus on making the text relevant and applicable dovetails with the frequent LDS approach of looking for “personal application”, and makes it a natural choice. That said, its Evangelical bias may prove less useful in some of the New Testament books.)
**Robert Alter’s Genesis, Samuel, and Psalms translation/literary commentaries.
**New Cambridge Bible Commentary
***Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary (OT and NT sold separately. I like the OT volumes more than the NT. Focus on culture and historical background, lots of pictures and illustrations)

My public library has several of these, sometimes in the reference section. It has some Anchor volumes, the Zondervan NT series, Robert Alter, and the NIV Application commentary. So check your library for samples.

Questions?