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Peake's Commentary On the Bible
This classic commentary, drawing on the expertise of over sixty scholars, gives students of the Bible a thorough grounding in the origin and meaning of all the books of the Bible, as well as the benefits of recent research into Scripture.
1142 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1997
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 11, 2018
My edition is published by Thomas Nelson & Sons 1977
July 29, 2022
I thought it might be a good idea to read the Bible, but with some idea of what it was I was reading. And so it was. Knowing nothing about biblical commentaries it was a case of trial and error and I just happened to be lucky first time.
First up, there are a whole load of essays on a whole range of subjects. Some of them, like those on archaeology or money are now hopelessly outdated, but the vast majority and still useful and/or interesting. They really are an education in themselves.
As for the commentaries, cast your eye down the list of contributors and you’ll see certain biases. They are all of them male. All white. All Protestant; mostly Anglian. Mostly British; some American. You’re never going to find an unbiased book on such a controversial subject, so my advice is to find one whose biases you understand. Well, I’m white, male, and from a Protestant country so I’m laughing. I think the most important bias in this context is the religious one. There’s something about the way they see the world that I understand.
Taking the Old Testament first, what they are attempting to do is to discover who wrote these books, when, and why. What did the words mean to those who wrote them, and what did they mean to the first people to read them? I think it would be fair to say that for these men the attempt to gain that knowledge is in itself an act of worship. There’s quite a range in the quality, from the masterpiece that is S. H. Hooke’s go at Genesis, to the one on Jeremiah that had me wondering if the author could even read Hebrew. Most are very good.
Moving to the New Testament, it’s the same sort of approach, but you do need to turn your Bullshit Detector up to 11 because now they’re writing directly about their own religion. My detector did beep a few times, but on the whole they acquit themselves admirably. I did sometimes find that they didn’t answer the questions that I as a non-Christian was asking. But you could do a lot worse. One thing that I think the commentaries on both testaments are very good at is explaining contexts. It’s very easy when you’re dealing with such alien cultures to read something in to an innocuous word or to miss something fundamental because our concepts have changed.
First up, there are a whole load of essays on a whole range of subjects. Some of them, like those on archaeology or money are now hopelessly outdated, but the vast majority and still useful and/or interesting. They really are an education in themselves.
As for the commentaries, cast your eye down the list of contributors and you’ll see certain biases. They are all of them male. All white. All Protestant; mostly Anglian. Mostly British; some American. You’re never going to find an unbiased book on such a controversial subject, so my advice is to find one whose biases you understand. Well, I’m white, male, and from a Protestant country so I’m laughing. I think the most important bias in this context is the religious one. There’s something about the way they see the world that I understand.
Taking the Old Testament first, what they are attempting to do is to discover who wrote these books, when, and why. What did the words mean to those who wrote them, and what did they mean to the first people to read them? I think it would be fair to say that for these men the attempt to gain that knowledge is in itself an act of worship. There’s quite a range in the quality, from the masterpiece that is S. H. Hooke’s go at Genesis, to the one on Jeremiah that had me wondering if the author could even read Hebrew. Most are very good.
Moving to the New Testament, it’s the same sort of approach, but you do need to turn your Bullshit Detector up to 11 because now they’re writing directly about their own religion. My detector did beep a few times, but on the whole they acquit themselves admirably. I did sometimes find that they didn’t answer the questions that I as a non-Christian was asking. But you could do a lot worse. One thing that I think the commentaries on both testaments are very good at is explaining contexts. It’s very easy when you’re dealing with such alien cultures to read something in to an innocuous word or to miss something fundamental because our concepts have changed.
October 20, 2007
Very good conservative commentary for reference.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews