Abstract
A magisterial commentary, Genesis 1–11 represents the crowning achievement of a career-long dedication to the study of Genesis. In all ways, it goes beyond E. A. Speiser’s 1964 commentary in the same series that it is intended to update, if not replace. This is obvious just from its scope in contrast to Speiser’s work, covering only Genesis 1–11, leaving a second volume to cover chapters 12–50. Employing what he describes as a “literary philology,” H. goes beyond the historical-critical approach and traditional literary (source) criticism foregrounded in Speiser to attend, additionally, to the literary and stylistic features of texts in a self-conscious renewal of Gunkel’s programmatic study of Genesis. The range of topics treated in just the introduction gives the reader a taste of what is to come in the commentary: the manuscript evidence, written sources and compositional growth, stylistics, Genesis’s dating, its genre (its native genre and its modern equivalent, including a rich discussion of myth), the moral world of Genesis, and of course a brief survey of Genesis’s reception history—discussions that are enhanced throughout by H.’s self-aware methodological sophistication.
The volume’s plan is broadly typical of the series: a translation, text-critical notes, explanatory notes, and general commentary, in which each pericope’s literary design, its themes, and its contexts in the Bible and the ancient Near East are fully explored (and more). A review such as this cannot do justice to the many exegetical insights a reader will encounter, but two points pertinent to H.’s overall treatment of Genesis distinguish his approach from other current approaches to Genesis: H.’s affirmation of the traditional documentary hypothesis (albeit with significant modifications) (5) and H.’s dating of the sources, with Wellhausen, to the ninth to seventh centuries BCE for J and the late seventh to early fifth centuries BCE for P (17). Both conclusions run counter to current trends in Pentateuchal criticism, which has largely abandoned the notion of continuous source documents running through the Pentateuch and generally adopts a later dating for the sources. But disagreements on such matters cannot change the fact that this commentary will be the standard reference for years to come.