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William Johnstone, A Commentary on Exodus . By D uane A. G arrett . , The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 67, Issue 1, April 2016, Pages 173–176, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flw040
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Extract
T he author of this commentary is professor of Old Testament at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky. He writes explicitly from a conservative Protestant point of view for a conservative Christian audience, its teachers, and preachers. This stance is already much in evidence in the extensive introduction of 130 pages. Beginning with questions of the literary origins of the book of Exodus and its composition, he rejects the usefulness of any documentary hypothesis, whether the nineteenth-century ‘J, E, D, and P’ or the more recent ‘P and Non-P’, as based on ‘extrinsic and peculiar criteria’ (p. 17). He acknowledges that ‘the book [of Exodus] is anonymous …, although it often asserts that the legislation within the book was given by God to Moses, and that should be the starting point for a confessional view of the origin of the book. … The full process whereby the book was composed is unknown to us, but’, he asserts, ‘it is a unity. It bears the marks of being a late second millennial text (see “The Suzerainty Treaty Form” …), … written by someone … familiar with the circumstances of Israel in Egypt. We may continue to view Exodus as the “Second Book of Moses”’ (p. 20), he reassures his readers. The famous crux, ‘I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but by my name Y hwh did I not make myself known to them’ (Exod. 6:3), whereby the literary critics distinguish P from JE, he disposes of by treating it as a rhetorical question: ‘…did I not make …?’.
