dinsdag 29 januari 2013

Review of: D.I. Block, The Book of Ezekiel, Chapters 25-48 (NICOT), Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998

D.I. Block, The Book of Ezekiel, Chapters 25-48 (NICOT), Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998

Review in: The Expository Times 1999 110: 259
Review door: Robert P. Carroll
Gevonden op: http://ext.sagepub.com/content/110/8/259.3.full.pdf+html

EZEKIEL COMPLETED
I reviewed the first volume of Daniel I. Block’s massive NICOT commentary on Ezekiel in The Expository Times 109 (1997/98), 309; the ink was hardly dry on that review when the second volume The Book of Ezekiel: Chapters 25-48 (NICOT; Eerdmans, 1998, £32.99, pp. xxiii + 826, ISBN 0-8028-2536-2) landed on my desk. It is a massive work and its 1750 pages make it longer even than Walther Zimmerli’s magisterial commentary on Ezekiel in the BKAT/Hermeneia series - it is an arguable point because the Hermeneia series uses double columns of print, but my sense of the matter is that Block is bigger if not better than Zimmerli. As a completed commentary I would want to add to the critical remarks made in my review of the first volume a rider to the effect that the commentary is itself a magnificent achievement, full of information and exegetical insights, well worth reading and pondering by fellow exegetes, whatever their theological hue or ideological commitment. I still find the overt Christianizing of Ezekiel’s message difficult to swallow, especially at the end of this century which has seen so many of the old supersessionist chickens come home to roost in the destruction of the European Jews. I also find that Block’s reading of chapters 40-48 as having ’theological implications for the modem reader’ which are ’compelling’, representing ’a profound theology of land’ somewhat naive, even disingenuous, when today Israeli and Palestinian communities are locked in a  struggle for land in the Middle East. Surely the continued say of scripture needs desperately to be updated, criticized and challenged by the further light afforded by modernity and the long reception-history transformations of scripture. I think I would want to recommend this twovolume work to contemporary readers as a good long read, but with a caveat about the need for taking the text more seriously and less seriously than Daniel Block does - if you get my meaning!

ROBERT P. CARROLL,
UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW

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