If you’ve ever embarked on the project of reading and studying the Bible, you must have realised very quickly that the text can be difficult to understand without the aid of some additional resources. With the Bible’s diversity of authors, historical backgrounds, literary genres and theological notions (not to mention all the different translations), that’s hardly surprising. Luckily, there’s a wealth of resources one can easily access on the internet: from Bible commentaries, concordances, word studies and detailed atlases, to discussion forums and countless articles explaining every single jot and tittle of the Scriptures – and from multiple denominational and theological perspectives to boot.
I’ll be reviewing some of those resources in the future posts, but this one is about an old-fashioned commentary I’ve been using over the past six months. (I wanted to allow enough time and plenty of daily use before I reviewed it here.) The King James Version Bible Commentary is old-fashioned in several ways. First of all, it’s an actual book, not an online commentary, and a simple one at that: printed on plain, thin paper, with no fancy colour illustrations. Secondly, it follows the somewhat archaic text of the 17th century King James Version (KJV) of the Bible, rather than any of the more recent, modern translations.
Most importantly, however, this particular Bible commentary is written from a recognisably conservative evangelical standpoint, with little to no interest in any of the liberal or (post)modern developments in biblical hermeneutics, nor in competing conservative approaches other than the evangelical Protestant ones. The book is not designed to be a neutral Bible commentary; its target audience is pretty narrow and specific, and the theological framework behind its scholarship precisely defined.
With that cleared up, let’s see: is this the book you should get if you’re looking for a Bible companion? Here’s my list of pros and cons:
PROS
- practical, concise, one-volume edition
- sturdy, hardback format, built to last
- not too large in size
- verse-by-verse commentary, easy to follow
- fairly large-print and easy on the eyes: a definite advantage if you’re struggling with low vision
- includes forty-eight monochrome maps (not very detailed, but still helpful)
- informative introductions to each book of the Bible
- contains useful bibliographies with suggested further readings
- written in a simple language, easy to follow even if you have no background in theology
- doctrinally clear and consistent (with the caveat mentioned earlier)
CONS
- no index! (I love a good index at the back of any kind of reference book)
- due to the thinness of paper, there is some ghosting (see the image below) – would be a problem if you were to use a highlighter or felt tip pen
- occasional pointless paraphrasing: there are quite a few instances where instead of a meaningful comment on a passage you’ll get nothing more than a word-for-word paraphrase
- although it’s supposed to be a complete verse-by-verse commentary, that’s not entirely true: many verses and entire passages are glossed over (much less so in chapters dealing with the New Testament)
- if you’re Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, you won’t find comments on any of the books outside the Protestant canon of Scripture (even though the original KJV did contain the Old Testament Apocrypha)
- theological / ideological bias
All in all, this is by no means a bad Bible companion, as far as one-volume commentaries go, but it does have its limitations. That’s necessarily the case with all of the one-volume commentaries of the Bible, where a lot of material simply has to be cut out for the sake of brevity. My personal biggest problem with this edition are the paraphrases, especially of some of the more obscure passages. At the same time, I love that it’s based on the KJV, and I appreciate the unapologetically evangelical stance of the commentators. If nothing else, it‘s allowed me to understand contemporary Christian fundamentalism a lot better.
If this is the commentary you decide to use as your main Bible study aid, make sure you use it in combination with other resources. You’ll probably feel the need for a supplement sooner or later, in any case. Three stars out of five from me.
The King James Version Bible Commentary
Published in Nashville, Tennessee by Thomas Nelson, Inc. in 2005. 1832 pp.
ISBN: 1-4185-0339-8
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