These days, any new Bible commentary must find a way to distinguish itself. For those looking at the new Fortress Commentary on the Bible, released today for the Accordance Library, I can happily say that this commentary finds its distinctive place among the many other scholarly treatments of the Bible.
The Fortress Commentary on the Bible, originally published in two volumes in print and comprising around 1750 pages, is written by a broad diversity of scholars from Jewish, Catholic, Protestant and other traditions. Covering the Old Testament, Apocrypha, and New Testament, the Bible is broken up into sense units larger than treatments in traditional multivolume commentaries, and the writers provide information about each passage in answer to the following three questions:
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The Text in Its Ancient Context. What did the text probably mean in its original historical and cultural context?
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The Text in the Interpretive Tradition. How have centuries of reading and interpreting shaped our understanding of the text?
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The Text in Contemporary Discussion. What are the unique challenges and interpretive questions the text addresses for readers and hearers today?
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Personally, I appreciate this approach because so many commentaries neglect one or more of these categories. As I’ve stated elsewhere, in recent years those first two questions above have become primary concerns of mine when trying to understand a biblical passage and teach it to others. For my use, I could see turning to the Fortress Commentary first to gain an overview of the above three concerns before moving on to more technical commentaries that may or may not cover the same information.
In addition to covering Ancient Context, Interpretive Tradition, and Contemporary Discussion, the Fortress Commentary offers introduction to sections and books of the Bible as well as a number of articles on understanding and interpreting the Bible in the modern world.
Although originally published in print in two volumes, Accordance users will be glad to know that we have included both in one module. This allows for searching for words and concepts throughout the entire Fortress Commentary at once. Moreover, the Accordance developers have carefully scrutinized the text of the commentary and tagged all content according to one of the following search fields: Reference, Titles, English Content, Scripture, Greek Content, Hebrew Content, Transliteration, Bibliography, Authors, and Page Numbers. This kind of detailed tagging allows the Accordance reader to find the exact information needed quickly and efficiently.
