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Review Summary: Daniel Through New Eyes |
Date: 2008-06-22 |
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Details: Jordan's work is always a marvel. The thesis of his larger body of work is that a theologian and commentator must pay attention not only to what happens in Scripture, but the minute details of how it is written. He has a breath-taking command of Scripture, particularly the Old Testament and Leviticus in particular. I still hope he will one day give us a full commentary on Leviticus.
Daniel is one of the most notorious books in Scripture to interpret, and Jordan faults the methods most theologians use to read it. His reading sticks very close to the text, and solves most of the problems quickly and without stretching very far. This is a book of upheavals, mostly the assumptions of the readers. His exposition of Daniel 7 is especially subversive. He argues that we see Daniel 7 absolutely backwards. We look at Daniel 7 through the lens of Jesus, or Daniel's future. Daniel would not have read it this way. To understand what Daniel meant, we must look at the text like Daniel would have. Daniel would have looked backwards, at what had been written before, particularly Ezekiel. The result is staggering, but one which makes good sense of the text.
One of my favorite arguments he made was that Israel was judged and brought into the nations because God was advancing His Kingdom in those governments, and that the kingdoms of the world would, until the coming of Christ, serve as the guardians and protectors of God's Kingdom and His people. He shows that Israel fell into sin because it refused to accept this fact. There is also a lot of inter-Biblical studies. Jordan correlates what Daniel was doing with what was happening in Jeremiah, Ezra/Nehemiah. The way he did this enabled me to see more clearly exactly how many of those Old Testament books relate to one another.
The commentary does many things well, and is not challenging to read. He provides translations of the book at the beginning of each chapter, and renders it in a way that it would originally been read out loud, as the book was intended to be read, which was very helpful.
I was not sure I followed his chronology argument completely, and more background may have helped there. That, I think is the largest problem with the commentary (and it's one that a second or third time through will probably fix as well). Jordan is building his method from a ton of ground work that is not readily available outside his Ministry's website. He has written extensive essays, books, monographs, and papers establishing things which he assumes here and that many readers may pause about, wondering why the author seems to move too quickly to a conclusion or assumption that he has amply demonstrated elsewhere (over thousands of pages of work), but which are not easy to get a hold of. I have long hoped that these would be compiled into books and published more widely. Perhaps with this wide release, that will begin to happen.
Jordan really is one of the best Bible commentators in the world today, and he is always a pleasure to read. We are blessed to have him. He takes the Bible seriously as history and as literature, and over-emphasizes neither. His bio on the back of this book states he is currently working on a commentary on Zechariah. Let us hope that commentary emerges soon!
If you are interested in the major foundations for his body of work in general, and for this book too, the reader will want to check out his "Through New Eyes." Athanasius Press has also started a commentary series on the whole BIble that employs the method Jordan developed there. There is one commentary on Ecclesiastes there, and they will be publishing a commentary on James in the near future as well. |
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Review Summary: An Important Book |
Date: 2008-02-17 |
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Details: Publisher's description:
Called by some as the "very best Bible teacher on the planet" and one of the most studied interpreters of the Bible alive today, Jordan has completed his commentary on the Book of Daniel. Jordan unravels the imagery of God's prophecies revealed in Daniel - events that were dawning in Daniel's lifetime. There are no "historical parentheses" or "gaps", no leaps of thousands of years into the future. (Hardback, 723 pages)
Review from the blog of David P. Field:
"The Jordan is not the boundary; the Jordan runs through the center." (p.518)
Although an aside referring to the borders of the holy land in the Old Testament, I suspect that Jim Jordan rather enjoyed writing that sentence. He knows full well that his way of handling Scripture is regarded by many as bizarre to the point of unbelievable ("If the reader balks at this analysis" (93), "The reader may be dubious" (185), "I am certain that some readers are dubious" (701)) but he is also convinced that his approach is much nearer the mainstream of historic and orthodox Christian interpretation than minimalist GHE proponents could imagine.
So, after several years of knowing it was coming, at last we have James B. Jordan's The Handwriting on the Wall: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel (Powder Springs, GA: American Vision, 2007)
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The approach of the book is marked by
1. Immersion in and informed reference to the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures. The use of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Ezra-Nehemiah, Esther, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Zechariah is astonishing and enriching at every turn. Use of or comment upon other books along the way are unfailingly stimulating and this applies to NT books as well, not least to Revelation which is greatly illumined by this work on Daniel.
2. Confident deployment of redemptive-historical paradigms which have themselves been recognized through close and repeated study of the whole Bible. In particular, theologico-spatial zones, old creation /new creation eras, and prophet /priest /king roles feature heavily and often have real power to unlock or clarify the subject in hand.
3. The closest of close structural analysis of the sort that comes from multiple readings. Chiasms and parallels and other patterning devices are attended to with great care and in such a way as positively informs the interpretation rather than being mere observations along the path.
4. Seriousness about chronology. This is one of the characteristics of Jordan's work overall, since he sees emphasis on "ideas" at the expense of history as revealing and strengthening the gnosticism of much contemporary Christianity. The detailed chronological work lying behind his interpretation of Jeremiah and Ezekiel and his resolution of some of the Daniel "difficulties" is awesome.
5. Interpretative weight given to what still gets called "inter-testamental" history. Inter-testamental history is redemptive history and Jordan emphasizes that God speaks to and about that period in the patterns of Daniel 1-6 and in the prophecies of Daniel 1-7.
6. Attention to numerics: word-counts, significant numbers, and the meaning of numbers. There is work here to compare with Bauckham's work on Revelation.
7. Typology. This is not a "typological" commentary as such because although half of Daniel is narrative, half of it is apocalyptic prophecy. But when you attend to redemptive-historical patterns and to literary structures and sequences and to the importance of history as Jordan does, then, in some sense, all your work will be typological. At the macro-historical this means that Daniel is one of God's major interpretative words for the entire second phase of the first creation. The first creation has a former days and a latter days and then gives way to the new creation. Daniel tells us about the last centuries and decades of the latter days of the old world.
8. Cheerful (and sometimes curmudgeonly) unfashionableness. Early dating, traditional authorship, defense of biblical chronology, unashamed constant reference to Christ (how could it be otherwise?!), impatience with "unbelieving scholarship", utter lack of interest in being respected and consistent resolve to be useful. This may be a difficult example for young scholars (like those in Daniel 1!) to follow but it is thoroughly refreshing.
9. Theological creativity at level "Genius". I thought I knew Jordan's work reasonably well but over and over and over again there are "aha!" moments. In my copy now there are almost more sentences and paragraphs marked than unmarked!
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The proportions of the book are:
Introductory - 116 pages
Daniel 1-6 - 210 pages
Daniel 7-12 - 302 pages
Appendices - 95 pages
This is just right. The introductory chapters cover the "covenant historical", the "revelation historical" and the "immediate historical" contexts of Daniel, as well as studies in "Death and Resurrection in Daniel" and "In the Land of Shinar". These chapters themselves amount to an orientation to the reading of Daniel and are very helpful indeed - and packed with insights.
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The argument of the book is yours, in detail, for the reading.
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The flaws of the book are few and far between. There are minor irritants: (1) quite a few typos - apart from the mix-up with the lettering of the appendices, I've caught 20 or so; (2) slightly quirky vocabulary such as his pleasure in using the correct but rare "invest" and "investiture" for besiege and siege and his use of "voice" for verb-stems; (3) no indices (though a searchable pdf version of the commentary comes with the book).
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The importance of the book cannot be doubted.
Of course, different readers will find different proportions and different parts of the argument more or less persuasive. For myself, I'm going away to think about the whole idea that the Empires of the 6thC BC through to AD70 were the environment, protector, and location, if not locus, of the kingdom of God, with the image, for example, as representing a new tabernacle-temple development. I think I'm with Jordan on this. His radical proposal on Daniel 7 - involving Ezekiel, the High Priest's double visit to the Holy of Holies on the day of atonement, and taking more seriously the fact that it is the saints who receive the kingdom - has much to commend it. I know too little to evaluate Jordan's chronological arguments, I still worry a little about those 62 weeks, and, after just one reading, I'm still lost in chapter 11. I'm going back for a second and third look at these things.
But that itself is a commendation. This is a book which is worth a second and a third look. In many ways The Handwriting on the Wall amounts to Through New Eyes vol 2., taking further, as it does, several of the massive contributions of that work, the best of all biblical theologies. It is an amazing piece of work, the fruit of many years of research and meditation, at once learned and devout, firmly orthodox and stunningly creative and itself a biblical theology in its own right. No careful reader will come away from it anything other than enormously enriched, stimulated, edified, and expanded.
More later perhaps but I'd rather go back and enjoy The Handwriting on the Wall a second time than keep blogging about it after only one reading. What a book! |
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out of 2 Reviews
