Ezekiel (review)

Hebrew Studies 36 (1995) 187 Reviews EZEKIEL. By Lamar Eugene Cooper, Sr. The New American Commentary . Vol. 17. pp. 440. Nashville: Broadman Press, 1994. Cloth. The New American Commentary series is unabashedly in the evangelical tradition and thus committed to the beliefs in the divine inerrancy and complete truthfulness of the Bible in the Christian understanding of the text. This makes for a strong emphasis on the historicity of events narrated in the text, a generally literal interpretation of its meaning, and a strong belief that the real fulfillment and goal of the text can be located only in Christian expectations. Cooper's reading of Ezekiel, then, focuses primarily on showing the literary unity of the text and its coherent message for Christians living out their faith today. The author clearly intends to provide a broad survey of current scholarship that can be used pastorally in the churches. The greatest strength of this volume is the clarity which the author brings to presenting the complexities of the book. He favors a brief description of each unit of the text and refers to a wide range of English language commentators in the footnotes, which are conveniently located at the bottom of the page. He relies heavily on mainline scholars such as Zimmerli, Wevers, Eichrodt and Cooke, as well as more conservative commentators, such as R. H. Alexander and J. B. Taylor, and also Jewish sources such as M. Greenberg and S. Fisch. Foreign language articles are barely represented because of the popular nature of the enterprise. In the description of each section, Cooper stresses the historical situation, as he understands it to be, and how it fits with the events presupposed in connecting passages in the book. He favors the position of Greenberg and others that the book is mostly a work of the prophet Ezekiel himself with relatively minor additions and expansions. The editorial work has largely been the minimum necessary to organize and link the oracles together, and was for the most part the work of the prophet's disciples. Thus, for example , even chaplers 40-48, while later than other parts of the book, are from Ezekiel himself. While the commentary does not include Hebrew vocabulary issues in the main body of discussion, it frequently notes specific words and their frequency of use, their distinction from other words with a similar semantic range, and any grammatical peculiarities that affect the particular nuance of a passage. None of this will be new to professors of Hebrew, but occasionally the noting of specialized use can be helpful for the message of the book as a whole. Thus he draws on the frequent use of betok (116 times- Hebrew Studies 36 (1995) 188 Reviews more than all other prophetic books combined) to show the sense of divine presence in Israel's midst that permeates the overall theology of the book. The same lesson is drawn from the fifty-two occurrences of raah, the most uses of any prophetic book. Since the intended reader is the ordinary Christian, the book contains a number of brief and helpful explanations of ancient customs and phenomena , such as the practice of Canaanite religion or the geography of eastern Iudea in view of the river that flows from the temple in chapter 47. The author also favors putting his points into lists. On page 346, there are seven reasons why God will bring the exile to an end, digested from the narrative of chapters 38-39; on page 309, there are five reasons listed from the text for the condemnation of Edom. This approach proves quite useful in showing literary unities among passages especially over a long block of texts: thus, for the oracles of salvation in chapters 33-39, he can isolate six major movements. Because the individual passages in Ezekiel tend to be lengthy and somewhat repetitive in style, this makes the book easier to follow and to organize for the untrained reader. Theologically, Cooper tends to be fair to the major themes in Ezekiel aimed at the sixth century, including judgment for sins as an explanation of the Babylonian conquest and the Exile, and the hope for restoration to their homeland. But Christian...