A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Hosea.

• Author: FREEDMAN, DAVID NOEL
• Position: Review

A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Hosea. By A. A. MACINTOSH. International Critical Commentary on the Holy Scriptures of the Old Testament. Edinburgh: T. & T. CLARK, 1997. Pp. xcix + 600. $69.95.

The new commentary on Hosea, in the justly famous International Critical Commentary Series, by A. A. Macintosh, President of St. John's College, Cambridge, is sober, serious, worthy of study, and fully in the tradition of its illustrious predecessor in the ICC, written by the legendary William Rainey Harper, whom the author professes to emulate. Macintosh is also in frequent if not constant dialogue with his continental precursors and contemporaries, especially such scholars as W. Rudolph and H. W. Wolff. In short, the commentary is a product of careful study, is well written and deserves a place on the shelf of every serious student of the Hebrew Bible.

At the same time, there is a striking anomaly in the work. Another major commentary on Hosea appeared in 1980, in the Anchor Bible Series. This volume, written by F.I. Andersen and me, is duly noted in the bibliography (p. xix), but beyond that there are only scattered references ("AF") and a few contraindications, as though to show that our volume had been seen but largely dismissed.

A curious thing is that "AF" undertook much the same task that Macintosh assumed for himself, namely to build on the solid foundation Harper laid in his magisterial commentaries and to interact with German scholarship. The effort was parallel even when parting company decisively at various points along the way. For example, Macintosh treats at some length the well-known crux at Hos 8:2 (pp. 294-95), but nowhere does he mention our discussion or our proposed solution. It seems clear that the proposal in BHS, which Macintosh does mention, resolves the problem of sense and intention: "Oh! God of Israel, we know you." But there is no need to rearrange the words in MT, a procedure that obscures a literary device employed elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, especially in poetry or poetic prose, namely "the broken construct chain," in which a word or more intervenes between the construct and the absolute. So without changing the order of the words: elohay yeda anuka yisra el, we read the same way: "Oh! God of Israel, we know you." Even the Masoretic vocalization of elohay can be defended, if we recognized that the second yod after the last vowel of elohay preserves the original diphthong of the construct plural form...