Proverbs. An Eclectic Edition with Introduction and Textual Commentary.

• Author: Snell, Daniel C.
• Position: Book review

Proverbs. An Eclectic Edition with Introduction and Textual Commentary. By MICHAEL V. FOX. The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition, vol. 1. Atlanta: SBL PRESS, 2015. Pp. xxii + 431, 42*. $69.95

How can we edit the Book of Proverbs when there are few modern edited versions and none really of the Hebrew text itself? We do what we have done for hundreds of years; we wing it with what we have got. Inevitably that will have to be done with a large dose of sometimes arbitrary judgment.

Michael V. Fox, the author of the authoritative Anchor Bible Commentary on the Book in two volumes (2000 and 2009), has now published his "eclectic edition" of the Book with his extensive discussions of how he got to the text he used. But in many ways this volume stands apart from the Commentary, and Fox has rightly felt free to change and nuance his views in light of his careful consideration of the evidence. There is no one now alive who knows as much about the Book and its versions, and Fox's achievement shows how right the judgment just expressed actually is. His judgments when arbitrary are flagged as such, and his decisions seem on the whole thoroughly defensible and eminently sensible.

People who worry about the Book will not be surprised that to a large extent Fox is discussing not so much the Hebrew text, of which there are precious few variants in the manuscript tradition. Rather, he is steeping himself and his reader in the history of the Greek text, certainly the earliest rendition of the Hebrew and one which over the years has been evaluated as uncommonly free in its translation technique and also prone to sometimes lengthy additions. These additions and translations frequently try to make the Book even more moralistic than it was in Hebrew, lest the reader miss the clear point of what we are supposed to be doing with our lives. Frequently such expansions are in the spirit of the Hebrew text, but that does not mean that they are necessarily as elegant or as polyvalent as the source tradition was. And so in some ways it seems as if the school-marmishness of the text is expanded upon and its ambivalence consciously reduced. But Fox does not want to characterize the whole of the Greek translation since he believes it probably stems from several hands and may span several decades of reworking. Free, yes, sometimes, but usually with the moralistic points sticking clearly out. Don't think it is permitted to steal, even if opinion might condone it in a starving...