Ecclesiastes

Believers Church Bible Commentary

by Douglas B. Miller, Herald Press

In this 23rd volume of the Believers Church Bible Commentary Series, Doug Miller respects the pastoral and theological contribution of Ecclesiastes, without muting its critique of simplistic and comfortable approaches to the life of faith. It is particularly useful for Christians who need a fresh look at the insights of this ancient sage in an era of uncertain identity, the flux of worldviews, and the elusiveness of truth.

Genres: Reference

303 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 1, 2010

Reviews

[Jean-françois Virey · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is quite good and I think Douglas B. Miller is probably close to the right take on Ecclesiastes: he wrote his PhD thesis on "hebel", the word generally translated as "vanity", and has very interesting things to say about it. But the book suffers from a problem of format: too much material is contained in the 54 pages of alphabetically ordered essays at the end (a little less than one third of the length of the commentary itself, if you don't count the introduction), so that the commentary is torn between two equally unsatisfactory options: either repeating the material (usually in a dumbed down form) or avoiding the redundancy and remaining a bit superficial or over-analytic. I am aware that this is the format this commentary series has imposed on all its authors, but some have chosen to turn the essays into a shorter glossary of key terms, which I think is wiser. Another problem with these essays is that they are referred to in the main text, and then refer to each other, so that you can be led from one to the other (as many as eight of them with the first reference) in a rather disorienting series of jumps. With my next volume (I have already bought two more in the series, having already read Proverbs and Romans), I will probably read the essays alphabetically after reading the commentary. I like my books linear.