Zephaniah

The Anchor Yale Bible Commentaries

by Adele Berlin

With keen insight and lucid analysis, Adele Berlin brings the dramatic words of the great prophet Zaphaniah to life.  Living under the tumultuous reign of King Josiah of Judah (640-609 BCE), Zephaniah predicted the final day of judgment when God would come to the fate of Israel and other nations.  The book of Zephaniah is composed as a charged dialogue between God and the prophet.  As their conversation unfolds, we learn of the doomed destiny which are indifferent to the Lord's power and of humans who have become too enthralled worldly riches.  As piercing as any modern day social critic, Zephaniah proclaims salvation only for those who lead a life of simplicity, faith, and humility. The new translation by Adele Berlin, a literary as well as biblical scholar, celebrates the vivid and powerful language of this ancient poet.  In staccato exclamations, elevated rhetoric, and a rich tapestry of metaphors and similes, Zephaniah paints a world beset by corruption, idolatry, and war.  Berlin's contemporary commentary illuminates not only the beauty of Zephaniah's poetry, but also the political meaning behind his anguished verse For the biblical scholar, Berlin draws vital between Zephaniah's references and the rest of the Hebrew Bible.  For general readers, Berlin's accessible Zephaniah is an invitation to explore the political and socially turbulent times of this ancient prophet's world.

Genres: Old Testament

165 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1994

Reviews

[Steven Rodriguez · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent commentary about a stunningly beautiful prophetic book. Zephaniah is a poet of wondrous complexity and emotive power, and Adele Berlin brings just the right literary sensibilities to draw out the poetic dimensions of this prophet.

Four good things about the commentary:

1. Berlin does a great job showing Zephaniah's dizzying, multidimensional wordplay. Zephaniah messes with words with the same reckless abandon as Shakespeare or MF Doom, and Berlin delights with her catches. Best of all, Berlin shows the aural power of the words, how the sounds themselves convey multiple layers of meaning. This is a prophecy meant to be heard to be believed.

2. Zephaniah, like all Hebrew poetry, is a dense forest of intertextual vines, connecting the poem to the rest of the Biblical canon. Berlin helpfully traces the ways that Zephaniah links to creation, the flood, Babel, Deutero-Isaiah, and the Psalms, just to name a few. Having learned from Berlin, I am now "hearing" Zephaniah in surprising places in the New Testament, too.

3. As a Christian, it is really good for me to read commentaries from a Jewish perspective. Berlin cites a wide range of historical Jewish sources, which wonderfully broadened my understanding.

4. Most importantly, again and again Berlin opts to preserve the strangeness of the text over against emendation and harmonization. She does this because of her commitment to literary interests over text-critical interests, and I am grateful for it, because it keeps Zephaniah's poetry vivid, bizarre, and unfinalizable.

And, three not-so-good things about the commentary:

1. Berlin follows modern historical-critical consensus in ascribing a late date to the work, so that all of the prophecies are after-the-fact. This robs the book of a certain level of revelatory power, and at certain points even seems to militate against the meaning of the text itself. Can God, the LORD "in your midst," speak in history?

2. A book as raw and daring as Zephaniah invites (demands?) reflection on the character and doctrine of God, but Berlin leaves this issue out of her comments, focusing only on textual and literary concerns. At times it feels as if the commentary, for all its richness, is avoiding the most critical existential questions posed by the prophet.

3. On a related note: From my particular perspective as a Christian preacher, this commentary is necessarily incomplete, since it leaves the questions of New Testament fulfillment entirely unanswered. Interestingly, the early church fathers did not write much about Zephaniah, either, leaving the book open and in need of more Christological and figural reflection. But that is a book for another person to write...

[slaveofone · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this from cover to cover. The introduction is fantastic. The bibliography is selective and outdated (not entirely the fault of the book). The translation is decent. Textual notes and commentary are poor. I was quite shocked by the lack of depth and engagement. Notes on the Hebrew are sparse. Little is added to what has already been said. Analyses of textual units are short summaries—they would barely satisfy the page count on a freshman midterm paper. What is said in the summaries is excellent. The problem is that they address a bare fraction of the text. It appears that Berlin's work has gone almost entirely into the short unit summaries and the introduction. It is hard to believe that someone who has written so well on Hebrew poetry should have virtually nothing to say on the matter in a text so thoroughly laden with it (to be fair, “The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism” was published 20 years later, but she must have been studying it long before). I would certainly prefer this over something like Smith's volume in the Word Bible Commentary series, but that's not saying much. The serious student will need to turn elsewhere (Vlaardingerbroek and Ben Zvi).