Posted: Thu, 1 Oct 2009 | Updated: Fri, 2 Oct 2009 | Tagged: ot, commentary, ot commentary, delitzsch, job.
Delitzsch’s two-volume Job commentary stands alongside his Psalms and Proverbs commentaries as outstanding exegetical work. My own sense is that his Job does not quite attain the standard of his Psalms volumes, but that is moot.
His procedure is to first give fairly terse but thorough technical discussion attending to philology and strophic units. It is fair to say that the former retains more value than the latter, even if the linguistic discussions are dated as well. Delitzsch shows a penchant for taking ki clauses as introductory, something that in my eye skews his structuring of the text.
However, following the technical material, Delitzsch offers extended literary and theological reflection on the argument of the given passage. Here, even though one might differ from his conclusions, the discussion is insightful and stimulating. As he observes in conclusion to his comments on Eliphaz’s opening speech (Job 4-5; vol. 1, p. 109):
The idea of the book does not float on the surface. It is clothed with flesh and blood. It is submerged in the very action and history.
A search for this commentary on Archive.org will find a number of hits, several of them incorrect. Furthermore, the most downloaded copies by some margin are of the first edition, not the later, corrected and expanded second edition from 1868. And, as it turns out, there is only one option for that second edition — the download links are: Volume 1 (dated 1881 on the title page); Volume 2 (dated 1872 on the title page).
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