Psalms Through the Centuries

Susan Gillingham’s book is an ambitious project that grew over ten years of diligent work. As the first in a two-volume reception-history commentary on the Psalter, she gathers material on psalm composition, redaction, and reception from the beginning of the text’s history until the present. Gillingham narrows this enormous amount of material somewhat by intentionally working from a bias toward the English-speaking world, particularly Britain. This bias is evident throughout the book, which aims to be a “kind of reference work” (311) for the second volume still to come, in which individual psalms will be discussed based on their specific reception histories. An undertaking of this size inspires admiration; it also has no choice but to stay at the surface on most issues. It would, however, be completely superfluous to state that more detail could be added at any point or that individual issues may be debated (such as setting the earliest dating for psalms in the eleventh century B.C.E.). Gillingham makes the most of the space in this book and provides a well-chosen and well-presented survey. In addition, a wealth of footnotes and a supporting Internet site (www.bbibcomm.net) provide access to literature for any who wish to delve deeper into particular issues. The chapters of the book cover successive periods in time, with chapter 1 covering 1100 B.C.E. to 500 C.E. [Full Review]