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Book Review: Jesus, the Man and the Myth

publication of Walther Zimmerli's massive work, that situation is even more the case. This commentary is a translation from German of the first volume of Zimmerli's contribution to the series Biblischer Kommentar Altes Testament, originally published in 1969. It was reviewed in this journal by John Bright (Interp 25:195ff. [April 1971]) whose description and assessment can be seconded. But the appearance of the English translation should be recognized and greeted here and the hope expressed that the publication of the second volume will soon follow. Zimmerli devoted a major part of his outstanding career to the study of Ezekiel. Before the commentary was written, he published a sequence of articles and monographs which brought the interpretation of Ezekiel to a new level. He analyzed the phenomenon of Fortschreibung (literary expansion of units by Ezekiel and his "school") as a way of accounting for the formation of the book. He identified the types of speech with which Ezekiel thought and spoke in a way that clarified and explained the peculiar individuality of Ezekiel's language; his study of the "demonstration-word" and its constituent formulae was a brilliant contribution not only to Ezekiel-study but to many other areas of Old Testament literature. In all the specialized studies, he consistently worked to bring into view the theological dimension and meaning of the texts. This extensive and successful reworking of every aspect of the exegesis of Ezekiel was invested in the commentary and has made it a classic in its time. Users need be dismayed only by the riches of comment which confront them — sixty pages on the call of Ezekiel, for instance. The translation was made by R. E. Clements, a guarantee that the original was fully understood and competently rendered in English. Comparison with the German text confirms as much; only at a few points does the German syntax overwhelm the English version. In contrast to earlier volumes of Hermeneia on Old Testament books, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin quotations are not translated, a disadvantage for those who do not read those languages. In some cases the editors have not noted the existence of English translations of works cited in the footnotes and bibliographies.