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Commentary

Word Biblical Commentary

The whole Bible · est. 1977 · Around 60 volumes

One of the large critical commentary sets of the late twentieth century, begun in 1977 and written from the Hebrew and Greek. Each volume follows a fixed apparatus — bibliography, fresh translation, textual notes, form and structure, verse-by-verse comment, then a closing section on the passage's theology — which makes the set unusually consistent for its size and unusually demanding of its readers. David Allan Hubbard and Glenn W. Barker were the founding general editors; Bruce M. Metzger took over as general editor from 1997, with John D. W. Watts and James W. Watts over the Old Testament and Ralph P. Martin and Lynn Allan Losie over the New.1 The set's ownership has moved twice with its publisher: begun at Word Books in Waco, carried to Thomas Nelson when Word was sold in 1992, and reprinted by Zondervan Academic since 2013, so a volume's spine says more about when a copy was printed than about the edition.2 One volume is no longer available at all: Peter T. O'Brien's Colossians-Philemon, discontinued by Zondervan in November 2016 as part of the wider finding against his commentaries, and catalogued here with the sources for that on its own page.3

  1. 1.Accordance — Word Biblical Commentary (structure of a volume, editorial succession, move to Zondervan)
  2. 2.Waco History — Word Inc. (the 1992 sale to Thomas Nelson)
  3. 3.Best Commentaries — Colossians, Philemon [Withdrawn], Peter T. O'Brien

In this series

3 volumes