Nijay Gupta nails it. No comment yet from Phil Sumpter or Daniel Driver. It remains obvious to me, in any case, that the best example of canonical exegesis is that provided by Michael Fishbane. His volume on the haftarot in the JPS Bible Commentary Series belongs on every Bible scholar’s shelf.
But Fishbane is not spoofable à la Gupta. His exegesis is intensely theological. He draws on exegesis – and more - from every century. He is canon-conscious, tradition-conscious, and liturgy-conscious in a way Christians might emulate. But Fishbane doesn’t major on theory and minor on exegesis. He doesn’t bother using terms like theology, canon, tradition, and liturgy. He just goes about doing exegesis in a canonical fashion.
In a review, Benjamin D. Sommer makes the point well:
Fishbane provides what I think is a paradigm for a new (Jewish?) form of canon criticism. If, as Brevard Childs teaches us, the essential concern of canon critics is to understand how biblical tradition is received and hence shaped by the community of faith, then commenting on the haftarot is the quintessential canon critical project. Indeed, I venture to propose that this commentary is one of the few genuine works of canon criticism that any modern biblical scholar has ever written.
Bibliography
Michael Fishbane, Haftarot: The Traditional Hebrew Text with the New JPS Translation (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2002), xxxix, 593 pp. Hardcover. ISBN 0-8276-0691-5. Order here.
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