In my upper level Greek and Hebrew classes, students are required to submit an exegesis paper using proper sources each semester. Many online students struggle greatly to find adequate sources for their papers. I think there are a number of reasons for this. I hope, in this post, to make the process of research for online students a bit easier.
What Can You Use?
Admittedly, the availability of commentaries on the Web is very limited. Resource sites on the Web tend to use commentaries that are very old and outdated. I don’t generally recommend these commentaries as good scholarly resources. The reason is not because they are old–sometimes there are gems hidden in old writings. However, scholarship has advanced greatly in the years since some of these old commentaries were written; and it is necessary to take new works into account in order to do thorough exegesis.
I will return to discussion of what to look for in a commentary and how to access some. In the meantime, what else can one use? I have strongly recommended that students use articles viewable from the ATLA database. This database should be accessible from the university library where you have your student account. It is not necessary to physically access the library in order to use it. You can search for your Biblical passage in the database; and it is likely you will pull up some articles.
In addition to articles in the ATLA database, commentaries may also be online via the library web site in ebook format. You may find them by typing your book title into the search box. For example, “Genesis” will pull up hundreds of hits, many of which are ebooks.
What’s a Good Commentary?
A good commentary will have at least some of the below elements.
- >The best commentaries make reference to the original language of the text. Some commentaries use transliteration, but most show the language itself. Some commentaries are based on English translations (e.g. NIVAC) and do not make comment on how the translation was formed.
- A good commentary provides some discussion of the relationship of the text you are studying to other biblical texts.
- A good commentary interacts with other interpretations and explains the position that it takes.
- Some commentaries provides notes on the socio-historical context.
- Some commentaries provides some theological interpretation. Some commentaries provide exclusively theological interpretation while others provide exclusively linguistic or exegetical interpretation.
All commentaries do not do all of these things. There are numerous commentary series that provide different perspectives, features, etc. In addition to multi-volume commentaries, there are individual volumes dedicated to each book. Sometimes monographs that are not written as part of a commentary series can be especially rich sources of information because they are written to provide in-depth information regarding specific topics or portions of Scripture.
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