Anchor Yale Bible sale

Thanks for the post, Mark.  This is a great deal for a valued commentary set.

Anchor Yale Bible: Revelation: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary by Craig Koester 

Is also still regular price.

-Dan

This is how bestcommentaries rates the individual volumes:

http://bestcommentaries.com/series/anchor-yale-bible-ayb/ 

You have 30 days to return an item, so if you want to, you can return Barth and then buy it again at the better price.

Anyone have an idea how long this sale will last?

Thank you.

Friedrich said:

Incidentally i just got Markus Barth's from the January sale...one volume was more than 19.99.  grrrrr.  

Call Customer Support ... If you are within the 30 day return policy, I think they can work it out so that you pay the discounted price.

Definitely a good sale, but to much for me to buy the entire set.  I may pick up a couple, but I have no idea which two to get. 

Here is my spreadsheet. The volumes that have been suggested in this thread are in bold type. I would add Jacob Milgroms's volumes on Leviticus to the list. In making my decision I will be looking at savings and ranking.  The ranking is from Best Commentaries.  It is difficult to make a decision based on someone elses ratings but at least it gives us a point to start from.  

JoshInRI said:

Would a conservative new england Baptist hopeful assistant pastor benefit from some books in this series - e.g., the two on Mark for my Mark class at Luther Rice Seminary?  Just curious.

These are of course critical works. I have found mark quite useful at times but have not used Daniel that much...

I would suggest looking into them. The mark volumes are very detailed... I have choose Mark 7:31 to have copied it to show you the detail of the notes... and have copied 2 paragraphs of the comments to give you an idea of it;s comments.

7:31. came out again from the region of Tyre and went through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee, going through the middle of the Decapolis region. Gk palin exelthōn ek tōn horiōn Tyrou ēlthen dia Sidōnos eis tēn thalassan tēs Galilaias ana meson tōn horiōn Dekapoleōs. Tyre and Sidon are in Lebanon, and it is perhaps significant that both Isaiah 35, which is alluded to at the end of our passage (see the COMMENT on 7:35–37), and Isa 29:17–19 mention Lebanon in the context of a divine cure for deafness.
If Mark’s wording is meant to describe a direct journey, it implies that Sidon and the Decapolis are on a line from Tyre to the Sea of Galilee. This is scarcely the case; the Sea of Galilee is southeast of Tyre, but Sidon is north of Tyre and the Decapolis region is mostly east of the Sea of Galilee (of the ten cities, only Scythopolis is west of it). Mark’s notice, then, is comparable to a description of an American trip from Portland to Denver via Seattle and the Great Plains or a British trip from Liverpool to London via Glasgow and Norfolk. Many have taken the verse as evidence that Mark is not a native of Palestine, but since the geographical knowledge of nonspecialists was even more faulty in antiquity than it is today, this is not necessarily the case (see Hengel, Mark, 148 n. 51). Moreover, as Lang (“Über Sidon”) and Theissen (Gospels, 243–45) have argued, Mark may be deliberately constructing for Jesus a tour of Gentile areas abutting Palestine—perhaps regions where there are Christian communities in his own day. Acts 21:3–6 and 27:3, for example, describe Christian communities in Tyre and Sidon, and there was also an important Christian center in Damascus, which is counted as part of the Decapolis in Pliny’s Natural History (5.16.74). Theissen points out that 7:31 and the other major Markan geographical “error,” the implication in 5:1 that Gerasa is near the Sea of Galilee (cf. 5:13), share several features: they relate to the part of Syria neighboring Palestine, they foreshadow the movement of the gospel to the Gentiles, and they are found at the beginning of a pericope, where one normally expects redactional activity. These similarities may well reflect the location of Mark’s audience; as Theissen puts it, “Jesus’ long detour over Sidon and the Decapolis in Mark 7:31 would have led him into the neighborhood of Markan Christianity.”

Joel Marcus, Mark 1–8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, vol. 27, Anchor Yale Bible (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2008), 472.

7:31–34: scene-setting, request, and Jesus’ healing technique. After his encounter with the Syrophoenician woman, Jesus’ tour of Gentile regions (7:31) apparently brings him to the notice of other people in need, including the friends or relatives of a man who is deaf and has a severe speech impediment. They bring the man to Jesus with the plea that he administer a healing touch (7:32); as in 2:3–5, the fact that the man cannot come to Jesus and make his request himself emphasizes his helplessness.

Jesus responds by taking the man aside privately (7:33). This motif of secrecy, which is reinforced in 7:36a, is frequently found in ancient miracle stories, and it is of a piece with Mark’s retention of Jesus’ words of healing in the original Aramaic: both features enhance the atmosphere of mystery in the narrative (see the NOTE on “Talitha koum” in 5:41).

In line with this atmosphere, our passage, like its companion piece in 8:22–26, concentrates heavily on the method employed in the healing, graphically describing Jesus’ actions of spitting, sighing, and sticking his fingers in the deaf man’s ears (7:34). Nineham (204) intriguingly suggests that this description may have been intended for the instruction of Christian healers. This possibly pedagogic description is emphasized not only by its length but also by its chiastic arrangement:

A And he thrust his fingers into the man’s ears

B And having spat he touched the man’s tongue

B′ And having looked up to heaven he sighed

A′ And he said, “Be opened!”

Here the two actions at the beginning and end (AA′), the thrusting of Jesus’ fingers into the man’s ears and his command that those ears be opened, are indicated by finite verbs, and the actions correspond to each other (Jesus’ fingers symbolically open the man’s ears). In the center of the chiasm, similarly, the clauses have a parallel structure (aorist participle + aorist indicative) and perhaps correspond to each other thematically as well (Jesus’ sigh may mimic the desired termination of the man’s muteness; see the NOTE on “sighed” in 7:34). These stressed magical manipulations, and similar ones in 8:22–26, are probably a large part of the reason that Matthew omits both stories in his retelling of Mark.

Nineham D. E. Nineham, Saint Mark

 Joel Marcus, Mark 1–8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, vol. 27, Anchor Yale Bible (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2008), 477–478.

I hope these help you decide or give you a feel for it at least.

-Dan

Thanks....I am an Mdiv Student at Luther Rice Seminary online www.lru.edu and am trying to augment my library with useful books.  Thanks Kelvin...blessings.

Personally, I bought the apocryphal books because that is the weakest section in my library.  I have plenty of excellent commentaries on all the canonical books.

I bought the 3 volumes of Jeremiah by J. Lundbom. It is highly recommended.

I broke down and bought the Johannine and Pauline corpus. Both are of particular interest to my studies.

Agape,

Steve

Friedrich,

Thanks ever so much for those thoughts!  You got the gist of my request, and while I'm not trying to be obtuse I'm also not looking to purchase commentaries that I wouldn't use much because of disagreements with the theological slant of the writer.  I am a conservative Protestant (Pentecostal) and I'm not interested in adding more liberal commentaries to my collection.  No offense intended.

If anyone else has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them. 

Justin Gatlin said:

Gary Osborne said:

I'm not interested in adding more liberal commentaries to my collection.  No offense intended

If you are looking for commentaries which will just help you vocalize what you already believe,  skip AYBC. They are all more or less liberal and if you are the kind of pastor who will consult two commentaries in preparation of a sermon, these will essentially never be in the top two or three.  Themelios ran a review with similar thoughts in volume 34. Volume 39, issue 3, identifies the better ones in the new testament,  but they are still really for people with a scholarly bent. 

Looks like my post came off poorly, which I was trying to avoid.  It's not that I'm only looking to be reaffirmed in what I already believe, or that I don't want to be challenged, or that I don't have a scholarly bent.  Right now I've got very limited funds and I simply don't want to add commentaries to my collection that come from an extremely liberal point of view.

Once again let me make it clear that no offense was or is intended.  But I'm also not keen on getting insulted, however so subtly, myself. 

Peace. 

Gary Osborne said:

.... But I'm also not keen on getting insulted, however so subtly, myself. 

Peace. 

I completely understand.

From my experience, it seems that the scholars who contributed to these volumes are generally sensitive both to other perspectives and to pastoral concerns in spite of the technical focus of their work in the AYB. Scholars others have mentioned (Brown, Johnson, Fitzmyer) seem to be very good in this regard.

Justin, thank you so much for the thoughtful reply.  I was reading you wrong.  And I'm grateful you clarified not only the personal point, but the larger point about the series in general.  Sounds like we are in the same boat and look to Logos software for the same daily and weekly preparation and study.

Thank you to Jonathan, Lew and others as well for recommendations!

I don't know the details, but I'm pretty sure it's a licensing issue that no longer allows any software company to offer Matthew as part of the Anchor commentary series.