Exodus 1-18: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. The Anchor Bible 2. By William H. C. Propp. York: Doubleday, 1999. Xl and 680 pp. Cloth. $44.95

This is the first of two volumes to appear on Exodus, with a series of five appendices already announced for the second volume. Propp is the third scholar assigned by the editors to Exodus, with age or busy schedules catching up with the others.

The commentary begins with a somewhat idiosyncratic translation of the eighteen chapters covered in this volume. Propp chooses, in his own words, fidelity over felicity, which basically means a very literal approach. Almost every sentence begins with "and" or a substitute, as does the Hebrew, although one might argue that the effect of such literalism does not have the same impact in English as in Hebrew. To indicate the infinitive absolute and the emphatic pronoun, one finds such renderings as "I will eradicate, eradicate," or "you, you will be silent." Propp believes that "of" is the bane of English Bibles and so we find "Israel’s Sons" and "Meeting Tent" (there is no attention to inclusive usage), but "Yahweh of Brigades" replaces "Yahweh of hosts" (Why should it not be "Brigades’ Yahweh?"). Other overly literal renderings are "the Sea’s lip," "the bone of this day," or "Nile’s arm." Yahweh and Elohim are rendered respectively by "Yahweh" and "Deity," with the second of these awkward and the first strange in a book otherwise drawing so heavily on Jewish sources. The translation is repeated before every pericope, only there with the sections assigned to P appearing in boldface since P seems "louder" to Propp than JE.

The analysis itself appears in three parts. First come copious textual notes (eighteen pages on 7:8-11:10). Next we find source analysis (seven pages on the same chapters) of a very traditional, one might almost say outdated, sort. Propp will explain this feature more in an appendix to the next volume, but for now he seems to follow the theories of his colleague, Richard Elliott Friedman, at the University of California, San Diego, published in Who Wrote the Bible? in 1987. Friedman is unshaken by recent attacks by critical scholars on source criticism and even assigns sources to individual authors (Jeremiah is responsible for D) and specific dates, although Propp himself equivocates on P by assigning it to a three-hundred-year window (700-400 BCE). The whole was put together by a Redactor whom Propp does not consider either an artist or a genius (p. 53). He concludes: "Nevertheless, the end product is art of the highest caliber—or so our Judeo-Christian conditioning obliges us to feel." Redaction criticism, the third part of his analysis, takes up four pages in 7:8-11:10.

The commentary in the strict sense appears under the caption of "Notes" (twenty-four pages for 7:8-11:10) and "Comment" (nine and one half pages for these chapters). The philological notes are wide-ranging and well-informed though the reader needs to know Hebrew quite well to gain maximum profit from them. The Comment section deals with more general issues. In the section described in this review we find "Anti-Creation" (a reaction to the work of Terence Fretheim and others); "Humanity and Nature" (Why does nature suffer for human failure? The projection of human qualities on nature), "A Tall Tale" (the use of hyperbole in the plague narratives), "Not Necessarily So" (the "origin" of each plague and its observable phenomena), and "fairness and justice" (the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart).

Propp indicates that his basic approach to the Bible is anthropological, attempting to understand Israelite social institutions and perceptions of reality. He uses methods of folktale analysis and understands the feast of Passover and Unleavened Bread as a rite of purification and "riddance." His interests also include relationships with the Ancient Near East and especially "words," as evidenced by his extensive philological notes. Finally, he is interested in what really happened and when Israel emerged as a nation, but Propp teases the reader by putting off the discussion of the historicity and date of the Exodus to an appendix to his second volume.

Although there is much freshness and learning in this volume, I suspect that pastors and other church leaders will continue to turn to Exodus commentaries by Childs (Old Testament Library), Fretheim (Interpretation series), and Brueggemann (New Interpreter’s Bible) for help in their preaching and teaching responsibilities.

Ralph W. Klein

Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago