PSALMS 1-89 — The Lord saves
PSALMS 90-150 — The Lord reigns
By Eric Lane. Christian Focus. 416 & 320 pages. £10.99 & £9.99
ISBNs 1 84550 180 2 &1 84550 202 7
To write a commentary on the Book of Psalms is a mammoth task. The author’s understandable difficulty has been to keep the book within reasonable bounds. Theological, ethical and spiritual applications are not majored on and the commentary is section by section rather than verse by verse. The same restraint on space means that there is little room for the explanation of individual words in the psalms of which perhaps a reader may be unsure.
The commentary has some outstanding features, in spite of these constraints. The introduction to the Book of Psalms is excellent. The nature, structure, authorship, poetry and variety of the psalms are succinctly discussed with nine types of psalm identified. The writer deals particularly well with the imprecatory psalms, not shirking the hard questions they raise. Especially helpful is the explanation of the three forms of parallelism found in the psalms, something essential to their interpretation.
