I’ve met plenty of folks who tell me, “I don’t need a bible commentary. That’s trusting in the words of men instead of trusting in the Holy Spirit. All I need to do is listen to the Holy Spirit tell me what the bible means. I don’t need any book” [said with complete disdain for the very idea] “to do it for me.”
If that happens to be your attitude, you definitely need a bible commentary. Here’s why.
As I’ve pointed out in the past, how do we know it’s God dropping these ideas into our spirits? How do we know that we’re not just talking to ourselves? How do we know that we’re not just interpreting the bible based on how we want to interpret it, regardless of how God actually wants it interpreted?
And one of the guidelines is that it must be consistent with other Christians. That’s all the commentators are: other Christians. They—like you—might know what they’re talking about, and then again they might not. Many of them, like you, have listened to the Holy Spirit, and their commentaries consist of what they’re pretty sure He’s told them.
And if it is actually the Holy Spirit, you’re gonna find—startlingly—that the commentator came to the exact same conclusion that you did. Happens to me all the time: I read the bible. I meditate on a bit of it and speculate what it might mean. Then I crack open the commentary and find out that my guess is what some researcher found, or some archaeologist discovered, or some ancient theologian likewise speculated hundreds of years ago. It’s freaky. But that’s how it’s supposed to work: Christians confirm for one another that we all hear the same God.
If we never bother to confirm anything—if we just assume that we hear God, and needn’t hear anything that any other Christian says—then we honestly don’t know whether we did hear God, or whether it’s schizophrenia or the whispers of devils. And this is how cults start.
So you need a bible commentary. Pronto.
There are three kinds of bible commentaries. There’s the verse-by-verse commentary, which goes through the bible book by book and analyzes it a verse at a time. There’s the bible dictionary or bible encyclopedia, which analyzes various topics in the bible. And there’s the bible handbook, which analyzes the bible as a whole. When people say “commentary” they usually mean the verse-by-verse sort.
The most common sort of commentary is the one built into bibles. The NIV Study Bible, the New Oxford Annotated Bible, the ESV Study Bible, the Archaeological Study Bible—there are all sorts of bibles that put little commentaries into the text. Many of them try to explain a little bit about history so that you can understand what the folks in the bible were going through. Most of them, though, try to explain how we should apply the bible’s teachings, like the Life Application Study Bible, the New Spirit-Filled Life Bible, or the Life With God Bible. And some of them focus on a particular church’s theology, like the Reformation Study Bible or the Catholic Study Bible—if you want to understand what your own church teaches, that’s one way to go.
The next most common is the cheap public-domain commentary, like those written by Albert Barnes, John Calvin, Adam Clarke, John Gill, Matthew Henry, Rober Jamieson, A.T. Robertson, or John Wesley. All of them free at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library World Wide Study Bible. Volumes of the 19th century International Critical Commentary have also been uploaded to Internet Archive.
Most of them—indeed, most commentaries period—are devotional: they explain what the bible means to the commentator, what it reminds them of, what they think the people in it were doing, and how it ought to be applied. Very few of them, like the ICC, are historical: they also explain what was going on in history while these events were taking place, or what people of that time-period would know or think.
Your commentary should be both devotional and historical. If you don’t look at history, you’ll make the mistake of assuming that ancient people thought like 21st-century people (or, depending on the commentator, like 17th-century men, 19th-century men, etc.) and had freedom of speech and religion, elected governments, were less prejudiced or bigoted or sexist or violent, were more religious or Puritan or conservative or traditional, and other common mistakes. Once the folks in the bible become familiar, we regularly forget that they’re foreigners with totally different customs and values than ours—and of course all the same sins. Our values are the result of theirs; they’re not the same as theirs.
Since there are so many free commentaries, why buy any? Simple: Scholars nowadays realize the importance of history and archaeology—and of listening to what other Christians from other churches have to say. Most of them are no longer so naïve as to believe the Holy Spirit only talks to people in their church. In contrast, the older commentators (and today’s independent commentators) bash everyone other than the people in their churches, which is not very Christian of them… and makes you wonder about how well they were really listening to the Spirit.
Commentaries published after 1950 will of course cost you. Popular books cost less, and commentaries aren’t popular. There are plenty of cheap commentary sets, but honestly you get what you pay for. Rarely have I found an inexpensive commentary (not counting those on sale) that had any real depth to it. The best ones are not cheap unless you buy ’em used. Since more and more people are switching to computer bibles, used books are getting even cheaper—but then again, you might want to buy the computer versions too.
Other than computer software, I don’t buy sets. I buy individual volumes as necessary. If I were to recommend any of them, it’d be the IVP Bible Dictionary series—the Dictionary of Paul and His Letters, Jesus and the Gospels, the Later New Testament, New Testament Background; Dictionary of the Old Testament: Penteteuch, Historical Books, Wisdom, Poetry & Writings, and the upcoming volumes on the Prophets. They’re more historical than devotional; they introduce you to the different viewpoints of different commentators and scholars on any given topic, and if you want to read more by that particular commentator, look ’em up in the bibliography, then go book-shopping. (Or to your library, if they’re there. Sometimes they are.)