Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 48:2 (Fall 1986)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

WTJ 48:2 (Fall 1986) p. 373

Book Reviews

H. F. D. Sparks (ed.): The Apocryphal Old Testament. New York: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 1984. xxii, 990. $44.50 cloth, $19.95 paper.

The title of this work will no doubt contribute further to the general confusion that exists in the description of ancient Jewish documents that lie outside the rabbinic tradition. R. H. Charles’ classic edition in two volumes, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (1913), followed the custom of using the term apocrypha for those books regarded as authoritative (and referred to as deuterocanonical) by the Roman Catholic Church. The term pseudepigrapha, which described the contents of the second volume, has become a catch-all to include virtually any other text. The present work, oddly enough, is intended as a revision of Charles’ second volume, but because the publishers viewed it as a companion to The Apocryphal New Testament (edited by M. R. James in 1924), a title was chosen that, while it may please Roman Catholic readership, will surely mislead many.

If one can quarrel with the title, however, there is little else to criticize. In my judgment it compares very favorably with the two-volume work edited by James H. Chariesworth, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983–85); the latter attempts to attract a large audience, yet it is priced at $70 and includes too many texts that are of interest only to scholars. On the other hand, the volume here reviewed is unabashedly aimed at the general reader, and it succeeds admirably in meeting the needs of that group. Sparks provides a limited number of texts, but the selections are judicious and interestingly arranged, and I suspect a good many students will be quite happy to invest in the paperback edition. What is more important, they may find the reading of it so enjoyable that they will actually work their way through the whole volume. (The type, incidentally, is larger and clearer than that used in the Doubleday edition.)

As the editor explains in the preface, the plans for revising Charles’ second volume were laid out in the mid- 1950s, and the idea was “to reprint as many as possible of the translations in Charles with only minor revision” (p. xi). Subsequent shifts in the public’s attitude regarding translation method, however, led the editor to undertake a systematic modernizing of the style. Wisely he has tried to preserve something of the “antique flavour” of these docu-

WTJ 48:2 (Fall 1986) p. 374

ments (p. xii), and the resulting compromise strikes me as both pleasant and quite defensible. In comparison with the Doubleday edition, this work contains more textual notes (including alternate tran...