The Broadman Bible Commentary Volume 1

Working with the Broadman Commentary: What You Actually Need to Know

I picked up Volume 1 of the Broadman Bible Commentary back in seminary, mostly because it was cheap at a used bookstore and seemed like a reasonable starting point for Genesis and Psalms work. Ten years later, I still reach for it, though not for the reasons you might expect from a review online. The commentary itself is solid middleware between the popular devotionals and the heavyweight academic sets. It was edited by Clifton J. Allen and published by Broadman Press in 1969, with a second printing in 1970. Volume 1 runs from Genesis through Song of Solomon. That covers a lot of ground for a single book, and you can feel the squeeze. The original print edition went out of print decades ago, which means you are working with secondhand copies now. Amazon, AbeBooks, and Better World Books tend to have them sitting in the $15 to $40 range depending on condition. I would skip the digital reprint scams that show up occasionally — there is no official ebook from Abingdon for this title, and anything claiming to be one is likely a garbled OCR scan. The physical book is straightforward to use. Each book of the Bible gets a lengthy introductory essay covering authorship, date, structure, and key themes before the verse-by-verse notes begin. The commentary format is mostly paragraph-length observations rather than the cramped line-by-line format you get in something like the ICC series. The contributors were pastors and professors from the Southern Baptist Convention mainstream. That matters more than it might at first glance. The theological baseline is conservative without being fundamentalist, which means you will find honest engagement with higher criticism on passages like the Pentateuchal sources, even if the conclusions lean toward traditional authorship. I learned more about how to hold both textual criticism and pastoral conviction in the same conversation from these essays than from any seminary methods class.

How to actually get use out of it

Start with the introduction for whichever book you are studying. The introductions in Broadman Volume 1 are where the real value lives. The verse notes are useful, but they are often thin on the harder passages. The introductory material gives you the landscape. For example, the Genesis introduction walks through the structure argument, the ancient near eastern context, and the theological contours without getting bogged down in the documentary hypothesis weeds. That is intentional editorial design. They want preachers and serious lay readers to have access without requiring a doctoral seminar. When you hit a difficult text, do not stop at the commentary entry. Cross-reference the note with the Jewish Study Tanakh or the Anchor Yale Bible Commentary for that same passage. Broadman will give you the pastoral and theological read. AYB or JST will give you the critical apparatus. Between the two, you get something close to a complete picture. I have found that combining Broadman with one critical commentary per book is the most efficient workflow for sermon prep or paper writing. It saves roughly three hours per passage compared to trying to read three full commentaries cover to cover. One thing people miss about this set: the psalm entries are surprisingly strong. The volume covers Psalms 1 through 150 in decent detail, and the treatment of form criticism in the psalm introductions is accessible without being dumbed down. Clifton Allen himself wrote some of the major entries, and his expertise in psalmody shows. If you are preaching through the Psalter, Volume 1 is worth keeping open on your desk the entire year.

A specific problem and what worked

Several years ago I was preparing a series on Isaiah 40 through 55 and needed to check Broadman's take on the servant passages, specifically Isaiah 49:5-6. I opened the book expecting a standard conservative reading and instead found the contributor engaging the Deutero-Isaiah question with real honesty, noting the scholarly consensus while still arguing for canonical unity. The problem was that the verse references in my copy were slightly off from the standard numbering. Volume 1 uses a particular pagination system and some of the cross-references in the introduction pointed to verse ranges that did not align with my NASB text. I spent about twenty minutes frustrated before I realized the commentary was using the Hebrew verse numbering rather than the English Bible verse numbering for certain passages in Isaiah. Once I adjusted for that, everything lined up. If you run into similar confusion, always check whether the commentary is following Hebrew or English verse divisions before you assume there is an error in the text. Be upfront about the limitations. The archaeological and textual evidence cited here is from the late 1960s. That means you are working with data that is now fifty-plus years old in many cases. The Dead Sea Scrolls discussion, for instance, is thin because the major publications were still coming out when this was written. If you need current archaeological engagement, especially for Joshua through Kings material, you will need to supplement with something like the NIB or the Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible. Broadman is not wrong on the major points, but it is not tracking the latest field developments. The commentary also tends to flatten literary complexity. When a passage has layered redaction or deliberate ambiguity, Broadman usually picks one reading and moves on. That is fine for preaching preparation. It is less useful if you are writing a thesis that needs to wrestle with the textual alternatives. I once spent an afternoon trying to trace a source-critical argument through the Pentateuch commentary only to find the contributor summarizing the documentary hypothesis in two paragraphs and then offering a traditional synthesis. If that is the depth you need, it works. If you need the full argument laid out, you will look elsewhere.

The physical quality of older copies is another factor. The paper is thin. The binding is glue-bound, not Smyth-sewn. If you plan to keep this open on a stand for extended study sessions, expect the spine to weaken after a year or two of regular use. I replaced the binding on my copy with a simple cloth hinge repair and it has held fine since. You can do the same without spending much money. Ultimately, the Broadman Bible Commentary Volume 1 is a reliable, theologically thoughtful resource that sits in a useful middle ground. It will not replace a critical commentary or a specialized monograph. But for anyone doing regular scripture study or sermon preparation who wants something more substantial than a devotional and more readable than a reference library set, it remains one of the better single-volume options available. The fact that it is out of print and selling used at reasonable prices only makes it more accessible now than it was when I first opened it.