Find a Bible commentary or other exegetical information

You may want to find commentaries in our collection dealing with a specific book of the Bible. On our initial search screen, choose Advanced Search.

Enter your chosen book of the Bible --for example, Luke -- in one of the boxes, and then choose Title Words from the drop-down menu. (This will ensure that you get only materials with the word Luke in the title, and not everything in our collection written by someone named Luke.) In the second box, choose Subject from the drop-down menu, and then type in the word commentaries.

Then, click on Go.

When the search results appear, look at the right side of the screen. The search found 720 records containing the word Luke and more than six thousand records containing the word commentaries. It put these two sets together and came up with 169 records containing both words. The combined subset holds the records you want. To view the records, click on the number beside the word Total.

You receive a list of the Bible commentaries in our collection dealing with the Gospel of Luke. They are ordered by publication date, with the most recent ones appearing first.

You can perform this same search with the name of any book of the Bible. You might also want to try terms denoting portions of the Bible, such as Pentateuch or Minor Prophets.

Exegetical studies other than commentaries

A great deal of very valuable scholarly work on the Bible is published in monographs or essay collections that do not fit the traditional form of a commentary. Catalogers assign the word commentaries only to the kind of publication that begins at Chapter 1, Verse 1 of a certain Bible book and works its way through to the end. But if an author writes an exegetical or critical study of the Bible that does not use this customary format, you will miss it doing a search restricted to commentaries.

To find this type of material, choose Advanced Search.

Enter your chosen book of the Bible --for example, Jeremiah -- in one of the boxes, and then choose Title Words from the drop-down menu. (This will ensure that you get only materials with the word Jeremiah in the title, and not everything in our collection written by someone named Jeremiah.) In the second box, choose Subject from the drop-down menu, and then type in the word criticism.

Then, click on Go.

When the search results appear, look at the right side of the screen. The search found 327 records containing the word Jeremiah and more than 18 thousand records containing the word criticism. It put these two sets together and came up with 106 records containing both words. The combined subset holds the records you want. To view the records, click on the number beside the word Total.

The works you retrieve are scholarly studies of Jeremiah or of some aspect of the book, its history, authorship or themes. Some of the studies may concentrate on a particular part of Jeremiah, such as Chapter 32. They are not traditional verse-by-verse commentaries, but they contain important scholarly interpretation and opinion that might be useful to you in your exegetical work.