Good Resources for Judges, by Daniel Montgomery

Is it Wednesday already? Tomorrow I will begin prepping for another sermon from the book of Judges. A lot of people ask me where I get all of my information for a sermon so here’s the Wizard of Oz moment – a peek behind the curtain, so to speak.

I like to fill my head as much as possible with information and that requires books. My library is kind of notorious around the Sojourn offices. I love books, like any information junkie would, and this Old Testament series has been a great reason to beef up my commentary library. So, Here are the books I have been using for Judges:

There are commentaries by David Jackman, Michael Wilcock, K. Lawson Younger, Jr., Daniel Block, Dale Ralph Davis, Gary Phillips, and, of course, Tim Keller’s Living in a Pluralistic Society.

How do I pick trustworthy commentaries out of the tons of them out there? Well, it’s fortunate that one of the scholars I admire most, Tremper Longman III has published a book that just tells which Old Testament commentaries are useful and rates them from 1 to 5 stars in his Old Testament Commentary Survey. He’s a total ox of a researcher and he did the heavy lifting for me and I’m very thankful. This information is also available at bestcommentaries.com, which has Tremper’s as well as many other reputable scholars’ recommendations. It’s great and it’s free.

So, that’s the Judges resource list. If you’re looking for more understanding of Judges or are looking to start/beef up your own theological library, I can say that Block has a lot of academic clout, Jackman has helped a lot with my sermon outlines, and you can’t go wrong with Keller as far as cultural significance goes.