Research Quick Guide: Selecting Commentaries
Welcome to this quick guide on selecting commentaries. To start, go to this website: Bestcommentaries.com. This website essentially provides lists of commentaries based on books of the Bible and provides ratings for them. These ratings are based on various factors, and if you'd like to know more details on that, you can click “How it works” on the home page.
Getting Started with Finding Commentaries
How I recommend you start using this website is to first click on “Best” and then “Top commentaries by book.” If you're doing an exegetical research paper on a specific book of the Bible, this is extremely useful for simply looking for a commentary on a specific book of the Bible. As an example, select 1 and 2 Samuel. It'll take you to the specific page for commentaries on 1 and 2 Samuel. Scrolling down, it's going to give you the top three commentaries followed by newer commentaries, and then it's going to give you an extremely helpful list of commentaries. In order to take full advantage of these lists, I'd recommend you utilize the sorting feature that's built in. So if I click “Score” up here, it'll sort each of these commentaries by the score. Please note that simply because a commentary doesn't have 5 stars doesn't mean it's not helpful, and useful commentaries, many really good commentaries, don't have any stars here on the website. The rating system is not necessarily something to rely upon too heavily.
You can also sort by the number of pages, which is helpful if you want to see how long these commentaries are and pick the commentaries that might go further for your research needs. You can also sort by year. Once again, it's important to note that simply because it's a newer commentary doesn't mean it's necessarily a better commentary. If you go ahead and sort it by score, looking at the “Tags” category you’ll see each of these letters which represent a unique feature of these commentaries. You can find this on the side or by simply hovering over the circle. So “t” stands for technical. If you want to filter for these as well you can click on the side. So if you click “t” for technical, it'll only show you the commentaries that are marked as technical, which might be useful if you're writing a technical research paper.
Finding Particular Commentators
The next thing I want to show you is up here under “Authors.” If there's a particular author that you found helpful in a commentary, it might be useful for you to search for the author and look at everything they have. For example, if you were to look at “Hamilton,” you can click on “Hamilton” and you can see everything hopefully that he's written. Notice though that it also includes works that he's contributed to or simply edited, so keep that in mind as you look through these.
Additional Components
Next, let's look over at “Libraries.” This can be very useful for you. Certainly not every one of these will be helpful for you, yet if you scroll down you can see who these lists are created by. For example, if you scroll down you can see a list here of D. A. Carson's “best buys.”
One more bonus item that this website offers is a section on theology. It essentially does a similar thing to what the commentary sections do, but it does so on topics related to theology. For example if you wanted to do research on Christology, you can click on “Jesus Christ/Christology,” and a similar table to the commentaries we can sort and search here for different books related to this topic.
Disclaimer When Looking at Commentaries/Theological Works
Please note that for both the commentary section as well as the theology section that many of the resources that are available, especially many of the technical ones that are available, may not have a view that you agree with or that’s in line with the theological positions held by the seminary or by the Southern Baptist Convention. So whenever you're looking at commentaries or any kind of resource, be sure to keep that in mind. Simply because the commentary has five stars doesn't mean that it's faithful to what the Bible teaches.
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Video produced by Jonathan Ahlgren, text by Flynn Evans
