Since I plan to resume work soon on my Commentary on Luke, I am always interested in seeing and reading other online commentaries that people are writing. Dan King recently put out a Commentary on Philippians as an ebook, and he was gracious enough to send me a copy of it for review.
After looking it over, I wouldn’t really classify his volume as a commentary. Most commentaries take a book of the Bible and work through it verse by verse, line by line, and even word by word. One verse of biblical text will often result in many paragraphs (or even pages) of commentary text. Dan King’s commentary did not do this.
Instead, he divided Philippians into sections, similar to how a pastor would divide the book to preach through it. Then for each section, he had friends of his write some thoughts about that section from Philippians. The length of each section was roughly the length of the average blog post—a couple hundred words at most.
Each section concluded with a Greek word study for one of the key words in that section, and some quotes from other available reference tools.
As a result of this approach, each section read more like a blog post than a page out of technical reference tool. This could be helpful for our sound-bite, blog-addicted world. Dan is not so much writing a commentary as he is a blogentary, and he may be on to something. Maybe there is a large audience for just such an approach to Scripture study.
So if you want a detailed, in-depth analysis of the text of Philippians, this commentary by Dan King is probably not what you are looking for. However, if you are looking for some sermon or Bible Study ideas to help you teach through Philippians, or want a basic guide for some of the key themes and ideas in Philippians, this ebook might be one helpful tool to obtain. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians
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