This delightfully written and eminently readable overview completes a seven-volume series on hermeneutics edited by Moisés Silva. Long received his PhD in OT from Cambridge and now teaches in Covenant Seminary, St Louis. Addressing a crucial topic not often well handled by modern scholars of any theological stripe, Long charts a judicious course between the extremes of a conservative compulsion to defend as historical everything that appears in the Bible in story form and a post-liberal (esp. post-H. Frei) allegation that ancients generally were not advancing claims for historicity by using such a form. In the process, Long outlines strengths and weaknesses of genre criticism, an indispensable tool for evaluating texts’ intentions, wrestles with definitions of history and fiction and illustrates the often over-lapping stylistic devices of both, explains why historicity is important for at least a substantial portion of Scripture’s narratives to buttress the truth claims of our faith, and does all of this in dialogue with most of the major post-Enlightenment critical methodologies, modernist and postmodernist. All this is abundantly punctuated with actual illustrations from Scripture, including detailed examples of applying legitimate hermeneutics to specific, extended narrative passages. And most of these come from the OT, where in general we have fewer resources for valid interpretive procedures than in the NT!

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