According to Amazon, I bought this book December 25, 2009 (I love that feature..). It sat on my shelf for around a year. But then I began wrestling through issues of historicity and inerrancy, especially whether the similarity of the OT to ANE literature meant the OT had borrowed lots of its history so that it amounted to appropriated “myth.”
I remembered that I had this book on my shelf so I grabbed it and began to read. Beale deals with the temple imagery and how it is a microcosm of the cosmos. He discusses the similarities of OT texts to ANE texts. He specifically is writing back and forth again Peter Enns and his work arguing for a lack of historical reality to all of Gen 1-11.
The most impressive thing about this work was not that it argued successfully for certain positions in a way that was irrefutable, but rather that he handles the evidence honestly and is far more careful in his interpretations. Rather than noting a piece of evidence and concluding hastily that it “must” mean such and such, Beale considers all the interpretive options before arguing for what he sees as the best. As a result, even if one disagrees with Beale’s conclusions, you get the sense he is trying to be fair and open to all the possibilities. The same cannot be said of Enns in his replies, and much the same is true of a large amount of critical scholarship (especially German).
G. K. Beale's Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism is on sale for $2.99 Share on XYou should buy this book while it’s on sale for $2.99. You might not read it right away, but someday, maybe a year later, you’ll pull it off your shelf when you need some help thinking through some really tough hermeneutical issues.
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