For years Nathan MacDonald’s Deuteronomy and the Meaning of Monotheism has been eluding me. I first became interested in it after reading a chapter that Richard Bauckham contributed to the volume Out of Egypt: Biblical Theology and Biblical Interpretation in which Bauckham drew from MacDonald’s work. I’ve read portions on Google Books but that’s never the same.
Anyway, I tried obtaining a review copy from Mohr a while back but was told that it was an older volume and they’d exhausted their review copy stock on it. Drats! I’ve had it on my Amazon wish list for quite some time and it’s always been unavailable. It’s conceivable that I would have picked up a second hand copy if I could have found one.
But by divine providence, I happened to google the title this morning, and it led me to the original doctoral dissertation on which the book is based (something that has also eluded me, because trust me, I’ve looked for it)! So now I’ll be able to finally read MacDonald’s “One God or One Lord: Deuteronomy and the Meaning of ‘Monotheism’” in its entirety! This will definitely hold me over until I can get the monograph.
Score!
B”H
Thanks for this link! And did you see Wesley Hill’s 2012 disst on the Triune Identity in Paul is also there? It’ll be an Eerdmans book soon, but great to be able to read this version now.
I’ve been wanting to take a look at this for a while too! Thanks for the link.
Fred: This is the first I’m hearing of it! I’ve just downloaded it. Thanks for the 411.
Benjamin: My pleasure. I just found out that a second edition was published this year. I’m gonna see if I can’t get a hard copy of that one.
I’ve been updating my post on Deuteronomy 32:8-9 and polytheism, so this is timely. From the bits I’ve read now, Macdonald’s canonical reading in light of 4:19 is helpful, but I disagree with him in that I think the final redactor of Deuteronomy was ‘authentically’ monotheistic.