Book Review: Sleuthing the Bible (by Kaltner and McKenzie)

Kaltner, John and Steven L. McKenzie (2019). Sleuthing the Bible: Clues that Unlock the Mysteries of the Text. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. 279 pages.

I finished reading through this work. I think that this is an awesomely helpful and fun biblical reference work, particularly because it makes biblical study more interesting by comparing it to a “crime scene” investigation (p. 2). It is all the more significant for me because this is exactly what I’ve been doing about the biblical texts in my classes for the past 14 years as a university instructor. And I thought I was the “originator” of this metaphor for studying the biblical texts (tongue-in-cheek)!

  What is significantly noteworthy about Kaltner and McKenzie’s work is that they go deep into the metaphor of biblical studies-as-detective work and develop it extensively by identifying the most significant clues that could help the biblical detective. They even classify these clues (such as etiology, weird social custom, broken pattern, etc.) into “Smoking Guns” (Part One; clues such as etiology, weird social custom, broken pattern, etc.) and “Dusting for Prints” (Part Two; clues such as anachronism, messy manuscript, perspectival bias, etc.). The former are readily identifiable clues (hence, smoking guns), while the latter needs some careful and more painstaking biblical “detective work” in order for the clue to become more identifiable.

  With the explicit identification of biblical studies as a “crime scene,” the obvious consequence is that the focus and goal of the process decidedly become the possible or probable history behind the text. The biblical text itself is utilized as if it were a crime scene that carries “clues” that a trained eye could identify – clues that could shed light on things that probably happened behind the (crime scene) of the text. This makes the study of the biblical text a fascinating quest to spot different clues that would enable the “investigator” to do a good reconstruction of the past, thus helping us understand the different forces that shaped the creation of the “crime scene” (the text) as we know it today.

  If I could make a suggestion for a future edition, I would say that a good explanation of the different dimensions of the text would even expand the picture and make it more complete. These dimensions are often expressed as “worlds”: namely, the world “of” or “in” the text (the literary work itself); the world “behind” the text (the historical forces behind the creation of the text); and the world “in front of” the text (the reader[s] of the text who interpret the meaning and significance of the text). The different clues of Sleuthing the Bible could then be explained “more globally” in the context of these different worlds as to how they could inform one or another of these dimensions.

  But that does not detract from the fact that this is a very worthy effort to make biblical study more interesting and when that is done, (at least) half of the work has been done. Kudos to the authors for this wonderful aid for biblical studies! (reviewed by jkk)