Always do your lit review

Yairah Amit’s review of Susan Niditch’s Judges: A Commentary (Old Testament Library) is posted over at the Review of Biblical Literature (link here). On the whole, the review is a balanced piece. It ends, however, on a rather sour note:

However, I feel that I have to finish this review with a personal touch. The book begins with sixteen pages of bibliography (xiii–xxviii), which include some Hebrew items too. But, alas, my commentary on the book of Judges, published in 1999 as part of the series Mikra Leysra’el by Magnes Press of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is absent. I am sure that if it was mentioned in Niditch’s book, at least more English readers could have known about my isolated one.

Ouch. I noticed the same absence when I recently read Niditch’s “My Brother Esau Is a Hairy Man”: Hair and Identity in Ancient Israel, but I chalked it up to the popular nature of that work.  However, Niditch even failed to mention Marc Brettler’s The Book of Judges (Old Testament Readings), a very accessible overview of Judges in English (which makes use of Amit’s Hebrew work).

Moral of the story: do your lit review. The source you omit might be your reviewer!