A comprehensive, thorough, well-researched commentary on Hebrews from the 1870s.

The commentary follows a kind of "Chrysostom" method, providing a more detailed exegesis of sections by verse with exhortations at the end of sections. The author takes the position that Paul is the author and the primary audience is Jewish Christians in the Jerusalem area.

The author is very much of his time and era. The work is incredibly well-researched; the author enters into conversation with a lot of the primary commentators of his age and the millennium before him. The reader is introduced to many of the exegetical disputes in Hebrews and see who came to which conclusions, and the author offers his own view. One can tell the author wrote his commentary before the big arguments about dispensational premillennialism and even before Darwin was weaponized.

For its time and age the commentary is robust. Many modern readers and interpreters do not maintain the same assumptions and presuppositions and come to different conclusions. At times one wonders why the range of options given or considered are as limited as they are given.

And yet one can understand why the GA series kept this volume and did not seek to "update" it; even when one might disagree with the author's conclusions, one still has to respect him, his scholarship, and his devotion. Even with a lot of the difficulties described above it remains one of the best, if not the best, commentary in the GA series.

For the modern reader its best purpose is to provide a picture of scholarship on the work from the late nineteenth century as informed by the heritage of conversation about the Hebrews letter for generations before it. ( )