At over 2800 pages in length, this book is not for the faint of heart. I decided to read through it in a year (Monday-Friday) by automatically creating a reading schedule in Logos. So far, I'm about ten per cent of the way through, and in my opinion Dr. Rosscup's work is already yielding ample rewards for my efforts. It's a survey type commentary of every explicit and implicit instance of prayer to the Lord that Dr. Rosscup has found in the pages of Scripture. The attention to the detail of the Bible's wording is careful but certainly not excessively technical, and at the end of each prayer instance considered, Dr. Rosscup takes the trouble to spell out the principles he sees in operation for each instance of prayer he covers. Dr. Rosscup explicitly avoids repetition wherever possible (especially when dealing with parallel passages), his tone is warmly devotional, and the focus throughout is on practical lessons the reader can profitably apply to opportunities for personal and (to a lesser extent) corporate prayer in daily Christian life. Notwithstanding the occasional (and perhaps inevitable) typo, I recommend this resource very highly to anyone who wants to deepen their understanding and application of the importance, principles, and practice of prayer as set out in the Bible.

I bought this book under the impression that it would be an informative guide to the Jewish cultural background which informs historic and present day Jewish approaches to the Five Scrolls (Esther, Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Lamentations). In this respect I find myself somewhat disappointed. This book does indeed contain some useful linguistic insights into the books, but prospective buyers need to be aware of something which I think is conspicuously absent from the Product Description of this book at time of review (18th Jan 2020). Taking his cue from Walter Brueggeman, the writer views the Bible primarily as a collection of competing human testimonies about God rather than as God-breathed Scripture. Having thus established the human diversity of the Bible's contents at the expense of any substantive Divinely inspired contribution which might underpin and unite them, Dr. Williamson evaluates the Five Scrolls mainly in terms of how they might be used to interact with various talking points on the socio-political agenda of the modern American "woke" Left. Unless you either need or want to (re)interpret the Scriptures through the lens of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School, you will probably want to spend your money on something else, or to put it towards a monograph or commentary which seeks to guide the reader towards understanding God through the Bible. Sadly, what this book tries to do instead is to shoe horn the Bible into what a range of contemporary "voices of victimhood" think it really ought to have said in the first place; and inevitably, that carries with it connotations of sitting in moral judgement over the Bible, the biblical authors and characters, and the God of whom the Bible speaks. Is a God who is criticized as offending against our own moral tenets really being treated as God at all? I suggest not.