The Brazos commentary series was created in the conviction that “dogma clarifies rather than obscures” (xiv, series preface). Consequently, the editors sought theologians rather than biblical scholars to write the commentaries. Barron's exposition of 2 Samuel provides significant theological erudition, but it does not help to elucidate the biblical text. The biblical text is messy, complex, and ambiguous. Barron tames the text and simplifies as he clarifies. To some extent, this tendency toward simplification is inevitable in a commentary. Summarizing the biblical text is also inevitable, though Barron indulges in too much summary and not enough analysis. There are three areas in which Barron's use of theology seems to have obfuscated rather than clarified.

First, modern scholarship has unpacked the deeply ambiguous nature of David's character in 1–2 Samuel. He is celebrated as a hero even as the text presents him in his weakness and wickedness. Since we know he is a skilled liar (1 Sam 21) and cold-blooded killer (1 Sam 27:8–12), critical readers suspect that the narrative of Abner's death may be propagandistic spin designed to distance David from this crime. Barron appears to be aware of this reading of David, but is strangely dismissive of it (e.g., 13) and inclined to read David's lament for Abner as straightforwardly sincere (36). This traditional reading of David is also possible, but Barron buries the ambiguity of the text under the assumption that the text should be didactic literature and David a model of piety.

Second, Barron's handling of the Bathsheba episode overlooks some important details. He can not deny David's wicked behavior in 2 Samuel 11, but regards this as an exception to David's conduct elsewhere, an interpretation that reflects his reluctance to unpack the ambiguous presentation of David. Although he acknowledges that David is in the wrong, he still seeks to mitigate David's offense by casting aspersions on Bathsheba, as commentators habitually did for centuries, but habitually avoid today. Like commentators of old, Barron reads Bathsheba as a seductress who intentionally bathes within sight of the king and signals her desire to become pregnant by performing her postmenstrual bathing on a roof. He neglects to observe that Bathsheba is not bathing on a roof (contrary to popular belief) and that David may not infer from her bath that she had just menstruated. His conviction that David must be a model person obscures his vision of how the text presents David.

Third, Barron also avoids ambiguity in the depiction of God. The biblical text presents God as causing such evil as the death of Bathsheba's firstborn, so Barron seeks to reconcile this narrative with the doctrine of God's goodness through discussions of God's permissive will and the Thomistic distinctions among natural law and eternal law to conclude that “God's ‘striking’ and eventual killing of Bathsheba's child was neither unjust nor capricious” (116). He seems never to consider that the text reflects ways of speaking and thinking that are foreign to his own, or that this manner of speaking might not be intended as literally as he imagines. In this case, he does not realize that this passage is much more interested in characterizing David than in characterizing God. Here as elsewhere, David evinces a practical piety and resilient character.

This commentary is for the reader who wants to be consoled that messy and complicated biblical texts fit neatly into familiar theological systems. It is not for the reader who wants to be challenged by the biblical text or to delve into its richness, complexity, and ambiguity.