According to the preface, the papers in this volume were presented to the program unit of the Society for Biblical Literature entitled ‘The Bible in the eastern and oriental Orthodox traditions’. The reader is uncomfortable right away, since ‘eastern and oriental Orthodox’ is not a synonym for ‘Churches of the east’. Is the ancient Church of Persia, the Assyrian Church of the east, deliberately excluded from the study of exegesis? It would seem that indeed it is, to judge by the introduction by Paul N. Tarazi, who speaks of using biblical exegesis to recover ‘the oneness that united both Eastern and Oriental Orthodox up to the Council of Chalcedon’ (p. 1; note, not Ephesus). This confessional note is fortunately not heard in the eleven papers that follow, and indeed two of them are on Aphrahat (although he is safely earlier than the Christological divide). Theological reflection of a broader kind is, however, a feature of several of them. Of particular interest are those whose authors are concerned with how to take seriously ancient exegesis that strikes us nowadays as arbitrary or fantastic. An excellent example is Timothy S. Clark's study ‘Ezekiel's temple and Mary's virginity: a peculiar strand in eastern Orthodox interpretation of Old Testament sactuary motifs’, which exposes some of the deep structure of the curious but widely-attested exegesis of Ezekiel xliv.1–4 (more widely than just ‘eastern Orthodox’, in fact) to refer to the perpetual virginity of Mary. Another example is Bradley Nassif, ‘Antiochene θεωρία in John Chrysostom's exegesis’ which seeks to rescue the concept of theoria as legitimate insight based on the literal sense of the text. Matthew W. G. Francis likewise tries hard to make positive theology out of the omission of the book of Revelation from the Orthodox lectionary. These are among the more ambitious essays in this volume. Others are useful studies of Greek, Syriac and Coptic authors. It is worth calling special attention to two that introduce little-known exegetical works, on Revelation by Andrew of Caesarea in the sixth century (by Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou), and on the catholic epistles by the twelfth-century scholar Sargis Kund (by the editor Vahan S. Hovhanessian).