New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham offers four exegetical essays highlighting characteristics of God revealed in biblical narrative, based upon lectures from 2015 and 2018. Bauckham begins by stating, ‘I would say [the Bible] is most centrally about the identity of God’ (p. 1), and so this exegetical work is in service of painting a picture of God that emerges through reading all scripture. The result is an accessible biblical theology that will interest a Christian audience of non-specialists.

Bauckham presents each essay as an exploration of a short passage of scripture, in which he highlights a characteristic of God. In chapter 1, Bauckham explains the narrative of Jacob's dream (Gen 28:10–22) as the revelation of God as one who is ‘not remote in heaven but down on earth’ (p. 9). In chapter 2, Bauckham highlights God's revealing God's name to Moses in the burning bush (Exod 3:1–6) as ‘a supreme act of God's grace, making himself accessible and knowable’ (p. 45). In chapter 3, Bauckham shows how God's speech to Moses after the golden calf incident (Exod 33:17–34:8) reveals God's ‘steadfast love and faithfulness’ (p. 71). In the final chapter, Bauckham shows how three narratives in Mark's Gospel make explicit the triune nature of God and reveal God's identity ‘not just to persons in the story but also to us’ (p. 107).

While each exegetical exploration could stand on its own, Bauckham's underlying argument is that each aspect of God's image is consistent across the biblical canon. Thus, he spends the bulk of each chapter tracing the characteristic revealed in his key text through other parts of scripture. For example, after identifying on pp. 5–18 God's ‘with-ness’ as the key insight of Jacob's dream, he spends pp. 19–32 tracing this characteristic throughout the New Testament, most prominently in the Gospel of John and Revelation. What emerges is a book not simply exploring four discrete moments of biblical revelation, as the subtitle implies. Rather, Bauckham offers a small biblical theology, characterising the God who emerges throughout the whole of the Christian scriptures. As he notes in the introduction, ‘These are not merely moments that are narrated once within the biblical story; they are more like reference points to which the rest of Scripture constantly refers back’ (p. 2).

As one would expect from an accomplished biblical scholar, Bauckham's exegesis is careful and full of insight. He draws helpful connections from the literary context of passages to explain events, and where appropriate he introduces the ancient Near Eastern and first-century contexts to illuminate texts, without overwhelming his reader with detail. Some of his exegetical conclusions are forced and go beyond the evidence. For example, to explain why the spirit descends in the form of a dove in Mark 1, Bauckham depends upon the linguistic similarity between the Hebrew word used for dove in the Hebrew Bible and the Tetragrammaton. It is unclear how this relates to Mark writing his Greek gospel for a Greek-speaking audience. Far more common, though, are more defensible connections between texts; Bauckham excels as a careful reader.

The defining accomplishment of the book is how clearly he presents this close, careful reading for a general audience. The book is wholly consistent with the goals of the Acadia Studies in Bible and Theology series, bringing critical exegetical insight ‘in a way that students, pastors, laity, and nonspecialists will find accessible’ (p. ii). Bauckham omits footnotes, but includes short, helpful bibliographies at the end of each chapter, and he illuminates his readings with a few beautiful images of Ethiopian artwork. He writes from the perspective of Christian faith for an audience of Christians, often using the first-person plural to identify shared assumptions about scripture and God.

It is, therefore, readers in the church who will benefit from this work. Bauckham's insights are at times provocative enough to interest his scholarly peers, and other scholars would likely quibble with specific exegetical conclusions or identify texts he does not consider that would undermine his argument for consistency. But this book will be most appreciated by those whose interests are not in exegetical debate, but in understanding who the biblical writers say God is. Bauckham closes his introduction by noting, ‘I dare to hope that, by God's grace, it may help some readers to know God better’. I imagine he has succeeded for a significant audience.