BOOK REVIEWS 797 the structuring of Gerald Wilson’s Editing of the Hebrew Psalter and then trace themes in the Psalms rather than treating individual ones. In the prophetic books, the authors take the traditional view of the author- ship of Isaiah and Daniel and defend the historicity of Jonah. One unique element of their approach is that they believe the twelve Minor Prophets should be studied holistically as the “Book of the Twelve,” both to avoid the pejorative connotation of the word “minor,” and because they believe these books were redacted in such a way that the message of each builds on its predecessors. In sum, Prepare the Way of the Lord is a competent, conservative introduction to the OT that would be suitable for undergraduates as well as seminary students. It gives less space to critical scholarship and is less technical than the text by Long- man and Dillard, but it mentions the most important critical views and represents them accurately. It is a work in the evangelical tradition. The Lutheran background of the authors shows itself in occasional quotes from Martin Luther, but there is no reason why evangelicals of other traditions could not use the work as a textbook or reference work. Joe M. Sprinkle Crossroads College, Rochester, MN An Introduction to the Medieval Bible. By Frans van Liere. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 2014, xv + 320 pp., $28.99 paper. In An Introduction to the Medieval Bible, Frans van Liere presents the reader with such questions as: What was the medieval Bible? What were its contents? What was the text of the Latin Bible? What hermeneutics were employed in its reading? How did the commentary tradition flourish? Was it read in vernacular languages of the medieval period? How did the medieval Bible function in worship and preaching and what was its relationship to the images and artwork of the period? Van Liere writes a chapter answering each of these questions in some depth even though the book’s purpose is to serve as an introduction. In essence, he narrates how the Latin Bible came into existence and he traces the history of the Bible from before it was a book to the late medieval period and the Latin Bible’s role in worship, preaching, and its complex relationship to the plastic arts and illustrations. The Bible has a long history in which Bibles were not always codices (p. 22). Bibles were transcribed on scrolls (e.g. Dead Sea Scrolls) before they were trans- ferred to the codex. Van Liere’s presentation of the material history of the book is fascinating and complements the study in Christianity and the History of the Book by Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams, in which they show how Origen and Euse- bius expanded the technology of the codex in the East (e.g. the Hexapla). The co- lumnar layout of Codex Vaticanus and Sinaiticus (both perhaps to be ascribed to Eusebius) and the per cola et commata (by phrases and fragments) of the Poetic books of these codices have a layout similar to that of Codex Amiatinus, the 8 th -century Vulgate codex (pp. 24–25; for photo see p. 7). Van Liere notes Jerome’s recom- mendation for dividing his text into these sense units (p. 42). An interesting study