A Note on This Edition

The texts

The Bible text is the King James Version. The English Annotations are taken from the third edition (London, 1657) in the transcription of Berith Press, and Poole from the second volume of the Annotations (London, 1685) in the digital edition of Good Books Free. Henry is taken from a modern digital edition of the Exposition, released into the public domain, and Gill from the Good Books Free digital edition of his Exposition of the Old Testament. All four digital texts already give the spelling in its modern form.

What has been changed

Within each excerpt the commentator’s words, italics and punctuation are kept as the base text has them. The old verb forms (doth, saith, signifieth) and the British spellings (honour, labour) are kept, and so is any old word that a footnote explains. A few evident slips of the digital texts have been corrected (is kingdom for “his kingdom,” be is for “he is,” a point for a comma). Hebrew letters are given as the base text prints them.

Three things are a matter of setting only. At the end of an excerpt, a colon or semicolon is printed as a full stop. The opening words of the verse that a comment begins with are set in italic and followed by a dash, whatever bracket or mark the original used. And Scripture references are printed in the modern form (Ezra 4.24. as “Ezra 4:24”), with the points around them made regular. Where a commentator cites a passage by a misprinted book, chapter or verse, the corrected reference is printed, and the base text’s reading is given at the head of the Index of Scripture.

Attribution

The labels name the work. The notes on Haggai in Henry’s Exposition are his own; those in Poole’s Annotations are by one of the friends who completed the work after Poole’s death. “The Commentators,” above, gives what is known of each.

The editor’s work

The selection and arrangement of the excerpts, the passage headings and summaries, the notes and the footnotes are the editor’s. The excerpts were chosen with the help of software that aligns each commentary to the verses and checks that every excerpt is verbatim; every choice, and every note, is the editor’s own.