thomas aquinas: selected commentaries on the old testament

Thomas Aquinas’s Old Testament commentaries remain some of his most neglected writings due partly to the widely varying quality of both the commentaries themselves and their English translations, which often retain the terseness and opacity of the original Latin manuscripts. Nevertheless, Thomas’s corpus of Old Testament commentaries contains some of his finest biblical exegesis and theology. Within them, we find dimensions of his thought and literary personality that do not appear in any of his other writings.

This volume aims to promote appreciation for Thomas’s Old Testament exegesis by making his best commentaries more accessible. To this end, it offers a topically organized selection of the most theologically profound lectures from his premier Old Testament commentaries--those on the Psalms, Job, and Isaiah. Moreover, the translations used in this collection have undergone extensive editing and revision to enhance their accuracy, elegance, clarity, stylistic consistency, and overall readability. Lastly, hundreds of explanatory footnotes have been added to facilitate study, along with two indices and a bibliography.

Together with its companion volume, Thomas Aquinas: Selected Commentaries on the New Testament, this collection offers a curated introduction to Thomas’s biblical commentaries, suitable for newcomers, students, and scholars alike.

Jason C. Paone is the editor of Word on Fire Academic. He studied the classics and philosophy at The University of Texas at Austin, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 2015. In 2017, he received a Master of Theological Studies at Duke Divinity School. He received a graduate fellowship from the Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America, where he completed a doctorate in historical and systematic theology in the spring of 2024. Under Reinhard Hütter, he wrote a dissertation entitled ＂Obedient Belief: The Act of Faith and the Problem of Doxastic Voluntarism in the Theology of Matthias Joseph Scheeben.＂ He lives in Dallas, Texas, with his wife and three children.