"Turn the other cheek"; "Love your enemies"; "Pray in secret"; "Do not store up for yourselves treasure on earth"; "Do not worry." These are just a few of the famous dictums found in the Sermon on the Mount. But what is the primary purpose of the Sermon?

Most interpretations treat the Sermon as an ethical text–concerned about the way Christians behave. Charles Talbert, however, argues that it is more concerned with character formation and ethical decision making. He argues that it is a text about covenant fidelity to God and to other humans, in which Jesus seeks to affect perceptions, dispositions, and intentions.

Talbert sets the stage for his reading of the Sermon by investigating Matthew’s relation to Judaism and exploring the composition of the audience that received Jesus’s charge. He also takes into account the order of Jesus’s discourse, the distinction between character formation and decision making, and the question of whether or not the Jesus who speaks in the Sermon is a legalist.

Talbert attends to six large units of thought in Matthew 5-7. Section by section, he analyzes form and content, comparing Jesus’s directives with similar statements in Jewish and Greco-Roman literature. The result is a superb commentary on the Sermon that will be of value to anyone studying this core passage of Scripture.

Reading the Sermon on the Mount is vintage Talbert: lucid, logical, with mastery of the commentary tradition and intimate knowledge of primary sources. The author’s emphasis on the Sermon’s role in the formation of character is a most welcome gift to specialists and general readers alike.–C. Clifton Black, Otto A. Piper Professor of Biblical Theology, Princeton Theological Seminary

Charles H. Talbert’s expertise regarding the relevant ancient sources, whether Greco-Roman or Jewish, is matched by his thorough familiarity with recent critical study of the Sermon on the Mount. He is also theologically sensitive and hermeneutically sophisticated. The result is a lucid and sure guide to the minefield that is the Sermon on the Mount.–Dale C. Allison Jr., Errett M. Grable Professor of New Testament Exegesis and Early Christianity, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary