Lectures on the Book of Job

James Durham's Lectures on the Book of Job was published from a
manuscript in 1759, one hundred years after his death, in what must be one of
the rarest Puritan commentaries to obtain in an original edition. It was
probably prepared for the press by Robert Wodrow, the son of the famous
historian of the same name, who collected a massive number of manuscripts,
though the manuscript on Job is not known to be surviving at this time. Often
Puritan commentaries were huge productions, like Joseph Caryl's mammoth
twelve volumes on Job. Yet Durham's work is compact, with a few pages of
exposition and comment, closing with a few pages of practical observations.
This makes the work perfectly suitable for private and family devotions. And
even though Spurgeon had not seen Durham's commentary, it was an astute
decision to include his above entry in the large print reserved for those
commentaries he highly recommended. Dickson's impression of
Durham's preaching generally was that, as paraphrased by the elder
Wodrow, while it is not known for turns of phrase, it is filled with
much good and great matter," as are any of his works. After 1759, " this work was not reprinted again until the Naphtali Press edition of 1995 (and
reprinted 2003). This newly revised edition has been carefully compared again
to the original and corrected and updated.