Reading Critical Commentaries on the Pentateuch

It's important for evangelicals to be familiar with critical approaches to the Pentateuch for a variety of reasons. Many commentaries just assume these critical approaches, and so if you're going to really appreciate a commentary and use it effectively, intelligently, you need to know where the author is coming from. If he's a form critic, diachronic critic of some kind, rhetorical critic, it just helps to understand the perspective of the commentary, evaluate it critically, and use it most efficiently. I find studying critical scholarship helpful even though I disagree with so many of the conclusions because it surfaces the issues for me. If I'm reading a source critic and he is arguing that these two passages contradict in some way, well that's a challenge to me. Because of my presuppositions regarding Scripture, I don't think they contradict. They may there may be a tension, but I need to explain what's going on with those passages. And so I find it helpful. It surfaces issues that I might just have missed if I had used the typical evangelical, conservative, let's-trust-the-Bible-on-everything kind of approach. So, I guess that's kind of a backdoor value to them, but that's why I like to read these guys, and gals, these days.