Introducing the Old Testament Of all the literature that has been handed down from the world’s ancient civilizations, none is as compelling—or as provocative—as the Hebrew Bible. It is one of the great classics, highly esteemed as sacred scripture by three of the world’s major faiths—Islam, Judaism and Christianity. That alone has ensured not only its survival, but also its widespread dissemination and continuing appeal to people far removed from either the cultural or the religious context in which it originated. Though its stories happened long ago and in unfamiliar places, they have an ongoing fascination for today’s readers. Furthermore, in a postmodern society with a growing scepticism about what is modern and scientific, many of today’s spiritual searchers are powerfully attracted by the possibility of discovering new directions for the future through uncovering spiritual truths that have been locked away for centuries in ancient and esoteric texts, which reflect other worlds and different ways of being. Whatever else may be said, the Hebrew Bible—or Old Testament—has plenty of mystery about it. Its pages contain the rich literary treasures of a whole nation—the ancient people of Israel—and its story embraces the formative period of world civilization as we know it today, beginning in the Stone Age and ending in the world of the Roman empire. That makes even the most recent parts more than 2,000 years old, while the origins of its earliest works are likely to remain for ever hidden in the mists of antiquity. Moreover, it is not a dull book, and its unique combination of epic stories, history, reflective philosophy, poetry and political commentary is woven together with all the elements of adventure, excitement and suspense that we might expect to find in a Hollywood thriller. Indeed, its traditional stories have themselves become the raw material for many movies on the grand scale, while at the same time they continue to provide personal inspiration for the millions of people all over the world who still read it regularly. Even a quick glance through its pages soon shows that the Old Testament is, of course, not just one single book. In reality, it is a whole library of books, and it is the sheer diversity of its contents that partly helps to explain its perennial appeal. From the great epic stories of national heroes like Moses, Deborah, David or Esther, to the more reflective books such as Job or Ecclesiastes, there is something here for everyone’s taste and for many different moods and emotions. Enchanting—and sometimes disturbing—stories of personal intrigue and passion stand side by side with philosophical enquiries into the meaning of human life. Trying to make sense of these apparently disparate books is, however, not a straightforward matter, and in the course of the last 200 years many theories have been put forward as scholars have sought to understand and explain their origins and relevance to the world in which their many authors lived and worked. Most hypotheses have not survived for long, and the last twenty years of the twentieth century saw the collapse of many opinions that previous generations would have regarded as the assured results of scholarship. But one conviction has survived: if we are to understand the books of the Hebrew Bible most fully, we must delve into the reality of the world in which they were written. Intepreting this literature is a complex and multi-layered enterprise, but a key element in this has always been the quest to uncover what these books meant when they were originally written. How did they relate to the needs and aspirations of their authors and their original readers? And what can an understanding of other cultures of the time tell us about the ancient nation of Israel? In order to address such questions, many different specialist disciplines need to be employed, including archaeology, sociological analysis, literary theory and historical investigation as well as more obviously religious and spiritual methodologies. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scholarship often emphasized the diversity of the materials contained within this collection, but for the community within which they originated the one thing that held them all together was the simple fact that they are part of a common story. Moreover, the heart of that common story focused on a set of spiritual perceptions, and without taking account of that it is virtually impossible to understand what the Old Testament writers were trying to articulate. Notwithstanding their diverse concerns and interests—and the centuries that separated them—they were all convinced that their books, and the experience of the nation which they reflected, came into being not just through social, economic or political pressures, but because of the activity of God running through it all. Beyond the obvious human interest of its individual stories, the Hebrew Bible is a deeply spiritual book, affirming that this world and all its affairs are not merely a haphazard sequence of coincidences, but are somehow the work of a divine being who is God of both creation and history. Moreover, this God is not depicted in terms of a remote, unknowable divine force, but is understood in essentially personal terms as one with whom human beings can—and do—have personal dealings. This message is set out in the opening pages of the first book (Genesis), and it is explained and emphasized many times in what follows. Today’s readers will no doubt have many different reactions to such overtly religious claims, some of which will be examined in more detail in later chapters here. But whatever response all this may evoke, any understanding of the Old Testament which does not take serious account of its world-view is likely to provide only a very partial insight into its meaning and significance. The story One of the difficulties often encountered by the reader approaching the Old Testament for the first time is trying to distinguish the main storyline from the many individual stories which help to make it up. This is partly related to the way in which these books evolved over many centuries, and the fact that the collection as a whole went through several different editing processes before reaching its present form. As a consequence, it is not difficult to identify what look like conflicting opinions within its pages. For example, the framework of the entire collection clearly affirms that the God of whom it speaks has universal jurisdiction over the whole world, whereas much of the story seems to imply almost the opposite, for in the early stories God mostly appears as a living reality only in the life of a particular ethnic group. These apparent tensions within the narratives will receive a good deal of attention in later chapters. But it will be worthwhile here surveying the story as it stands. Scholars have often forgotten that, whatever else may be said about their literary origins, the way these books were combined to form the final edition of the Hebrew Bible was intended to present a coherent message that would both sum up and take forward the stories told by the individual writers. While it is certainly not illegitimate to speculate on the various stages of development through which the various books passed, the meaning of the collection as a whole is to be judged on the basis of the end product. Just as the impact of a well-cooked meal is more than the sum of its individual ingredients, so the significance of the Old Testament transcends the insights contained within its various components. The stage is set on a grand, international scale in the opening pages, and though the main focus is on the life of a specific group of people, the earliest episodes span most of the ancient world. Before long, though, the main interest centres on a childless couple—Abraham and Sarah—living in the Mesopotamian city of Ur (Genesis 11:31–12:5). This unlikely couple then become parents to a great nation who, by the end of the introductory stories, have settled in a land so idyllic that it can be described as ‘flowing with milk and honey’ (Deuteronomy 6:3). In between these two points, the books from Genesis to Deuteronomy recount many memorable stories about the children who were eventually born into this family, and of how their descendants unwittingly ended up as slaves in Egypt. In the telling of the story of Israel’s earliest days, this time of enforced slavery became one of the pivotal points of their experience, but under Moses, a dynamic leader trained in the royal courts of Egypt, it was to become a central element in Israel’s national consciousness. Generations of later writers had no doubt that even this was a part of God’s plan for the people, and with great insight and sensitivity the eighth-century b.c. prophet Hosea pictured God at this time as a loving parent (probably a mother, given the form of the imagery) and Israel as God’s child: ‘When Israel was a child, I loved him and called him out of Egypt as my son … I was the one who taught Israel to walk. I took my people up in my arms … I drew them to me with affection and love. I picked them up and held them to my cheek; I bent down to them and fed them’ (Hosea 11:1, 3–4). Almost 200 years later again, and after many more calamities, this conviction was still of central importance, as highlighted by Ezekiel’s assurance to the people that ‘When I chose Israel, I made them a promise. I revealed myself to them in Egypt and told them: I am Yahweh your God. It was then that I promised to take them out of Egypt and … lead them to a land I had chosen for them, a rich and fertile land, the finest land of all’ (Ezekiel 20:5–6). Escape from Egypt With their dramatic escape from slavery in Egypt—the event subsequently referred to as the ‘exodus’—Israel’s destiny began to take shape. But between the exodus and their entry to the ‘land flowing with milk and honey’ (Canaan), there is the story of God’s Law given to Moses at Mount Sinai. As the Old Testament writers reflected on the meaning of their nation’s experience of God, they always gave this Law (Torah) a central place. The occasion when the Law was given is depicted as a fearful and serious moment: ‘The whole of Mount Sinai was covered with smoke, because Yahweh had come down on it in fire. The smoke went up like the smoke of a furnace, and all the people trembled violently … Moses spoke, and God answered him with thunder’ (Exodus 19:18–19). To people nurtured on the values of Western democracy, the laws of the Hebrew Bible (contained mostly in the books of Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers) can seem harsh and unreasonable. surprisingly, perhaps, the people of Israel never regarded them in that way, and though God was to be honoured and respected, observing the requirements of the Law was never regarded as a heavy burden. On the contrary, it was something to be kept with great joy, for the people looked back beyond the smoke and fire of Sinai to the events that went before it—and in that context they could see that God’s Law was very firmly based on God’s love, and that their continued obedience was the free and loving devotion of those who are grateful for unexpected and undeserved benefits. It is no coincidence that the ten commandments begin not with an instruction, but with a reminder of God’s love and goodness: ‘I am Yahweh your God who brought you out of Egypt, where you were slaves’ (Exodus 20:2). In due course, the nomadic way of life that could be traced right back to Abraham and Sarah gave way to a settled farming life in a new land. Here, Israel began to ask new questions about their faith in God. So far, they had known the God Yahweh whom Moses served as a God of the desert. But new questions began to bother them. Did this God know how to grow crops—or have any experience in rearing sheep to have many lambs? In a technological age, these can seem to be rather naive questions, but for these people they were the most important questions of all. Life itself depended on the answers, and in one way or another the struggle to find those answers dominates the rest of the Old Testament story. For when Israel settled in their new land, other gods and goddesses were already well established there—and they had long and apparently successful experience in agricultural matters. So there began a long battle of loyalties between Yahweh, the God of the desert, and the gods and goddesses of the land of Canaan: Baal, Asherah, Anat and other members of their pantheon. The people of Israel were tempted to forsake their own God in preference for these others. The unfolding epic of the nation describes how, from the earliest times, there were local heroes like the so-called ‘judges’ who were prepared to resist such spiritual treason. But as time passed, things went from bad to worse, and the great prophets found themselves protesting over many generations that the people of Israel had left their own true God for the worship of false deities. National decline The story describes Israel’s national fortunes reaching their high point in the days of David and Solomon (dated by some to about 1010–930 b.c.). But following them, it fell into serious decline as the great kingdom was partitioned, to be followed by the collapse first of the northern part (Israel), and then in due course by the southern part (Judah). Prophets, from the radical and outspoken Elijah to the introspective Jeremiah, spoke out in both north and south against the social and political corruption which they believed had led to the inevitable disintegration of the entire nation. Though the many prophets spoke in different circumstances, to the people of their own time, they were all united in their belief that the nation of Israel had come to ruination because of its neglect of the Law given at Mount Sinai, and an increasing fondness for the gods and goddesses of Palestine. This figure is a Cannanite Baal, or storm god. The struggle against idolatry recurs throughout the Old Testament. Was Israel’s Lord just one god among many, or was this the only true God? By 586 b.c., the entire nation was finished. In that year the city of Jerusalem was captured by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, and its Temple and most of the other significant buildings were destroyed. This was a disaster of immense proportions, whose impact on the national consciousness lasted for many centuries. But once more, out of the ashes of defeat new life was kindled by new leaders who, if anything, had an even more expansive vision than their predecessors. The sheer scale of the calamity forced a thoroughgoing reappraisal not only of national strategy, but more especially of the national faith, and as those who survived this dark time reflected on its meaning, they concluded that even this new disaster was all a part of God’s plan for their people. As they set out to review the lessons of the past, they were quite sure that God would not forget the earlier promises. There would be a new creation and a new exodus on an even greater scale than before, for the whole world would now be the scene of God’s renewed activity, and Israel’s role in this new world would be to function as ‘a light to the nations—so that all the world may be saved’ (Isaiah 49:6). With this, the story had come full circle. It began with Abraham and Sarah and the promise that through their family God would bless many nations (Genesis 12:1–3). In the intervening centuries, this promise had been repeatedly challenged from many different directions. Politically and economically, it was always under threat—whether from the Egyptians, the Canaanites, the Assyrians or the Babylonians. Religiously, it was undermined from within as the people of Israel were tempted to forget Yahweh, the God of their forebears, and turn instead to other forms of worship in religions which, the prophets complained, allowed their moral and spiritual responsibility to be left behind in the shrine instead of forming the basis of everyday life in home and market place. But God’s intention for this world never deviated: ‘the holy God of Israel remains faithful to the promises … I, Yahweh, was there at the beginning, and I, Yahweh, will be there at the end’ (Isaiah 49:7; 41:4). Understanding the story It is not too difficult to gain a general impression of the Old Testament story. But once we begin to dig beneath the surface, this most fascinating of books also presents many puzzles. In later chapters, we will be looking at its complexities from different perspectives, but at the outset it is worth making just a few general comments on some of the most distinctive features of the Old Testament and its contents, which will identify some broad principles of interpretation that can then be applied to the exploration of specific questions. ■ Most readers today probably encounter the Old Testament as the first half of the Christian Bible. The fact that it is commonly called ‘the Old Testament’ only serves to emphasize this position, for in this context it is ‘old’ not because it is ancient, but by contrast to the records of the early church which are conventionally designated ‘the New Testament’. Given that the Christian faith emerged from within Judaism, it is hardly surprising that Christians should have taken it for granted that these two quite separate collections of writings properly belong together. Within the Christian tradition, it has always been assumed that the events surrounding the origins of the Christian faith were yet a further stage in God’s dealings with men and women that began through the ancient nation of Israel, recorded in the Old Testament. This of course is a particular interpretation of these books, for the Old Testament was not written by Christians, nor is its message intrinsically and necessarily a Christian message. Long before the emergence of Christianity, these books were the sacred writings of the Jewish faith (Judaism), and that is obviously their primary reference point. To understand them fully, they need to be read in their own original context, and in the light of their underlying spiritual orientation. Though Christians may legitimately feel that the Old Testament is incomplete without its Christian sequel, it can never be fully understood if it is viewed only through exclusively Christian spectacles. This is why many contemporary writers prefer not to speak of ‘the Old Testament’ at all, but rather of ‘the Hebrew scriptures’ or ‘the Hebrew Bible’. Here, we have used both sets of terminology more or less interchangeably. ■ It is also important to remember that the Old Testament is quite different in character from a modern book. It is even different from the books that make up the New Testament, all of which had their origin in the same social and religious context as one another. Moreover, whereas we can, on the whole, be tolerably sure of the identity of the New Testament authors, and of the reasons why they wrote, the same cannot be said in the case of the Old Testament, and here there are very few books for which it is possible to give a positive identification of either a particular author or a specific date. The Old Testament is essentially an edited anthology—a collection of writings by different people, and from different ages. Nobody ever sat down to gather the New Testament into one unified collection: it just arose spontaneously from the reading habits of the early church. But somebody did set out to edit and organize the books of the Old Testament, to form a coherent account of the life of the nation of Israel. In fact, more than one person or group of people did so. The earliest editions of Old Testament materials were probably gathered together during the reigns of David and Solomon, who provided the stability and economic prosperity necessary for the flourishing of such an enterprise. It was natural that the people of Israel should begin at this time to take a keen interest in their past, revisiting the stories of their forebears as a way of identifying and celebrating their emerging national consciousness. Before this time, they no doubt had their own tribal histories which had been preserved and handed on by word of mouth from one generation to another, but they had not been written down. People whose life was a daily struggle for survival had neither time nor appetite for creating literary masterpieces: that was left to scribes working in the more leisurely atmosphere of the later royal courts of Israel. Naturally, such researchers could only bring the story up to their own time, and the task of preserving and interpreting Israel’s history was an ongoing and never-ending one, lasting through many generations. Much of the Old Testament is associated with the names of the prophets, and many of its books contain their words and actions dealing with various aspects of national life and policy. Parts of the history books were doubtless written by those whose outlook was deeply influenced by these prophets, though the final stage in the Old Testament story was reached only after the destruction of the state by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, which the prophets had so clearly foreseen and warned about. As new leaders emerged after that tragedy and began to reconstruct the broken pieces of a great heritage, they consciously set out to apply the lessons of the past to their own hopes for the future. To help do that, they began to collect the whole of Israel’s national literature, as well as writing their own assessment of the nation’s achievements, and it was out of this post-exilic reappraisal that the Hebrew Bible finally emerged in the form it has today. ■ A further distinguishing mark of the Old Testament is the enormous time span that it covers. Whereas the whole of the New Testament was written in the space of something like sixty or seventy years, the Old Testament story covers many centuries. There is a good deal of debate about where historical narrative in the proper sense begins, but even if (as many think) that was only in the time of David or Solomon, it still takes us back 1,000 years before the Christian era. In addition, though, the Old Testament contains accounts of things that appear to pre-date that, by a long way. The very earliest parts of its literature are located in a world where civilization itself was a relatively recent arrival. Its story begins in the region of what is now Iraq, in what the ancients called ‘the Fertile Crescent’, a part of the world that had witnessed many remarkable developments long before the story of Israel’s history began. Great empires had come and gone, and as early as 3000 b.c. the Sumerian people of ancient Mesopotamia had written down their traditional stories and beliefs for the generations that would follow them. One of their most noteworthy successors was the Babylonian king Hammurabi, whose law code written on clay tablets some 1,700 years b.c. still survives as a lasting monument to the culture of those ancient times. Many other texts from this ancient world have come to light—from Nuzi in Iraq, from Ebla in northern Syria and from Ugarit further to the south. In addition, there are the many records and monuments of that other great and ancient civilization centred on the River Nile in Egypt. By comparison with these empires, the people who wrote the Old Testament were undoubtedly latecomers on the world stage. The shape of their culture was already formed by other nations, and to understand their story fully it is necessary to know something of the story of these other peoples too. The fortunes of Israel were always inextricably bound up with the manoeuverings of the two superpowers of the day: the one based on the Nile, and the other based on the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. But then the Old Testament takes us beyond even the last of these great empires, for Israel survived longer than them all, and the latest books of their national literature reflect the concerns of the period that saw the rise and fall of Alexander the Great, and which was eventually to herald the arrival of the next great superpower of world history, the Roman empire. It is hardly surprising if today’s readers find the Old Testament slightly confusing at times, for its pages cover almost half the history of civilization as it has been documented in the West. In addition, the circumstances of the early parts of the story are quite different from the situation encountered in the later parts, while none of it bears much resemblance to the world as it is today. ■ Something of the Old Testament’s distinctive character can also be observed when its books are viewed purely as literature. As has already been observed, it is above all a book infused with spiritual values. It does not set out to give what might be regarded as an impartial, independent account of the events it describes. The Old Testament story has been written for a purpose, and its different parts were used by men and women living at different times to speak to the people of their own generation. Some have taken this to imply that the story it contains must be essentially fictional—a kind of moralizing tale, which is valuable for whatever lessons it teaches, but out of touch with what actually happened. In reality, things are much more complicated than this. For example, many events and people mentioned in the Old Testament also appear in the records of other nations of the time, which at least means that we need to explore the relationship between these various accounts. The truth is that there is probably no such thing as the ‘bare facts’ of history, whether biblical or otherwise—and if there was, they would be much less useful than people often imagine. To understand the past—or, for that matter, the present—events need to be interpreted, placed in a context and set alongside other aspects of human experience in order that their full significance might be discerned. A historian who merely reported past events in a disinterested way would not be a good historian. It is the judgments made by others on what things mean that actually enable us to form our own opinions and understandings. In everyday life, we take all this for granted, and we know that when, for instance, we watch a television documentary, the overall perspective is going to reflect the world-view and opinions of the programme-maker, but we would not normally regard this as a barrier to understanding. We may wish to make a different judgment ourselves on this or that matter, but we simply take it for granted that to understand any situation fully we need to take account not only of the facts, but also of the outlook of our sources of information. It is the same with the Old Testament. The more clearly we can understand the intentions of those who wrote and handed on these books, the more likely we are to arrive at a useful appreciation of their significance and meaning. In addition, we should remember that these writings are not just one person’s assessment of the history of a nation: they are a national archive. The people who wrote and edited these books were themselves a part of that nation and its history. It is not easy for the detached observer to grasp exactly what this means. But we can find a useful analogy in the pictures that medieval artists painted of the life and times of Jesus. The crucifixion was a favourite theme, and there are many great works showing Jesus hanging on a cross between two thieves. But, on closer inspection, the people around the crosses often seem somewhat out of place, and instead of Roman soldiers, there are soldiers of sixteenth-century Europe. The people too belong to that age—and the city where the scene takes place is not Jerusalem in a.d. 33, but Venice or Rome in a.d. 1500. When today’s art critics look at such pictures they do not usually feel that they cast doubt on the reality of the crucifixion of Jesus. Indeed, some may unconsciously follow the artist’s example, and pencil in an image of themselves and today’s social context. In a way, this is what the writers of the Old Testament story were doing as they depicted their national past. From generation to generation, they knew that the story of their national heroes and heroines was their own story. They were a part of it, because they saw in it the continuing story of God’s dealings with their nation. It was this conviction that enabled them to recognize in the failures and triumphs of the past the realities and the potential of their own age, and gave them the freedom to reinterpret the traditional stories so as to equip new generations to address the challenges of the present. The story and the faith What of the distinctively religious aspects of the Old Testament books? It is, of course, possible to read the Old Testament and never discover its faith. Certainly, if definitions of spirituality or faith are restricted to collections of carefully articulated systematic beliefs or doctrines, then there is little in the Old Testament that would fit that description. The truth is that the story and the faith are so inextricably interwoven that it is both impossible and pointless to try to disentangle them from one another. But even accepting that and adopting a more open-ended approach, it is not easy to identify something that can plausibly be labelled ‘the faith of the Old Testament’, for several reasons: ■ It has already been observed that the Old Testament is not a single, unified book. It contains many different types of literature, and together they cover the greater part of 1,000 years in the history of ancient Israel. For this reason alone it is a good deal easier to identify the faith of various Old Testament authors than it is to discover a comprehensive system that might be described as ‘Old Testament faith” in some definitive sense. Indeed, many scholars would argue that the best we can hope for is to find ways of speaking of ‘the faith of the prophets’, or ‘the faith of the psalmists’, and so on. ■ Was the Old Testament ever intended to be a guide to what people should believe, or is it rather a record of what people in ancient Israel did as a matter of fact believe? As a book of history, it contains elements of both these things, but depending on which one of the two is labelled ‘Old Testament faith’, quite different conclusions can be reached. For example, the prophets declared that true worship of God had to include the way a person behaved in everyday life, and could not just be restricted to ritual actions carried out at a shrine—but both prophets and historians make it perfectly clear that this understanding of worship was never shared by the majority of people in ancient Israel. Similar diversity of opinion can be found on many other issues, which means that from the outset we need to clarify what we are looking for when we talk of the Old Testament faith. Is it the sort of religious beliefs that were generally held in Israel, or are we trying to extract some system of normative beliefs out of the Old Testament records? ■ Just to complicate things a little more, we know for certain that both actual practice and the ideals of people such as the prophets did not remain static from one period of Israel’s history to another, but were continually evolving to match new circumstances. The question of marriage and family provides a good example of this. By the time of Ezra (towards the end of the Old Testament period), it was assumed that one man would marry one woman, and both of them would be ethnically Israelite. In earlier times, though, it was the common practice for a man to have several wives, and not only is this practice never explicitly forbidden, but also almost all the leading male characters in the Old Testament stories had multiple regular sexual partners, who were not necessarily their wives. Nor were they all Israelites: the list of Solomon’s wives and partners reads like a roll-call of all the nations of the ancient world! The same diversity can be found in the laws governing things such as food, keeping the sabbath day or circumcision, all of which were applied in a much more relaxed way before the time of exile in Babylon than they ever were after it. In view of such complex problems, some doubt whether it will ever be possible to articulate anything remotely like a comprehensive account of the spiritual and religious teachings of the Hebrew Bible. On this view, the best that might be achieved would be a carefully researched description of the history of Israelite religion, tracing the ways it developed and changed over many generations. This kind of historical understanding is certainly a vital part of any assessment of the message of the Old Testament, and much of this book is taken up with the discussion of questions that will help to identify how the Old Testament faith related to the world in which it developed. In the process of doing this, it needs to be compared with the religious beliefs and aspirations of other nations of the time, in order to highlight whatever it was that made its message distinctive. Many of the features that seem especially strange and unfamiliar to today’s readers were just a natural part of everyday life in the ancient Middle East. Things like animal sacrifices, and much of the structure of Israelite worship, were common to many different cultural contexts in Old Testament times, so by understanding this context it is often possible to gain invaluable insights into religious themes in the Old Testament itself. Even the language used of Yahweh is at times very similar, if not identical, to terms used in other religions of the day, and this, too, can help to illustrate the full meaning of apparently obscure Old Testament passages. But, of course, the Old Testament has another context than just the world of ancient Israel, and that is determined by the circumstances of the contemporary interpreter. A Jewish person will see something different in the Hebrew Bible from what a Christian sees, and a Muslim will discern its message differently again, while a secular atheist will have another perspective, and a New Ager will perceive it from yet another angle. While seeking to be aware of the various insights that can be gained from different standpoints and personal perspectives, it is not the intention of this book to present a comprehensive account of all the possibilities. As with the companion volume, Introducing the New Testament, this one is written from a self-consciously Christian position. When the Old Testament is approached from a Christian standpoint, it is not adequate to regard it solely as part of the religious history of the ancient world. Purely historical and literary matters are not unimportant, but they are not the whole story, and theological questions also need to be addressed. These include such matters as how the religious ideas of the Old Testament might be related to the Christian faith as it is explained in the teaching of Jesus and the rest of the New Testament, and whether it is possible to square the Old Testament’s ideas with Christian beliefs. Even many Christians find it hard to think that what they understand of the descriptions of God in the Old Testament can be reconciled with the message of the New, while in some quarters it is taken for granted that there is an unbridgeable chasm between the ethical perspectives of the two parts of the Christian Bible. And what about things like sacrificial worship? To most Western Christians this has always been frankly offensive. But is it saying something fundamental about God’s nature and about true religious belief and practice, or is it a peripheral part of the culture of the day that can easily be discarded? These are all big questions, perhaps too big to be properly addressed in the scope of a book like this. But they are key questions for every Christian reader of the Old Testament, which is why it seems worth making the effort. Matters of faith are examined especially towards the end of the book, and the way they are dealt with there reflects the kind of questions that contemporary readers may wish to ask. But before coming to that, some considerable attention needs to be applied to setting the Old Testament faith in its proper social and historical context. Once we have understood it in its own world, we have a better chance of interpreting it sensibly in ours. Ordering the books Types of literature The Old Testament is a complete library of literature, containing books of many different types. If they were taken separately to a modern library, it is certain that they would not all be placed on the same shelf, for they represent many different literary genres, each with its own distinctive style and requiring different methods of interpretation to appreciate their individual contributions to the overall picture. HISTORY Some books are easily recognizable as a kind of history: Genesis, Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah. These tell the story of the nation’s life, which is then continued in the deuterocanonical books of 1 and 2 Maccabees. But none of them merely records past events. They all report some things and not others, and always interpret what they include, explaining its significance in the light of the distinctive religious faith of their various writers. The nearest we come to historical archives in the generally accepted sense would be some sections of Chronicles. LAW Other books (Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) are obviously law codes, though they are hardly the kind that today’s Western lawyers might use, for they contain a mixture of civil and religious laws, as well as some stories that could just as readily be classified as a kind of history. POETRY There is a lot of poetry in the Old Testament, and some books consist of nothing else: religious poetry in Psalms and Lamentations, and love poems in the Song of Solomon. But many other books also contain poetry, including Job, Proverbs, and (from the deuterocanonical books) the Wisdom of Solomon and Wisdom of Ben Sira. The prophets also seem to have expressed many of their messages in poetic form, no doubt making it easier to remember and repeat. STORIES People have always loved good stories, and the Hebrews were no exception. Stories that were obviously carefully crafted, maybe by professional storytellers, include Job, Jonah and Esther, along with parts of Daniel and the stories about Joseph contained in Genesis. Among the deuterocanonical books, Tobit, Judith and the various additions to the stories of Daniel and Esther all fall into this category. They are all narratives that have obviously been skilfully designed, like a good novel, to engage the reader’s attention and to get a message across at the same time. Some scholars believe they are novels, presenting a distinctive message by means of a fictional story, while others would rather classify them as history—though, nevertheless, history with a meaning. The stories of Job and Jonah have features which suggest they may originally have been meant to be performed as drama. VISIONS Visions are found scattered throughout the Hebrew Bible, but Daniel in particular is full of them, as also is the deuterocanonical 2 Esdras. These books were written in a distinctive apocalyptic style, and at a time when their writers and readers were suffering persecution and injustice. By looking at what was going on from God’s angle in some other world, they were able to put such suffering in a wider perspective and assure their readers that it was only a temporary thing. They use symbolic images in a very precise way, which means they require quite specific interpretative skills. LITURGICAL MATERIALS The book of Psalms is, in effect, the liturgical handbook of the Jerusalem Temple. It is a specialized form of poetry, and includes prayers, litanies and songs, often with instructions for the musicians, and detailed directions for dancers and other worship leaders. PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS Many books contain advice about how to live. Much of it, such as that found in Proverbs, is simple homespun wisdom of the sort found in every society across the world. Other books, however, wrestle with the great issues of life and death and the ultimate meaning of things—the existence of God, or the problem of undeserved suffering and the presence of evil in the world. These include Job and Ecclesiastes and (from the deuterocanonical collection) the Wisdom of Solomon and Wisdom of Ben Sira. FAITH STORIES Books of philosophy tend to address big questions in abstract ways, but people of all cultures have usually preferred to tell stories to one another, to explain things that just could not be explored in any other way. Many different terms have been used to describe such stories, ‘myth’ being one of the most popular—though in common speech, that can suggest they are somehow untrue or unreliable, which is why I have preferred the term ‘faith stories’ here because, far from being untrue, these stories express the most profound truths imaginable about some of life’s most complex questions. The Old Testament begins with stories of this kind in the book of Genesis and, in doing so, sets the scene for all that then follows. Sections of the Hebrew Bible The order of the books in the Christian Old Testament is derived not from the manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, but from a Greek version (the Septuagint) that seems to have originated in Egypt sometime before the beginning of the Christian era. The Hebrew Bible arranged its contents in a totally different way, with three separate sections: the Law, the Prophets and the Writings. THE LAW This consists of the first five books (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy), believed to be of special importance as they were traditionally regarded as the work of Moses himself. Genesis, of course, contains nothing at all that would nowadays be recognized as ‘law’. It is a collection of stories, and at first sight it might more naturally be regarded as some sort of historical narrative. That reflects current understandings of ‘law’ as being a set of rules and regulations, a legal code that can be interpreted by lawyers and applied in a court by a judge. It would certainly be hard to imagine a modern person agreeing with one of the poets of ancient Israel who wrote that ‘the law is my delight’ (Psalm 119:77). But the biblical notion of ‘law’ was significantly more comprehensive and far-ranging than ours. The fundamental meaning of the Hebrew word conventionally translated ‘law’ (Torah) was ‘guidance’ or ‘instruction”, and the ‘law” of the Hebrew Bible was the place where people could discover what to believe about God, and how they should live in order to reflect God’s will. This is why the Torah and its development is so closely bound up with the stories of Israel’s history. It is a basic assumption in the Old Testament that knowing and obeying God is not just a matter of blind obedience to a few religious and moral rules, but is rather a question of experiencing God’s concern and love in a personal and social context. Though the Law might include principles of justice, it also needed to incorporate stories which could serve as everyday illustrations and case studies of how people were intended to live—and the likely consequences if they chose to follow other practices. THE PROPHETS This is the largest section of the Hebrew Bible, and takes its name from a number of religious and political activists who sought to influence the life of the nation over a period of several centuries. This collection of books itself falls into two distinct sections, ‘the former prophets’ and ‘the latter prophets”. Since ‘the latter prophets” are more obviously connected with the individuals whose names they bear, it will be most useful here to look at them first. ■ The latter prophets Prophets are mentioned throughout the history of the Israelite people. They were not primarily writers, but speakers and political activists. One of the central planks of the Old Testament faith in its final form was the conviction that spirituality is not so much concerned with the kind of rituals that go on in shrines and temples, but relates to everyday styles of life. As the people looked back to the traditional stories of how their forebears had lived, they came to the conclusion that God’s values were essentially concerned with justice and freedom. Since their own ancestors had been enslaved in Egypt, and God had stood by them in their distress, before finally orchestrating their freedom through Moses, it was natural to conclude that God must be on the side of the poor and the oppressed—and this belief came to be enshrined in many of the nation’s laws, particularly the book of Deuteronomy. It is easy to hold such beliefs, but much more difficult to put them into practice. The prophets functioned as the conscience of the nation, always reminding the people of how much they themselves owed to God’s generosity and love—and encouraging them to demonstrate these same values in their dealings with one another and with other nations. It was an uphill struggle, and many of the prophets were persecuted, imprisoned or even killed. But this message was at the heart of authentic Hebrew faith, and plays a large part in the books of the Old Testament. Not all the prophets had books named after them. Of those who did, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel (the so-called ‘major prophets”) have the longest, while twelve others (the ‘minor prophets”) are credited with much shorter books: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi. From what we know of them, it seems that the prophets themselves rarely made long speeches. They usually delivered short messages that could be easily remembered—many of them in poetry, though prophets were also on occasion mime artists and dramatists, acting out their messages in the market places and on street corners. ■ The former prophets These are the books of Joshua, Judges, 1-2 Samuel and 1-2 Kings, and in the Hebrew Bible they appear before ‘the latter prophets”. At first sight, they look to be so different that it is not obvious why they too should have been included as part of the Prophets. They read more like history books, telling the story of the nation from the time when their ancestors escaped from slavery, through to the time in the sixth century b.c. when their national capital was destroyed by the Babylonian empire and its people were deported. In between, we read of how, under kings David and Solomon, Israel briefly enjoyed a period of political stability and influence. But most of the remainder of the story describes how their grand kingdom split into two parts (Israel and Judah), both of which struggled to maintain their independence in the face of growing pressures from larger states, notably Egypt, Assyria, Babylon and Syria. The thing that makes these books also ‘prophets” is that they do not merely relate the stories but—like all good history books—interpret them, informing their readers what the stories mean and showing how they were to be understood in relation to the sweep of wider world history of the time. In doing that, their writers looked at things from the perspectives they had learned from the prophets. As they reviewed their nation’s history, they could see that whenever the people had commitfted themselves to God’s values and ways of doing things, they prospered—but when God’s demands for justice and love were forgotten, then the nation suffered. As we have already observed, Israelite faith was not focused on philosophical abstractions, but began with the way God had dealt with people in the experiences of everyday life. History was therefore very important, and was one of the key places where God’s activity could be seen. By a proper appreciation of its meaning and significance, as explained by the prophets, the people could discover how they were meant to live. All the prophetic works—former and latter—were regarded as accounts of how God had spoken to the people, sometimes through the events of history and at other times through the words of people. But in each case it was the same God, and the same message. THE WRITINGS This section includes all the remaining books of the Hebrew Bible. They are not all the same kind of works. Psalms, Proverbs and Job are very different from one another in content, for example, but they are all poetry. Then there are those books known as the ‘Megilloth’, or ‘five scrolls’: Ruth, Song of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations and Esther. Again, these five are all different styles and genres, but they were grouped together because each of them had a particular association with significant religious festivals: Ruth was used at Pentecost, Song of Solomon at Passover, Ecclesiastes at Tabernacles, Lamentations to commemorate the destruction of Jerusalem and Esther at Purim. There are also the books of Ezra, Nehemiah and 1-2 Chronicles, all of which relate to the situation in which the remnants of the people of Judah found themselves after they were allowed to return to their homeland in the years following 538 b.c., when the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great managed to overthrow the Babylonian empire. Last of all, there is the book of Daniel, containing visions and some stories, and relating to a later period still. The reason for this unusual arrangement of the books was probably historical, and the three sections roughly represent the three stages in which the Old Testament was put together. The first part of it to be permanently recorded was the Law, followed by the Prophets, and then much later by the Writings. This is why the books of Ezra, Nehemiah and Chronicles were included in the final section, rather than being placed alongside the other history books in ‘the former prophets’, for they were written much later and from the perspective of the age that survived the destruction of Jerusalem in the sixth century b.c. The books of Chronicles contain many of the same stories as the books of Samuel and Kings, but they are an analysis of the meaning of those stories and an application of their lessons to the people of a later generation. By then, both the Law and the Prophets were widely accepted as sacred and important collections of books, and it would not have been possible to make any further additions to their contents. How many books are in the Old Testament? There were thirty-nine books in the original Hebrew Bible. All Christian Bibles include these thirty-nine books as part of the Old Testament, but some contain additional works, which are variously referred to as the Apocrypha or deuterocanonical books. These were mostly written in Greek in the centuries immediately preceding the Christian era, and never formed a part of the Hebrew Bible. Different selections of them are contained in different versions of the Old Testament, though they typically include the following: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Wisdom of Ben Sira, Baruch, 1-2 Esdras, The Letter of Jeremiah, 1-4 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151, and various additions to the books of Esther and Daniel. After the time of the Persian empire, the world changed very rapidly, and it was not long before the ancient language of Hebrew was forgotten by all but a few, and Jewish people (the descendants of ancient Israel) were living in many different countries. In the time of Jesus, for example, there were more Jewish people in Alexandria in Egypt than there were in Jerusalem. The language most of these expatriates (or members of the Jewish Diaspora) spoke was Greek. By the time of the New Testament, the Hebrew scriptures were widely read in Greek translation, in a version known as the Septuagint (LXX). It was through this Greek version that these ‘extra’ books found their way into the Christian canon of the Old Testament, and their inclusion is related to the way the Septuagint evolved. It is customary today to speak of ‘the Septuagint’ as if it were simply a Greek Old Testament. But the facts are not so simple. Modern translators would begin with a complete Bible in Hebrew and Greek, and produce its equivalent in their own language. But what is now called the Septuagint was never a complete Bible until the early centuries of the Christian era. Before that, no one knew the techniques necessary to bind such a large collection of literature into one single volume. Writing materials were pain-stakingly made by hand and individual sheets would then be glued or stitched together to make a strip long enough to contain a single book. This would then be rolled up for storage, and to possess a complete Hebrew Bible required a large number of different rolls. In addition to this, different people were busy making their own translations of the Old Testament books into Greek—and when the Christians eventually produced a single-volume Greek Old Testament, they simply made a selection from the translations that were available to them. In the days before the Old Testament could literally become one book, bound together inside a single cover, the various rolls in which its writings were contained needed to be stored safely and were often kept in small boxes. These boxes were all of the same size, and were used as a classification system. If a particular box had unused space in it, it would be natural to fill it up by storing similar kinds of writings in the same boxes. This was probably how the deuterocanonical books came to be associated with the original writings of the Hebrew Bible. In content and style, they were not all that different from the books that had been translated from Hebrew, and it made good sense to keep them all together. In time, they came to be automatically accepted as constituent elements of the literature that collectively made up the Greek version of the Old Testament, and so when the early Christians came to bind them all into one volume, it was natural to include them, even though they had never been part of the Hebrew scriptures that evolved throughout the life of ancient Israel. Like the original thirty-nine books, they represent different types of literature. Some are clearly history books (1-2 Maccabees), while others are books of philosophy and religious poetry (Wisdom of Solomon, Wisdom of Ben Sira), and yet others are moralistic novels (Tobit, Judith, and the additions to Esther and Daniel), or apocalyptic writings claiming to give a clairvoyant view of the future (2 Esdras). Though these books are known primarily from early Christian copies of the Greek Septuagint, it is highly unlikely that they all came from the same sources. Fragments of some of them have been discovered written in Hebrew, while others were certainly first composed in Greek, and yet others were probably first written in Hebrew, but have only survived in their Greek or Latin versions. It is unclear how the Jewish community in Egypt, among whom the Greek version was produced, regarded these books, though there is no evidence to suggest that it was a matter of great importance until after the emergence of Christianity, when Judaism found it necessary to define which books were to be considered authoritative—partly in response to the way Christians were then using sections of the Hebrew scriptures. The New Testament contains references to the deuterocanonical literature (compare, for instance, Hebrews 1:3 with Wisdom of Solomon 7:25; Hebrews 11:37 with 2 Maccabees 5–7; John 10:22 with 1 Maccabees 4:59 and 2 Maccabees 10:1–8), and second-century Christian writers regularly quote from or refer to these books. However, following the increasing circulation of all kinds of documents purporting to be Christian ‘gospels’, it became necessary for Christians to define exactly which books they could accept as authoritative—and that inevitably meant that some kind of decision had to be made about the shape of the Old Testament, as well as the New. Jerome (a.d. c. 345–419) regarded the books of the Hebrew Bible as specially authoritative, though he felt that the others could be useful for more general edification, and he accordingly included them all in his Latin version of the Bible (the Vulgate). However, at the same period Augustine (a.d. 354–430), one of the early church’s greatest theologians, regarded the deuterocanonical books as fully authoritative. Subsequent generations of Christians perpetuated this ambivalence. The Protestant Reformer Martin Luther, for example, adopted Jerome’s policy of commending the deuterocanonical literature as valuable but not authoritative, though the Westminster Confession of Faith in 1646 denounced them as completely unbiblical. A century earlier, though, the Roman Catholic Council of Trent had insisted that (with the exception of 1-2 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh) they were an integral part of the canon. The Orthodox Church, for its part, has always accepted an even larger collection of literature as an authentic part of the Christian Old Testament scriptures. Archaeology and the Old Testament Comparing books on the Old Testament written a century or more ago with one written today, the thing that is most obvious is the radical change that has taken place in our knowledge of the world of the Bible. In the nineteenth century, study of the Old Testament was largely a literary affair: the text itself was studied in minute detail, and dissected in much the same way as a pathologist might deal with a corpse. But today, Old Testament study is vibrant and living, and is dominated by social and cultural considerations that would have been quite foreign to earlier generations of scholars. One of the major concerns of contemporary scholarship is to understand how the Old Testament fits into the world of its day, and to analyse its contents not just ideologically, but historically and sociologically. This has all been made possible through an enormous expansion of knowledge of the ancient world, and thanks to the consistent efforts of archaeologists we now have a better idea than ever before of what it was actually like to live in the world of ancient Israel. It is possible to appreciate the social and political realities of life in a new way that has shed untold light on many difficult passages of the Old Testament. Explorers have always had an interest in the materials left over from earlier civilizations. In the seventeenth century many ancient objects of interest and beauty were randomly seized and taken by such people to their wealthy patrons all over Europe, but it was not until the eighteenth century that anyone took a systematic interest in the subject. The archaeological exploration of Bible lands began when Napoleon’s armies invaded Egypt in 1798, taking with them a team of scholars to study the ancient monuments. They made many significant discoveries, one of the most useful being the Rosetta Stone which had an inscription in both Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphs, and enabled scholars to decipher ancient Egyptian for the first time. However, it was only at the end of the nineteenth century that rigorous procedures began to be applied to sites in the Bible lands on a widespread scale. A typical site in Palestine will take the form of a large mound, or tell. Many of these sites look just like large hills, perhaps as high as thirty or forty metres, and covered with trees or grass, but under the surface is to be found the remains of an ancient city. Sometimes cities were built on a natural hill, for that was an easy site to defend. But many of these tells began at ground level, and have been raised to their present height by the normal processes of building over many years. In the ancient world most buildings were made of mud and wood, and when a settlement was either destroyed by an enemy or just fell into decay, the inhabitants would gather together any available materials that could be reused, and set to work to build their own new town on the ruins of the old. The new level could be as much as two or three metres higher than the one that preceded it, which meant that over time the ground level was gradually raised, and the whole mound took on the structure of a giant gateau with many different layers superimposed one on top of the other. Excavation of a tell. Archaeologists have developed a number of basic procedures to guide their investigations at sites like this: ● Digging is done in such a way as to keep separate and distinct the successive strata, or layers, of occupation. The ideal way to do this, of course, would be to start at the top and slice off each layer in turn. But this would be impractical, taking up too much time and for that reason being impossibly expensive. Instead, the archaeologist usually cuts into the mound in much the same way as a slice might be cut from a cake. This technique can provide access to a cross-section of the mound’s contents in a process known as ‘stratigraphic excavation’. The one disadvantage is that the archaeologist can easily cut a slice at the wrong place in the mound and miss significant remains as a result. For instance, the site of the city of Hazor in northern Israel was excavated in 1928 by archaeologist John Garstang, who concluded that the city was deserted between 1400 and 1200 b.c. But thirty years later, the Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin dug a trench at a different point on the same mound, and found extensive evidence of people living there at just that period! ● If objects were to be removed and taken away indiscriminately, it would be impossible to assess their significance. To understand what they mean, they need to be studied in relation to the precise spot where they are uncovered and with respect to other items that are found alongside them. Making an accurate record of every level that is excavated and of every object that is found is therefore an essential part of the process. Plans must be drawn and photographs taken, because once a layer of a mound is removed, no one can put it back together again. ● Archaeologists must also compare what they find with what others have found in other places. Pottery provides a good example of the importance of this. For every basket of significant objects recovered, dozens of baskets of pottery are unearthed. This is because pottery was always in common use, and it was very easily broken—but it was virtually impossible to destroy completely. Fashions in pottery changed from time to time, and though some styles were in use for a long period, distinctive aspects of size, shape, texture and decoration were generally limited to a specific period. So when the same types are discovered at several different locations, it is reasonable to conclude that the layers in which they are found were occupied at about the same time. In fact, pottery is one of the most important clues to the dating of a particular find. Early in the twentieth century, English archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie realized this, and by comparing pottery from different sites and noting the various distinctive styles, he developed what he called a ‘Ceramic Index’—a catalogue of typical pottery types which could be accurately dated, and which has proved to be an invaluable aid to the work of all subsequent excavators. In trying to apply information discovered in this way to the study of the Old Testament, there are some basic principles that should always be borne in mind: ● Though the records of the Assyrian and Babylonian kings contain a good number of accounts of events that are also mentioned and described in the Old Testament, this kind of direct correlation is unusual. It is only rarely that archaeologists have discovered things with a direct and specific reference to events and people mentioned in the Bible. ● More often, archaeology helps to place the Old Testament story in its true context. It is, for example, highly unlikely that any archaeologist will ever find a reference to the story of Abraham, but investigations have shown that migrations like those described in the Genesis stories were taking place all over the Fertile Crescent during the second millennium b.c., and that some of the customs mentioned in Genesis were practised at the time. ● Occasionally, the findings of archaeologists can illuminate specific passages in the Old Testament. In 1 Samuel 4 there is the story of how the Philistines captured the ark of the covenant from Israel in a fierce battle near the town of Shiloh, where the ark was kept. Readers of the Bible had often surmised that Shiloh itself must have been destroyed at the same time, for when Israel recovered the ark it was not returned there. Excavation at the site has confirmed that Shiloh was indeed destroyed at the time of this incident in the eleventh century b.c. ● Archaeology is also often a help in interpreting difficult parts of the Old Testament. For example, Ezekiel 14:14 mentions three people as examples of great goodness: Daniel, Noah and Job. But it is curious that the prophet should place Daniel, believed to be one of his own contemporaries, in the same class as two ancient figures. Archaeology has shown that he was probably not talking of the hero of the Old Testament book of Daniel at all, but of an ancient king of similar name renowned for his religion and justice, who is mentioned in religious poems from Assyria to Canaan, some of which are nearly 1,000 years older than Ezekiel. ● Sometimes the findings of archaeology seem as if they cannot be reconciled with what is found in the Old Testament. For example, according to Joshua 7:1–8:29 a great battle was fought at a place called Ai during the conquest of Canaan, whereas archaeological evidence shows the town was destroyed about 2400 b.c. and was not rebuilt, which means there cannot have been a town there in the days of Joshua. Of course, there could be many reasons for this apparent discrepancy. It may be that archaeologists have wrongly identified the site: it would certainly not be the first time such a mistake had been made, though it seems unlikely in this instance. It is also possible that other discoveries could be made in the future which would resolve the problem. Or it could be, as many think, that we should look for the meaning of the Old Testament story elsewhere—perhaps in the fact that the word Ai in Hebrew means simply ‘the ruin’. Whatever the full explanation may be, it is important to take seriously both the Old Testament picture and the evidence that can be provided by archaeological investigation. Drane, J. W. Introducing the Old Testament. Completely rev. and updated. Oxford: Lion Publishing plc, 2000. Page 11.