A Theological Introduction to the Pentateuch

Interpreting the Torah as Christian Scripture

Briggs, Richard S., Lohr, Joel N.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441236203
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

In this concise volume, a team of fresh Old Testament voices explores the theological dimensions of the Pentateuch and provides specific examples of critically engaged theological interpretation. This Pentateuch text is unique in that it emphasizes theological reading, serving as an affordable supplement to traditional introductory Pentateuch texts. Each chapter introduces theological themes and issues in interpretation then offers exegesis of one or two representative passages to model theological interpretation in practice. This useful text will be valued by students of the Old Testament and the Pentateuch as well as pastors.

1

The Book of Genesis*

Richard S. Briggs

On any account of Christian (and Jewish) Scripture, the book of Genesis stands out. Whether one approaches the book from the perspectives of popular culture, of science, of ethics, of history, or from any theological angle, the book of Genesis is a text that invites, and has long received, serious attention. It remains a fixture of general public awareness of the Bible long after most of the rest of the Old Testament (and much of the New) has receded from cultural prominence. Its stories retain their power through media ranging from the literary, such as in Steinbeck’s famous East of Eden,[41] to the musical, most famously in the long-running Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Its simple and elegant account of creation retains its startling value against any and all other accounts of origins, provoking controversy as much today as it doubtless did when it was written. Its notion of humans in the image of God continues to invite all manner of ethical, psychological, and philosophical reflection. And then in the wide-ranging fields of biblical studies, Genesis has long been the proving ground of many theories attempting to explain the origins and development of the Old Testament as a literary collection of texts.

The book’s impact is related to its extraordinary scope, ambition, and placement as the opening text of sacred Scripture. The very familiarity of Genesis can obscure some of its most striking features. It paints on a canvas designed to encompass all of human history, from the beginning to a specific point on the cusp of the narrative of Israel, stopping short of Moses and Israel’s exodus from Egypt. It opens with its narratives of “Adam” (“man”) and “Eve” (“mother of living”), of Cain (“I have gotten”) and Abel (“breath”), of Enosh (“human”) and the sons of God who “take” daughters of men as wives (6:2). Barely six chapters later, a cataclysmic flood appears to reset the narrative and return us to a new beginning, with Noah heading up a new “first family,” as one might say. All of these, along with many other aspects of the opening chapters of the book, play no further role in the Old Testament; they are not even mentioned. And then it becomes specific and focuses on one man, Abram (exalted father), and the trials and successes of him and his family and the generations that follow after him. The book becomes an extended tale of an extended family, focusing on themes of blessing (12:1–3), covenant (chs. 15 and 17), and the pursuit of a land that is barely in view by the end of its closing chapter. Indeed, its lengthy final narrative of Joseph and his brothers relocates the setting to Egypt and seems to put the major hopes of the Israelites in a fairly precarious state, raising instead the issues of how the people of God are to understand and act within the circumstance of finding themselves a long way from home, and equally far from the fulfillment of the promise. Some of these features of the book are key to understanding it well. At the same time, like any great narrative, it will always remain more probing and productive of fresh insight than any analysis of its constituent parts or themes.

Hermeneutical theory offers us the insight that there is a difference to be pondered here between the tasks of understanding Genesis and of explaining Genesis.[42] Explanations typically seek to offer an account of the text in such a way that all of it is fitted into the explanatory framework, which can then sometimes replace the text itself with its own paraphrase or theoretical way of looking at it. Thus, for example, one could suggest that the Joseph story was written to respond to life in exile as it was later experienced in the sixth century BCE, and then go on to interpret all the details of the story to fit this hypothesis. In contrast, understandings offer ways of looking at the text that draw out some aspects of its purpose and coherence from some readers’ perspectives, without necessarily prejudging other ways of interpreting that would draw out other aspects. Hence, to understand the Joseph story in the way just noted need not mean that one has the correct account of the historical origin of the written narrative. In turn, understandings can often generate further insights into new possible explanations—leading in turn to ways of reading that will also render coherent the text before us. If one pursues explanations alone, key though they are to accurate handling of the textual data, it can tend to offer the spectacle of a “survival of the fittest” as old theories fall by the wayside. In my judgment, theological interest in the scriptural text invites us to focus at least as much on understandings as on explanations, enabling one to move on from an account of how the text came to be before us, toward asking how one might read it well today. In this chapter we will seek the path of theological understanding of (some aspects of) the book of Genesis: inevitably partial and open to development, but nevertheless focused on highlighting aspects of its theological coherence and challenge for today’s readers. In the words of Mark Brett, “The laconic style of Genesis, and its opacities and ambiguities, suggest that we can engage with it only partially: we can never exhaust . . . its meaning.”[43]

Outline of Genesis

The book begins with creation. In particular, it offers a story-poem of a seven-day creation of “the heavens and the earth” (1:1), carefully structured to bring out the order and fittingness of the ecosystem described. The unfortunate chapter break after the creation of humanity on the sixth day obscures the more likely intention of marking the climax of creation as the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh and final day of the story (whereas, as the chapters now stand, it is easy to read Genesis 1 as suggesting that humans were the high point). Creation points to God, and God deems it very good. Indeed, so strong is this overall impression that it persists even if one observes that Genesis 1:3–5 leaves the strong sense that the darkness is not good, perhaps as an indicator of the “chaos” against which creation is set.[44]

There follows immediately a phrase that will recur throughout the book: “These are the generations (toledot) of . . .” (2:4). The plural noun toledot derives from the verb yld, “to give birth to or bear,” or, more traditionally, “to beget,” although many modern translations offer a range of words across the book such as “generations,” “descendants,” or “story.” Its elevenfold repetition through the book seems to create a sense of literary episodes occurring in a carefully structured narrative.[45] The phrase is more or less absent elsewhere.[46] It is common for analyses of Genesis to rely in some way or other on these “generational markers.” However, despite the obvious appeal of this move on a formal or structural level, it is not straightforwardly apparent how the phrase meaningfully orders the account as a whole. Certainly it serves to underline a coherence between chapters 1 and 11 and 12 and 50, though it has been debated as to whether this is to highlight a continuity between them or rather to draw them into the same frame of reference, for the purpose of emphasizing contrasting perspectives.[47] One function of the “generations of” formula is perhaps to emphasize the focus on the particular people through whom the narrative unfolds, gradually narrowing the notion of a chosen people as the book progresses.[48]

In terms of what takes up the bulk of the narrative, a simpler set of divisions might capture the basic movement of the finished book, whereby chapters 1–11 constitute a so-called primeval narrative, set outside the parameters of Israel as a focus; and then chapters 12–50 offer “ancestral narratives,” focusing on three major figures in one family line: Abraham (chs. 12–25), Jacob (27–35), and Joseph (37–50). Walter Brueggemann structures his commentary around this fourfold division and thematizes it as concerning the core notion of “the call of God.” That call is “sovereign” in the opening chapters; “embraced” by Abraham; “conflicted” in the life and experience of Jacob; and then “hidden” in the Joseph narrative in that, as is often observed, the God who has spoken and interacted with all the major characters thus far is not represented as speaking directly with Joseph.[49] Although one need not want to characterize the four sections in precisely this way, this is a helpful example of a reading that tries to discern some key theological aspects of the text. Of all the characters in the book, Abraham represents the original model of obedience to God’s word alongside receipt of God’s promise; while in certain senses Jacob is Israel personified. For Jacob, one should note especially a narrative like 32:22–32, wherein he “wrestles with God” but will not let his adversary go without being blessed by him (v. 26). During this contest he is specifically given the name “Israel” (v. 28). It has always been something of a puzzle why the book ends with such a long, continuous narrative about Joseph, who is only rarely mentioned outside Genesis. However, here it might be observed that the final “generations” marker in the text is at 37:2, and in fact describes this section of the book as “the toledot of Jacob” (which the NRSV deals with by translating as “the story of the family of Jacob”). Perhaps this gives a clearer idea of the way this story is understood to fit into the larger scheme of Genesis, as a story with a “corporate focus.”[50] We shall return to the theme of family below.

Two final notes on this discussion. First, some stories disrupt any attempt to offer an overly simplistic map of the narrative as a whole (such as the story of Tamar and Judah in ch. 38). Second, and more generally, it is odd that so much biblical commentary is concerned to provide analytical charts of how a book is “structured.” The narrative of Genesis does not have a single structure within it, if only because narrative in general does not work that way. On another occasion such an assertion might invite some theoretical justification before the massed ranks of those who like to “chart” or “outline” their biblical books (a practice that probably makes sense mainly on structuralist assumptions). Yet here we shall note only the relatively straightforward point made by Peter Leithart, that “multiple structure is virtually inescapable, especially in narratives and poetry,” and that there are in general a wide variety of possible structures depending on the point being brought into focus.[51]

Genesis in the Canon

Genesis comes first. Its canonical location is both so striking and yet so obvious that one almost forgets to reflect on the significance of its placement. But since the work of Brevard Childs and others, part of the changing frame of reference in Old Testament studies involves adding a “canonical perspective” to all the other ways in which the text invites the reader’s engagement.[52] Such a focus presumes upon the point that the production of the book of Genesis was long and drawn out before finally being brought together at some point in Israel’s history. Sometimes this has taken the form of arguments about the integration of different narrative “cycles” into the finished whole. The model for this process has sometimes focused on the integration of literary sources (as in the JEDP hypothesis), and at other times on the oral traditions by which stories have been passed down in Israel from generation to generation (before being drawn into literary units), the focus of Hermann Gunkel’s significant work on Genesis.[53] On either account, the book we have at the beginning of the canon is the achievement of some redactor(s), and in addition there is clear evidence of editorial adjustment occurring over a period of time, such as in the asides to the readers like Genesis 12:6, “At that time the Canaanites were in the land.” Although this is not the place for a discussion of all these issues, the overall conclusion is clear, as stated by Childs in his introduction to Genesis: “It has become increasingly obvious that a complex literary history preceded the present structure.”[54]

Once granted, such a perspective opens up the possibility of reflecting on why the book has been given the shape and position in the canon that it now occupies. With regard to shape, Childs follows the above observation with “Yet it is also clear that the present order has often assigned a different role to a passage from that which it originally performed.”[55]

With regard to canonical location, the case of Genesis is simplified by the basic observation that it has always and only come first. But as with the analysis of the composition of Genesis, so also with the composition of the whole Old Testament: that Genesis comes first is not the same as saying that it was written first. In fact, as noted above, many of its most famous stories and figures appear either not at all or relatively little in the rest of the Old Testament. One of the simplest ways to account for this historically is to suppose that there was no “book of Genesis” quite as we now have it, standing at the head of any collection of holy scriptures that might have been around in preexilic Israel. Scholars who have dated the book (in its final written form) to the Persian period, perhaps in the fifth century BCE, are offering an account that makes good sense of the fact that these stories are not appealed to elsewhere in the canon. This is particularly true of Genesis 1–11; yet with the notable exception of Psalm 105, relatively few Old Testament texts mention many of the other characters from elsewhere in Genesis either. And where they do, it is not to point to any sort of narrative or structuring of the accounts of their exploits (which in some ways Ps. 105 does do) so much as to draw on what could well be independent “story units” referring, with little narrative context, to Abraham or Jacob.[56] Such references point to the circulation of stories that later become part of the canonical Genesis, but not to an early completed book of Genesis. All this shows that canonical readings are deeply implicated in various sorts of historical investigation, and in the process they open up productive theological lines of inquiry. A canonical approach suggests that instead of just “being first,” and being a book of “beginnings” somewhat by default, the book of Genesis is deliberately first, placed there for (perhaps) some theological reasons.

How then might one reflect on the book’s present canonical location? We may consider several examples of how some theological issues are thrown into sharper relief when seen this way. Creation itself is an obvious example. Whatever one concludes with regard to the historical rise of a belief in creation in Israel, which is usually dated relatively late in its development, and which takes different forms at different times, the net effect of beginning Scripture with Genesis 1 is to realign the overall perspective in strongly creation-focused terms. In the midst of many other things that a careful reader of the Old Testament will want to say about creation, the inherently peaceful and ordered account of Genesis 1 is given an undeniable prominence by its canonical location.[57] Second, Genesis is somewhat unusual in the Old Testament for its largely familial frame of reference. Does this suggest an emphasis on the significance of theological reflection on family life? We shall consider this particular topic later.

Other points of theological reflection are also given canonical emphasis. Is the book, and especially chapters 1–11, designed to provoke the reader of Scripture to retain a wider (global?) frame of reference as the setting of the story of Israel? For much of Israel’s history, it may have been conceptually straightforward to think of Yhwh as the God of Israel, and indeed of the land of Israel, but around the time of the exile, one can see how Israel’s sense of its own position among the nations of the world would have been a pressing question. It is striking to reflect that Israel’s Scriptures did not begin with any claim that it was the first nation, or the original location of God’s w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Book of Genesis*
• 2 The Book of Exodus*
• 3 The Book of Leviticus*
• 4 The Book of Numbers*
• 5 The Book of Deuteronomy*
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Scripture Index
• Notes
• Back Cover