Making Sense of the Old Testament (Three Crucial Questions)

Three Crucial Questions

Longman, Tremper, III

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9781585586103
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

A noted biblical scholar explores three questions Christians often ask about the Old Testament and provides answers that are both satisfying and understandable.

What Are the Keys to Understanding the Old Testament?

An Overview of Old Testament Study: Attractions and Obstacles

The Attractions of the Old Testament

1. GRIPPING STORIES

In my travels and correspondence, I see that Christians have an increasing interest in the Old Testament. While, in my opinion, we still don’t spend enough time studying and reflecting on God’s revelation before the coming of Jesus, I am extremely excited to observe that people are turning to the Hebrew Bible to learn more about God and more about a godly life.

A variety of factors have been attracting Christians to the Old Testament lately. Prominent among them are its gripping stories. We love stories. A good story can hold our attention for hours. We will stay rooted in a chair as we listen to someone tell a story or as we read a good book.[1]

The Old Testament is a repository of varied stories about the most fascinating people. As we begin in Genesis, we encounter the story of Abraham’s physical journey from Ur of the Chaldees to the Promised Land and of his developing relationship with God. We read about Joseph, cast into a pit by his brothers, rising to a position of great prominence in Egypt, and saving his family, the people of God, from death by starvation. Next comes Exodus with its tales of Moses and the burning bush, the ten plagues, and the crossing of the Red Sea. The list goes on and on: Joshua and Jericho; Samson and Delilah; David and Goliath; Elijah and Elisha; Ezra and Nehemiah. These stories stimulate our imaginations and evoke deep emotions.

As we read Old Testament stories, we encounter not only spellbinding plots, but vivid characters. We do not get modern-style biographies in the Bible, but we do find character portraits. We have an intuitive understanding that these character portraits are given to us to help us navigate life. Paul in fact explicitly tells us that that is their purpose. In 1 Corinthians 10:1–11 he recalls to mind some significant events from Old Testament history and then offers a generalization: “These events happened as a warning to us, so that we would not crave evil things as [our ancestors] did or worship idols as some of them did” (vv. 6–7). Among the more potent warnings is the account of the disastrous consequences of Solomon’s marriages to foreign wives (1 Kings). His transformation from the wisest of all kings to a fool who brings down the kingdom is a solemn caution against godless entanglements.

In addition to warnings, the Old Testament narratives present us with ideals to emulate. Daniel and his three friends serve as an extraordinary example of faith during persecution. When cast into the furnace, the three friends trusted God even though they knew they might be roasted alive. Listen to their testimony to Nebuchadnezzar: “We do not need to defend ourselves before you. If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God whom we serve is able to save us. He will rescue us from your power, Your Majesty. But even if he doesn’t, Your Majesty can be sure that we will never serve your gods or worship the gold statue you have set up” (Dan. 3:16–18). These Old Testament stories have additional punch because they are true. We can learn much from fiction, but our attention is riveted by historical characters and events that actually happened.

2. HEART-WRENCHING POEMS

But there is more to the Old Testament than stories. A good portion of the Old Testament is poetic.[2] Poetry in ancient Hebrew, as in most other literary traditions, is compressed language, saying a lot in only a few words. Poetry is particularly appealing because it so obviously addresses us as whole people. It is not interested just in informing our intellects, but in evoking our emotions, stimulating our imaginations, and influencing our wills.

The Psalms have been a perpetual favorite among Christians. Throughout church history the Psalms have been used as sources for hymns, as encouragements to prayer life, and as corporate responsive readings. These poems, the expressions of their authors’ intense emotions, never make concrete (except perhaps in their titles) the particular situation that gave rise to their joy or sorrow. The historical nonspecificity of the Psalms renders them an appropriate vehicle for community worship. In other words, later worshipers can appropriate the Psalms for their own prayers and mold the words to fit their own situation. We in effect become the “I” of the psalm.

John Calvin observed that as we pray or sing a psalm, that psalm serves as a mirror of our soul: “What various and resplendent riches are contained in this treasure, it were difficult to find words to describe. . . . I have been wont to call this book, not inappropriately, an anatomy of all parts of the soul; for there is not an emotion of which anyone can be conscious that is not here represented as in a mirror.”[3] Just as a physical mirror reflects our physical appearance, the Psalms afford us a look into our soul. If we feel at one with the psalmist as he expresses his love for God, then we know that our relationship with God is strong. On the other hand, we may find that Psalm 130, which begins, “From the depths of despair, O LORD, I call for your help,” better expresses what we feel. The latter is typical of the lament psalms, which reflect disorientation in relationship with the Lord. Such psalms, with only one exception (Ps. 88), point us back to God by concluding with either an expression of confidence in him or a hymn of praise.

3. IMAGES OF GOD

Christians are also drawn to the Old Testament because we encounter God in its pages. God reveals himself not only to his Old Testament people, but to us who read these accounts millennia later. The first two chapters of the Bible describe God as Creator of the cosmos and the source of human life. After the fall in Genesis 3, God appears in various forms to his chosen people to rescue them from distress, protect them from danger, and inform them of his will. To Abraham he appears as a flaming torch in a smoking pot (Gen. 15:17); to Moses he shows his back (Exod. 33:12–23); to the Israelites in the wilderness God makes his presence known through a pillar of fire and a cloud of smoke. These and many other appearances (theophanies) confront the reader with a God of mystery who reveals himself only partially (though truly) to his people.[4]

God also chooses to reveal himself in the Old Testament through metaphor, which serves the same purpose of preserving the mystery of God. Through imagery God shows himself to his people, while also veiling himself. It is of the nature of metaphor to communicate truly but not precisely. In what way is God like a father? a warrior? a shepherd? a husband?

Note that most of the metaphors for God that we encounter in the Old Testament are relationship metaphors. God’s fatherhood presupposes our sonship. God as a warrior implies that we are soldiers in his army. Since relationship is so crucial to our human experience, we find ourselves drawn to these Old Testament metaphors to understand ourselves.

4. GUIDANCE FOR LIFE

Along the same line, Christians find themselves attracted to the Old Testament in the hope that we might there gain insight into how to navigate life. This expectation accounts for the rise of interest in the law and wisdom literature, particularly the Book of Proverbs, among Christians. We hope to find principles for living that transcend the ancient world to shape our attitudes and behavior today. Some even feel that the Old Testament goes beyond individual guidance to provide a blueprint for society, the basis for a contemporary legal code for a nation that wants to please God.

5. BACKGROUND TO THE NEW TESTAMENT

The more time one spends in the New Testament, the more one realizes how much of it flows from the Old. That one cannot really understand the New Testament without being steeped in the Old is an inescapable conclusion.

Why did Jesus have to die? What does Paul mean when he says that Jesus was the second Adam (Rom. 5:12–21)? What is the significance of Jesus’ dying just before the Jewish festival of Passover? Why is there so much warfare imagery in the Book of Revelation? Finding the answers to such questions depends in large measure on a thoroughgoing acquaintance with the Old Testament.

Obstacles to Understanding the Old Testament

For a host of reasons, then, Christians find themselves reading and studying the Old Testament with eagerness. Both the narratives and the poetry of the Old Testament not only are riveting, but have the potential to transform our lives. They prepare the way for the coming of the Savior, Jesus Christ.

However, we must also admit that the church’s interest in the Old Testament is highly selective. Christians struggle with the Old Testament because they find large parts of it hard to understand and of doubtful relevance to their lives. It is ever so difficult to discipline ourselves to read it regularly. Ministers often avoid preaching from the Old Testament, concentrating on the more obviously relevant New Testament.

Even when we do make an effort to read the Old Testament, we are often baffled concerning its meaning. Why are we so passionless as we approach this large portion of God’s Word? Why do we have such difficulty understanding its message and, perhaps most tellingly of all, its implications for our lives? I would suggest that the Christian community’s ambivalence about the Old Testament is the result of more than our sin or our lack of intelligence. The reasons range from the mundane to the theological. Among the major causes of the feeling of distance from the Hebrew Bible are (1) its length, (2) its antiquity, (3) its foreignness, and (4) its place in the history of God’s redemption. These four characteristics distance the reader at the beginning of the third millennium A.D. from the Word of God as it was revealed to his ancient people Israel before the coming of Jesus Christ.

1. LENGTH AND DIVERSITY

Long books are harder to read than short ones even when they are gripping novels. On a recent plane trip I overheard two Tom Clancy fans discussing his new book Executive Orders. They had read all the previous books recounting the exploits of their hero Jack Ryan. This latest volume was exciting enough, but it was over one thousand pages long, and in small print. They were struggling to get through it, but were determined to do so.

The Old Testament is a long book. Indeed, it constitutes 77 percent of the Bible. Not only is it hard to get through by virtue of its length, but the diversity of the writings also proves a formidable barrier. There are vast differences as one moves from Exodus to Leviticus, for example. The exciting story of the Israelites’ release from Egyptian bondage is temporarily suspended for a technical discussion of sacrifices and priests. The story line of the Bible is often interrupted by laws, prophetic oracles, or lyric poetry. Thus it is a hard book to pick up and read from cover to cover. As a result, we find it difficult to get a sense of the whole. We read piecemeal, a psalm here and a chapter of prophecy there.

Let me take this opportunity to suggest that a frequent obstacle to reading large portions of the Old Testament, and the New for that matter, is the type of translation used by many Christians. Most translations of the Bible lack the compelling literary quality of the original languages. The literal, stilted, and sometimes archaic language which is used in the majority of English translations does not reflect the literary power of the original Hebrew stories and poems. The false notion that literal is more accurate, or that religious language must sound like Shakespearean English, has led to the production of English Bibles that are tedious to read. Please understand that I think literal versions like the New American Standard Bible and the New International Version have an important place in the church and in our study, as do high-style versions like the King James and the New Revised Standard. However, we must also acknowledge that they hinder sustained reading of large portions of Scripture.

2. ANTIQUITY

In addition to being long, the Hebrew Bible is old, surely older than most books we read. True, the Old Testament is not the oldest writing we have. There are important religious and literary works from Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Canaan that predate the earliest portion of the Bible by centuries. Nonetheless, the Bible’s antiquity provides a challenge to our understanding.

We sometimes forget how distanced we are from the Old Testament in terms of date. That is because many of us have grown up with a Bible in the home. Accordingly, we have a sense that it belongs to our time, our era, but that is misguided. The parts of the Old Testament closest to us in time come from no later than 400 B.C., nearly two-and-one-half millennia before we were born. These parts include postexilic works like 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.

The oldest part of the Hebrew Bible is considerably older than the postexilic works. According to the Bible itself, Moses was the first individual to actually write down divine revelation for posterity. God had revealed himself before the time of Moses, but Moses was the first to inscripturate the revelation. Here arises the problem of when exactly to date Moses. Traditionally, most evangelical scholars have understood the Scriptures (passages like 1 Kings 6:1 provide guidance in this regard) to point to the fifteenth century B.C. for the time of Moses. However, the evidence can possibly be interpreted to indicate a period of time some two centuries later.[5] This is not important for our purposes; it is clear that the earliest portions of the Old Testament were written about one thousand years before the last parts.

Besides noting the antiquity of the Old Testament, we should be aware of the incredible length of time during which it came into existence. One thousand years is a long, long time. We must keep this vast space of time in mind as we read the different parts of the Old Testament.

3. CULTURAL DISTANCE

Culture is difficult to define because its origins, motivations, and developments are highly complex phenomena. Art, music, relationship styles, attitudes toward strangers, clothing, forms of entertainment are all expressions of culture. Adding to the difficulty of definition is the fact that culture represents the tastes not of individuals, but of society at large.

But even if we cannot define it precisely, we intuitively recognize differences in culture. We look at a picture from the sixties and chuckle at the hairstyles, the peace sign, the tie-dyed shirts, and the painted Volkswagen van. When we go to a museum of ancient artifacts, we are in for an even bigger shock. The art, literary expressions, relationships, and the practice of warfare strike us as bizarre. We may think to ourselves that if a time machine carried us back, the experience would be similar to encountering an alien from another planet.

Now the Bible was God’s Word to a specific people. It was, like his Son, incarnational. God did not reveal himself in some type of transcultural way (which is in fact an inconceivable notion). God’s people lived in a specific culture, and he condescended to address them by using the conventions of their day. We see this most clearly in the fact that he spoke to them in Hebrew. In order for us to hear God’s Word today, we must bridge the cultural gap by translating the Hebrew into English. Such a task entails learning the linguistic conventions of Hebrew and working hard at rendering God’s message in a modern idiom that reflects his ancient intention.

But it is not just language that is at issue here. Images, such as God as a shepherd (a royal image in the ancient Near East), drew from the contemporary experience of the ancient people of Old Testament times. Literary genres such as the treaty form of Deuteronomy arose in the ancient Near East and are not recognizable immediately today, because we do not use such forms.

All of this is to say that it is not only because of its length and antiquity that we find ourselves distanced from the Old Testament; we also must take into account that we are modern (or postmodern, if you prefer) African-Americans or white Americans reading ancient Semitic literature. We will encounter strange customs, literary forms, and institutions. We must take into account the cultural form of the text as we seek to understand and apply it to our own situations.

4. POSITION IN THE HISTORY OF REDEMPTION

The fourth reason why we feel distanced from the Old Testament may be the most important. As Christians, our faith is appropriately focused on Jesus Christ, who died on the cross and was raised to save us from our sin. He is the one in whom we have the hope of eternal life. We learn about Jesus most clearly in the pages of the New Testament, not the Old. When we turn to the Old Testament, we find a religion which leaves us cold. We read of priests, sacrifice, festivals, circumcision, food laws, and the like. We read of bloody wars against Israel’s enemies and encounter psalms beseeching God to take a foe’s child and dash its head against a rock. When it comes to the all-important...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Editors’ Preface
• Author’s Preface
• 1. What Are the Keys to Understanding the Old Testament?
• 2. Is the God of the Old Testament also the God of the New Testament?
• 3. How Is the Christian to Apply the Old Testament to Life?
• Notes
• Recommended Reading
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index