The Old Testament for a Complex World

How the Bible's Dynamic Testimony Points to New Life for the Church

Howard, Cameron B. R.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781493430840
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

"This impressive analysis will resonate with any Christian interested in the evolution of biblical criticism."-- Publishers Weekly What if the Bible, which has come to us through a complex process, is just the resource we need to speak to the challenges of living as Christians in a complex world? In today's era of significant cultural upheaval, studying the Old Testament can seem impractical or irrelevant. This book reclaims the Old Testament as a vital resource for today's church, showing how critical study of these texts helps us understand the Bible as a dynamic testimony for our changing future.

1
The Bible’s Dynamic Witness

And why is that important for the church?”

I was at a dinner with colleagues when the retired seminary president sitting next to me asked for a synopsis of my recently completed dissertation. Like any emerging scholar, I was accustomed to that request, and I had developed a well-rehearsed speech of about three sentences that nicely encapsulated the project’s central question and the argument I was making in response to it. I gave a succinct summary of the Persian Empire’s bureaucratic impulses, the biblical texts in which those impulses are either reflected or satirized, and the ways in which my project synthesized methods to illuminate the historical impact of Persia on the literary style of the biblical text.

However, I was not similarly prepared for his follow-up question: “And why is that important for the church?” In fact, I was quite startled by it. I had entered the field of biblical studies because of a deep love for and fascination with the Bible, rooted in my ongoing, lifelong experience of church. In the weekly worship services of my childhood, I would follow along with the Old and New Testament readings in the pew Bible and then keep reading through the rest of the service. Church is where I learned to love the Bible, and I had taken it for granted that any discovery that broadens, however incrementally, our understanding of the biblical text, its backgrounds, or its interpretation through history would by definition be important for the church. Isn’t that why we go to seminary—to broaden and deepen our understanding? Isn’t that why seminaries hire scholars trained in critical methods of biblical studies to teach their students?

What I began to understand in my conversation with that seminary president, and what I have come to comprehend more fully in the years since, is that while many seminarians and pastors delight in their Bible courses as much as I enjoy teaching them, the connections between “what I learned in seminary” and “what I do every day in church work” are sometimes elusive. Classes in both Old Testament and New Testament richly inform the preaching life of pastors and empower them to teach the Bible well, but the finer points of academic biblical scholarship do not always feel “useful” when pledges are down 20 percent, you have three funeral services to conduct this week, and the machine that folds the bulletins has broken down. Faced with limited time and resources, biblical scholarship can feel like a luxury reserved for flourishes in sermons, rather than a foundational part of the everyday life of the church. That sense of irrelevance can be particularly magnified with regard to the Old Testament, which already struggles under the weight of a rampant, if often unintentional, tendency toward Marcionism in Christian churches. Many Christians regard the Old Testament as boring at best and fearsome, violent, and damaging at worst. It is widely avoided in the pulpit.1

Why is critical biblical scholarship important for the church? In this book I will offer an answer to that question by focusing on the dynamic nature of the Old Testament witness. The many and varied texts of the Bible developed in times of community turmoil, political unrest, and theological uncertainty. In the midst of those unsettled and unsettling contexts, the writers of the Old Testament innovated. They took existing texts, themes, and even theological assumptions and reworked them to meet the needs of a new day. As the world changed around them, they found new ways to tell old stories, and when the facts on the ground challenged core assumptions about how God works in the world, they reoriented themselves to new theological possibilities. In the midst of all the change, one element remained stable: the ongoing relationship between God and Israel, who, despite sprains, strains, and fractures in that relationship, remain tethered together throughout the biblical witness by covenant, ancestral commitments, and sheer tenacity.

Written in Stone

In the book of Exodus, when Moses descends from Mount Sinai after receiving the law from God, he brings with him “the two tablets of the covenant, tablets of stone, written with the finger of God” (Exod. 31:18).2 The depiction of these stone slabs engraved with the laws of God, by God, is perhaps the most widely recognized representation of a biblical text today. The image of Charlton Heston’s Moses cradling the tablets in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 film The Ten Commandments helped to cement their iconic status as a recognizable element of popular culture, not just a symbol within faith communities. Displays of the Ten Commandments on rounded stone slabs continue to dot cities and towns all over the United States, often igniting debates about the separation of church and state and the role of biblical law in the founding of the country.3

What do these popular depictions of the Ten Commandments say about the Bible? I will leave for other books the question of what the monuments mean for the relationship between the religious and the secular in the United States. My interest is in how our representations of the Bible and its texts reflect, as well as influence, what we understand the Bible to be. What do these granite renderings communicate about how we regard the Bible, and how do they in turn help to shape our expectations of the Bible when we read it? On purely aesthetic criteria, a monument in stone connotes immovability, steadfastness, and completion—hence the expression “set in stone.” Beyond the look and feel of the medium, however, the choice of monumentalizing the Ten Commandments symbolizes a static approach to what is a fundamentally dynamic text.

Listing the commandments communicates that the Bible is full of laws or, more narrowly construed, rules. To be sure, law is a fundamental element of the Hebrew Bible.4 The relationship between God and Israel is described as a covenant—that is, legal—relationship, and the laws are the stipulations of the covenant. The giving of the law at Sinai is an integral part of the Hebrews’ exodus from Egypt, neither separate from it nor incidental to it. Yet this context already alerts us to the fact that the law itself is communicated in a narrative framework, placing its revelation within the broader tale of the Hebrews’ enslavement, exodus, wilderness wanderings, and conquest. By no means is law the only genre, or type of text, in the Old Testament. In its pages we find stories, poems, lists, genealogies, and many more genres.

Biblical law itself also contains far more than just the Decalogue.5 Rabbinic tradition holds that there are 613 commandments in the Torah, not just ten. The legal material in the Torah also extends beyond absolute prohibitions or commands (known as “apodictic” law) to include case law (“casuistic”), which dominates the Covenant Code, the group of laws in Exodus following the Decalogue (Exod. 20:22–23:19). Casuistic law contains conditional regulations dealing with specific situations; for example, “When individuals quarrel and one strikes the other with a stone or fist so that the injured party, though not dead, is confined to bed, but recovers and walks around outside with the help of a staff, then the assailant shall be free of liability, except to pay for the loss of time, and to arrange for full recovery” (21:18–19). Rather than making sweeping religious or ethical demands, these laws articulate possible situations in the life of the community and suggest just restitutions for victims. Thus the Ten Commandments represent only a sliver of just the legal material, let alone all the material, in the Hebrew Bible. Lifting up the Decalogue as a representation of biblical law, while symbolically effective, can obscure the inherent diversity of the Old Testament corpus.

Furthermore, reifying the commandments in monument form implies that we know exactly what the Ten Commandments are. Usually Exodus 20:1–17 serves as the default list, but in fact there are three places in the Torah where a Decalogue appears, and none is an exact match for another. After Moses descends the mountain with the tablets, he discovers the people in the camp reveling in front of a golden calf that they implored Aaron to construct. Moses is so angry that he throws down the tablets and breaks them (Exod. 32:19). When God instructs Moses to make two new stones for a reissuance of the words of the covenant, the so-called Ritual Decalogue is reported in the text, instead of a repetition of Exodus 20 (34:11–26). Some of the commandments given here echo Exodus 20—for example, “You shall not make cast idols” (34:17)—but the list is nonetheless markedly different. Furthermore, Exodus 34:27–28 implies that “the words of the covenant, the ten commandments” written on the tablets are this Ritual Decalogue, not the classic formulation found in Exodus 20.6 Later, Deuteronomy 5 re-presents the Exodus 20 list but with a distinctly Deuteronomic twist: the rationale for keeping the Sabbath is not because God rested on the seventh day but because the Israelites were once slaves in Egypt.

Which of these lists was meant to be on the tablets Moses brought down from the mountain? Or was there something else written on them entirely? If we follow the order of the way things are presented in the text, the first set of tablets could have contained specifications for the tabernacle’s construction or even the entirety of the Covenant Code.7 The issue is complicated further when we consider that different interpretive traditions also number the commandments differently. Even though they all add up to ten, exactly what the ten are varies. In Jewish tradition, the first commandment is found in Exodus 20:2—“I am the LORD your God’’—which is considered an introductory statement in most Christian renderings and is not counted among the ten. The second commandment in Jewish tradition is then the totality of verses 3–6—no other gods before God, and no fashioning idols. Within Lutheranism, Judaism’s second commandment is counted as the first, and then the commandment not to covet (v. 17) is divided into two, so that the numbers still add up to ten. For the Reformed and Anglican traditions, the first commandment is no other Gods, the second is no idols, and the rest align with the Jewish ordering. Inscribing the commandments on stone necessarily asserts one interpretive tradition over the other, even as it obscures the ambiguity present within the biblical text itself.

Granite renderings of the Ten Commandments imply that the Bible is a static, steady, immovable text, written in stone, presented with clarity and certainty.8 Even all the “singular” language we use to talk about the Bible—the Bible, the Word (singular) of God, Scripture (as a singular, if also collective, noun)—can direct our attention away from the remarkable diversity of texts, values, possibilities, and proposals contained within it. That is not to say that these ways of describing the Bible are inaccurate or ill advised. On the contrary, reading the Bible in its canonical wholeness is a key part of the Christian interpretive tradition.9 Nevertheless, language shapes and reinforces how we think. The more we emphasize the singularity of the Bible without acknowledging and affirming the multiplicity within it, the more we risk overlooking elements of Scripture that can broaden and deepen our knowledge of God. This book does not claim that interpretation is an exercise in “relativism,” wherein there can be no adjudication between readings. Instead, it is an invitation to allow the dynamism of the Old Testament’s witness to be a vital part of the process of interpretation, rather than something smoothed over, corrected, or ignored.

Shifting Metaphors

In seminary we are taught—and rightly so—to conduct exegesis on texts. Exegesis is, simply put, critical analysis, and it can encompass a wide range of methods and approaches. Yet inherent in the etymology of the word “exegesis” is the notion of “drawing out” meaning, as if it might be locked inside the configurations of words and phrases on the page. In my own teaching I have often used the metaphor of “mining” the text for data as one way to think about exegesis. Both these concepts rest more or less on the notion that there is some static core of right interpretation buried in every text and that we just need to lasso it with our exegetical ropes and tow it out of its murky depths.

I propose that instead of conceptualizing interpretation as excavation, we think of every encounter between text and reader as an atomic particle collision. Atoms—the so-called building blocks of matter—are in constant motion. The more energized they are (for example, by being heated), the faster they move. They can combine with each other to form new molecules, as when two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen combine to form a water molecule (H2O). In every chemical reaction, electrons are rearranged and there is a transfer of energy, so that energy is either released or absorbed.10 In nuclear reactions, an atom’s nucleus is changed, and even larger amounts of energy are rel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The Bible’s Dynamic Witness
• 2. Adapting Popular Culture
• 3. Rethinking Theological Assumptions
• 4. Developing a New Genre
• 5. Biblical Foundations for Creative Change
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover