An Introduction to the Old Testament, Third Edition

The Canon and Christian Imagination

Walter Brueggemann, Tod Linafelt

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781646980116
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

In this updated edition of the popular textbook An Introduction to the Old Testament, Walter Brueggemann and Tod Linafelt introduce the reader to the broad theological scope of the Old Testament, treating some of the most important issues and methods in contemporary biblical interpretation. This clearly written textbook focuses on the literature of the Old Testament as it grew out of religious, political, and ideological contexts over many centuries in Israel's history. Covering every book in the Old Testament (arranged in canonical order), the authors demonstrate the development of theological concepts in biblical writings from the Torah through postexilic Judaism.

Incorporating the most current scholarship, this new edition also includes concrete tips for doing close readings of the Old Testament text, and a chapter on ways to read Scripture and respond in light of pressing contemporary issues, such as economic inequality, racial and gender justice, and environmental degradation. This introduction invites readers to engage in the construction of meaning as they venture into these timeless texts.

PART I

The Torah

3

Introduction to the Torah

Many interpreters are now returning—after centuries of hypercriticism—to a view that the text of Genesis–2 Kings (excepting Ruth, following the Hebrew Bible order) constitutes the “Primary Narrative” of ancient Israel that funded the imagination and fidelity of Judaism. Such a judgment is quite traditional and must ignore important distinctions, both critical and canonical. It must ignore the canonical distinction between the Torah and the Prophets that indicates a radical divide in the literature between Deuteronomy and Joshua at the death of Moses. It must, in turn, also disregard the common critical distinction between the Priestly material that shapes Genesis–Numbers and the Deuteronomic theology that derives from Deuteronomy and that dominates the corpus of Joshua–Kings.

To the extent that we may entertain the notion of such a Primary Narrative, these nine books (counting 1 and 2 Samuel as one, and 1 and 2 Kings as one) offer an imaginative portrayal of Israel’s memory that runs from the creation of the world (Gen 1) to the exile of Israel in Babylon (2 Kgs 25). There is no doubt that 2 Kings 25:27–30 voices a definitive literary, historical, and theological ending. Given that ending, whereby royal Judah winds up in deportation to an “unclean land,” the Primary Narrative is an act of uncommon imagination that dares to claim that the story of the world—of heaven and earth—culminates in the deportation of the leading inhabitants of Jerusalem to a foreign land. This imaginative construal of the “story of the world” evidences a profound conviction that the “story of the world” is “our story,” that is, the story of the generation of Israelite exiles. Beyond that, the canonists dare to assert that this self-centered conviction is an inspired truth concerning not only Israel but the God of Israel: God’s intention for the world has come to a deep and sad caesura in this moment of the sixth-century Jewish exile. In any case, such an extended narrative exhibits a shrewd interpretive capacity to bring together the largest truth of the world with the most concrete reality of Israel’s life, an interpretive capacity that is uncommon but characteristic of the text of the Old Testament.

Even when we accept this notion of a Primary Narrative, we must slow down enough to make important distinctions, and so segment the narrative into its smaller units, distinctions that are noticed in the formation of the canon itself.

The Primary Narrative (Genesis–2 Kings) is decisively interrupted by the canonical distinction of the Torah (Genesis–Deuteronomy) on the one hand and Former Prophets (Joshua–Kings) on the other. That important distinction in the literature reflects both the hidden story of literary development as well as a different theological judgment about the normative character and authority of these two quite distinct canonical pieces. As we shall see, the interruption between Torah and Former Prophets is not only formal but substantive. It is at this break in the narrative that Moses dies: by ending the Torah with the death of Moses, the tradition means to assert that Moses is the normative character and teacher who vouches for the authority of the corpus of the Torah. This does not mean that Moses was the “author” of this literature in any modern sense of authorship, but that the literature claims the unrivaled authority of this character in the tradition. At this break point, moreover, Israel enters the land of promise (in Joshua). Thus the Torah of Moses and the life of Moses must conclude prior to entry into the land, for as founder he is explicitly prohibited from entering the land of promise (see Deut 34:4).

The Former Prophets (Joshua–Kings) reflect on Israel in the land, in contrast to the Torah, which presents Israel as a pre-land people passionately en route to the land (J. Sanders 1972). In the present chapter, we will consider the Torah and defer until later a discussion of the Former Prophets. Nevertheless, it is clear that the two bodies of literature, subunits of the Primary Narrative, are intimately connected. The pre-land Torah looks “with eager longing” to the narrative of the land, and the land narrative of the Former Prophets looks to the pre-land literature as normative for life in the land. The dialectic of not in the land/in the land is definitional for Israel’s self-understanding as given in these texts. It is this dialectic that makes the linkage of the two units in the Primary Narrative poignant and compelling, for understanding this dialectic is crucial for the theological claims of the Old Testament.

I

The Torah comprises the first five books of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. In Christian usage the term “Torah” is characteristically mistranslated as “law” (based on the Greek nomos); it is better rendered as “instruction,” that is, a teaching that gives guidance. In its final, canonical form, the Torah is the normative instruction of Judaism and, derivatively, the normative tradition to which Jesus and the early church regularly appeal. The Torah instruction is constituted by a combination of narrative and commandments, though it is not clear how the two relate to each other. A great deal of scholarly energy has been used in seeking to understand this relationship. Adele Berlin writes:

Is the Torah a series of legal collections with narrative sections serving as the glue that holds them together, or is the Torah primarily a narrative, with some blocks of legal material inserted here and there? . . . Is the narrative the background for the laws or is the law a detail of the narrative? This is like asking whether in the perceptual puzzle the image is an urn or a human profile. In the Torah, there could be no set of laws without the narrative of revelation and no narrative of revelation without the laws. The laws would have no raison d’être without the revelation narrative and the revelation would have no content without the laws. While we need to continue to analyze individual laws and law collections, we also need to consider the possibilities of more profound meanings that the laws together with their narratives may evoke. (Berlin 2000, 25, 30–31)

Critical scholarship has spent long years of effort on the literary prehistory of the Torah, that is, the complicated traditioning processes that eventually arrived at the five scrolls that came to constitute the canonical, normative Torah. In sum, that phase of critical scholarship over a period of 250 years reached the conclusion that the Torah is constituted (a) by the use of a rich and complex variety of traditions that derive from many contexts (including ready appropriations from non-Israelite materials and cultures) and (b) by shaping and interpreting those materials, over time, through a steady, fairly constant theological intentionality. That is, the traditioning process is a sustained practice of appropriation and transformation of available materials. The outcome is a complex tradition, a product of an equally complex traditioning process that roughly—quite roughly—serves as an attestation to the character, purpose, and presence of YHWH, the God of Israel who is the creator of heaven and earth and who is the deliverer and commander of Israel.

It is evident, however, that this steady interpretive resolve does not everywhere fully prevail in the text that became the Torah, so that the Torah itself reflects ongoing tension between a variety of materials that continue to have something of their own say and a theological intentionality that seeks to bring coherence to the complexity and variety of the materials and, where necessary, to override and trump the initial claims of extant materials. More critical study (to be found in the academy) attends primarily to the complexity and variety of the materials, whereas more focused “church interpretation” gives primary attention to the theological constancy produced by the canonical traditioning process. Our judgment is that our reading must attend to both of these tasks and to permit neither to silence or depreciate the other. It is clear to us, moreover, that neither of these perspectives is privileged as more intellectually respectable, so that the demanding part of responsible interpretation is to take seriously both the critical attentiveness to the variety and complexity and the “canonical” impetus toward constancy and coherence.

It is an old, traditional assumption of Bible reading, reflected in New Testament attribution, that the Torah is authorized (and therefore “authored”) by Moses (see, for example, Matt 19:7–8; 22:24; Mark 1:44; 7:10; Rom 9:15; 10:5, 19; 1 Cor 9:9; 10:2). We must recognize at the outset that such a traditional way of speaking of the “Torah of Moses” was a device whereby Israel credited its normative teaching to its most normative teacher. The claim for Moses did not entail the notion of “authorship” in any modern sense, for the tradition is interested in authority, not in authorship. The issue of “Mosaic authorship” of the Torah has been an endlessly vexing issue over a long period of time, and critical scholars have used much energy uncovering the complexity of traditioning that is covered over by the “authorship of Moses.” We may mention four ways of scholarship that have been variously important in the study of that complexity.

1. Julius Wellhausen summarized and consolidated a long effort of critical scholarship in the “Documentary Hypothesis” (also known as “Source Theory”), proposing that the Torah reached its final form in a series of successive “documents” or “sources,” each of which reflected and articulated a particular mode of Israel’s religion. His great book, originally published in German in 1878, was the decisive presentation of the hypothesis that has dominated Old Testament scholarship for over a century (Wellhausen 1994; see Miller 2000, 182–96). The hypothesis was an attempt, in nineteenth-century categories of German academic life, to attest to and understand the complex traditioning process evident in the text itself. (For an updated version of the Documentary Hypothesis, see Friedman 1997.)

2. Hermann Gunkel sought to go behind Wellhausen’s “documents” in order to recover the characteristic genres of oral communication underlying the material that came to constitute the hypothetical documents (Gunkel and Begrich 1998 [original German, 1933]). By introducing formal categories of “myth, legend, saga, fable, and novella,” Gunkel called attention to the artistic, imaginative dimension of the material that could not be regarded in any scientific way as “history.” Thus Gunkel opened the way for an appreciation and study of the text that was not contained in the dominant historical categories of Wellhausen. It is an oddity of scholarship that it has taken over a century for the insight of Gunkel to impact study in the field in a major way. It is Gunkel who pointed the way for “traditioning” as distinct from a more exacting notion of “history.”

3. William Foxwell Albright, the premier figure in U.S. “biblical archaeology,” presided over a major attempt to demonstrate that the biblical materials, matched to nonbiblical evidence, in large measure can be shown to be “historically reliable” (McKim 1998, 558–62). At mid-twentieth century, the enterprise of biblical archaeology was a powerful scholarly force in which theological interpretation of the Old Testament largely proceeded (even among the most critical scholars) on the assumption that the text reflected authentic history. That judgment was highly tendentious on the part of those who held a faith claim about the Bible. In the last two decades, the immense influence of that approach has been overturned; the field is now open to a profound skepticism about the historical reliability of the biblical text. It should be noted that this skepticism is potentially as highly tendentious as the earlier fideism, and the question of history remains open.

4. Gerhard von Rad was perhaps the most influential theological interpreter of the Old Testament in the twentieth century. In 1938 he published an article that laid out the main lines of his approach, a perspective that was later exposited in his two-volume Old Testament Theology (von Rad 1966, 1–78; 1962; 1965). Von Rad proposed that the early “historical” traditions of the Old Testament began as a short confessional credo that was then regularly modified, expanded, and reiterated in new circumstances in subsequent generations. This approach made it possible to understand the traditioning process in all its dynamism. At the same time, von Rad was able to finesse historical questions by easily assuming the congruity between the “historical confessions” of the text alongside “history” understood in more scientific terms (Brueggemann 2001b, ix–xxxi). Indeed, it is the collapse of that uneasy compromise that has made “historicity” such an acute question in current Old Testament studies.

These major scholarly efforts, each reflecting a certain cultural moment, have made important contributions to our understanding of the text. Each, however, also reflects a mood of scholarship and a way of putting a research question that could not subsequently be undertaken by any scholar. That is, the particular interpretive question tends to belong to and reflect certain assumptions that do not persist over time. The gain of this scholarship is to understand (a) that the textual material is uncommonly complex and variegated and outruns our best interpretive categories, and (b) that interpretation, in every cultural setting, reflects a real world of cultural practice and of contested faith.

We may identify two newer approaches that go in different and quite fresh directions but that oddly converge in surprising ways. In 1979 two definitive books on method were published. Brevard Childs, the most influential Christian theological interpreter of the Old Testament in the United States, published his Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture, in which he considered the “canonical shape” of each book of the Old Testament (Childs 1979). He proposed that whatever the prehistory of the literature may have been (à la Wellhausen and Gunkel), the “final form” of the canonical text is a major theological achievement. The traditioning process is one that led to canon, the production of a normative theological statement. Childs’s accent, in contrast to older critical study, is on the theological constancy of the corpus. To be sure, Childs has been much criticized for seeming to disregard the complexity of the literature that critical study has noticed, and by seeming to find theological coherence too readily in the text. Nonetheless, Childs has generated a perspective from which church interpreters are able to proceed concerning the main theological claims of the text.

In the same year, Norman Gottwald published his definitive book, The Tribes of Yahweh, in which he offered a sociological reading of the Moses-Joshua traditions according to the categories of Marxian analysis (Gottwald 1979). The outcome of Gottwald’s work is to propose that the Torah provides a militant YHWH-based ideology for the mounting of a social revolution whereby the “tribes of Israel” overthrew and destroyed the system of Canaanite city-states and their practices of economic exploitation. In that YHWH-based ideology, YHWH is understood to be the legitimator of a social ideology that intends an egalitarian or communitarian society, a society quite alternative to the conventional practice of “Canaan.” Not surprisingly, Gottwald’s radical proposal has been sharply criticized, both because of his historical conjectures and because of his reliance upon Marxian categories of interpretation. As one might expect, Childs rejects Gottwald out of hand, though Gottwald himself pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the Third Edition
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Introductory Materials
• Part I: The Torah
• Part II: The Prophets
• Part III: The Writings
• Concluding Reflections
• Bibliography
• Index of Scripture
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects