Old Testament I

Exodus shows us that God is a God of mercy and grace. He is patient, full of loving-kindness, faithful, and shows loving-kindness to thousands. He forgives iniquity, rebellion and sin. God is the one who reveals himself with a jealous love for his people. In covenantal relationship with his people, God is defined primarily as one who allows reconciliation and restitution because of one who interceded for the people of God and his disposition toward his people is one finally of grace, kindness and mercy. The "no" of God's judgment is real and has a sting but is never his final word. The "yes" of his mercy and grace is his final word.

In Leviticus, we see that being holy is the working out of the Mosaic Covenant in worship and life. Leviticus is the calling of Moses and the people to walk in the holiness of God. Its focus is maintaining the Covenant relationship between God and his people. The narrative also depicts the disastrous consequences of coming to God in a way other than how he says. Blood is the essence of life and it belongs to God. The eternal sacrifice of Jesus is the archetype which the ectype of priestly sacrifices in the temple were based.

Numbers constitutes wilderness wanderings and priestly life. The focus is on priestly ritual law which is concerned with the order of creation. Life flourishes in a well-ordered creation. Life has its source in the holiness of God. Numbers shows the importance of priestly mediation. Deuteronomy concerns covenant and election. It is Moses' farewell speeches on the plains of Moab. Deuteronomy provides theological justification for the speeches and the laws. The divine will includes within it both law and gospel.

In Genesis, the power of God's promise to make good on His covenant to Abraham is displayed. The result of sin is chaos and it unravels the cosmos of God's world. The Sodom and Gomorrah narrative reveals that God takes sin really seriously. It is also God's character to be gracious and merciful to people who even tend to lean against Him.

The significance of the divine name in Exodus is tied to God's salvific character for his people. God reveals his divine name to Moses and reveals the substance of his Name because it reveals the character and identity of God. God's identity is revealed as the Redeemer of his people.

In Exodus, we are shown that obedience to God's commands is constitutive of being the people of God and it fulfills the purpose of election. Election is not just a privilege to be enjoyed but a responsibility to be performed. The Decalogue plays a special role in the literary shaping of Exodus. Located in the larger cross current of the Old Testament, some of these laws get worked out in different places within the narrative of the Pentateuch. Israel becomes the people of God because she has been chosen and redeemed. Exodus makes clear that the imperatives that God gives to His people flow from the indicatives of God's grace - His initial redemption and redemptive move toward His people.

This lecture examines the Septuagintal Tradition and Classic Literary View of the Torah. The appeal to Mosaic authorship does not in any way diminish the fact that one has to give an account of how the book came together. In dealing with critical issues concerning Scripture there has to be a commitment to the providence of God.

In this lecture, you will come to appreciate the importance of the creation, primeval, and patriarchal history for the Torah and whole of the Old Testament. The theological pattern of Creation, Sin, Death, and New Creation is a Microcosm in Genesis and a Macrocosm in the history of Israel. This pattern functions as how the whole history of redemption has worked. The toledots of Genesis are examined and humanity is shown to be the key means by which God sets His glory in His image among the earth. The ultimate struggle in Genesis will be who will have dominion, the serpent or the human?

The Creator in Genesis is also the Preserver. There is a formal and material overlap between God as Creator and God as Redeemer. As man sins, God is there to preserve. God's salvation and redemption is not limited to Israel itself but has its scope for the nations. The Person and work of the Servant secures the promise of Abraham's offspring and Seed for the nations.

What happens with Abraham and Isaac becomes a symbol for the institute of sacrifice within the public covenant community. In another account, Jacob's struggle reveals the emergence of Israel as a people who wrestle with their God and emerge with their truer identity as those who have been overcome by their God. Jacob is subdued by his God and is permanently marked by that for the rest of his life. God is not the subject but the object of Jacob's struggle. Jacob's struggle is a symbol of Israel's entire history. A major theme in Genesis is the Joseph narrative. In Joseph, God preserves the children and offspring of promise to Abraham. The figural pattern of the Abrahamic promise is worked out in Joseph.

This lecture will continue to cover the influence Spinoza's thoughts had in modernity. Spinoza believed it folly to allow the Bible an authoritative voice in philosophical investigation. To make sense of Scripture, his method of historical inquiry included knowledge of Hebrew, categorizing various claims made by the biblical books, and to take into account the social and personal circumstances of the biblical author (occasion, audience and language of the writing). A posture of suspicion regarding the text was the result due to conclusions on what it said being only provisional. The literal sense of Scripture for the pre-Modern's could include a spiritual and theological dimension but for Spinoza the literal sense becomes conflated with the historical sense complicitor and the Bible becomes a historical document. Spinoza paves the way for an overly historicist and naturalist way of reading the Bible.

This lecture will shed light on the significance of TaNaK and provide a brief history of canon formation research. The lecture will look at the Three Stage Theory, Heinrich Graetz and his ideas on canon formation, and Herbert Ryle's argument for the successive model of canon formation. The Law and the Prophets are revealed to form the fundamental grammar by which the whole of the Old Testament is to be construed.

A revolution replaces the standard paradigm of normal science and it is during this time that Brevard Childs determines that the final form of the text is the key place where the interpretive work of the Old Testament needs to be done. Child's approach brings both a confessional approach to the Bible while viewing the critical posture toward the Old Testament to be taken seriously. Childs is dubious about approaches to the biblical material that do not allow the canon to play a constitutive role in understanding and use of critical issues in the Old Testament.

Learn how Wellhausen's view of Israel's history is a move away from free and uninhibited worship to a stilted and lifeless religion based on written legislation. Wellhausen is remembered most for the idea of the Documentary Hypothesis or JEDP (Jahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, and Priestly) as the source critical understanding of the Old Testament. Wellhausen holds that the Penteteuch is an amalgamation of these four sources and it is up to the scholar to identify and sort the books into these categories. JEDP became an issue that sent a rip current into the life of the church and academe.

The significance of the final form of biblical text is shown that it alone bears witness to the full history of revelation. The Scriptures themselves, in the way in which they have been handed down to us are the unique means God continues to communicate His own divine self-disclosure. In the biblical canon, the layers are brought together with equal normativity and prophetic status.

This lecture will focus on two prominent figures within the tectonic shift of ideas between pre-Modernity and Modernity: Spinoza and Descarte. Spinoza brought together the thought that the Bible is a product of human history and evolution and is to be read in light of its natural history. He also read Scripture with the assumption that philosophy and theology were to be understood as two distinct disciplines. With Descarte's thoughts on reality, the thinking self became detached from the material world around it and began to prize method and the organization of the mind more so than the results of wrestling with it and making sense of it.

What happens when Historicism and Romanticism meet? De Wette is a theologian whose ideas are a result. De Wette found in the Bible a human people and human culture that was rich in its religious experience and to enter into that religious experience is to enter into the world of that people that knew something good and beautiful - an emanation of the Absolute. He is an important voice in having the Scriptures become religion.

Brevard Childs is known for developing four effects of Historical Criticism on defining the literal sense. For him, the object of biblical exegesis is the text itself with subject matter of which the text speaks. It is significant that the subject matter of the Bible is God and the Holy Spirit must play a central role in defining the literal sense.

In this lecture, the Old Testament is shown to be the battleground for Christian theology. From the writing of the Torah to the New Testament, it is important to remember that an authoritative body of Scripture existed and the early church never operated without it. Our Trinitarian confession and framework for reading Scripture flows from the biblical claims themselves. The Old Testament of the church and the canon together witness in their own unique ways to the one God who has revealed himself by the name Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

In this lecture, the distinction between ontology (being) and gnosis (knowing) is made as it pertains to the Old Testament and its people in relation to the triune God. Within the history of the interpretive tradition, Christian interpreters of the Old Testament were held together by recognizing that the subject matter of the Old and New Testaments is the same: God's triune identity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit moving toward humanity to redeem a people for himself. The dependence of the Holy Spirit, prayer, and grace of God is shown to shape our exegetical activity for the proper reading of Scripture. The invocation of the grace of God and the recognition that Scripture is God's is the most necessary presupposition for engaging the Old Testament and reading it as God's youthful and eternal word.

A tectonic shift of ideas occurs between the pre-Modern and Modern era with the major issue being the displacement or suspension of belief. The rise of the individual self has shaped the way we read the Bible in large ways and has an impact in academic and intellectual approaches to reading the Bible. This lecture will trace the steps leading up to this shift of ideas and influence in biblical studies.

Setting the Stage: This lecture is an overview of the direction the course will take in presenting the larger theological framework of the Old Testament by asking, "What is the nature of the Old Testament?" It will culminate by looking at three specific figures of modernity and their "displacement" of belief which presented challenges to the historic Christian confession regarding the ontology of the Old Testament.