Women of Metaphor and Mirrors and Voices Paper Read Goldingay, Preface & Sections 1.15, 2.04, 2.06 to 2.11 Kelle: Chapter 3 Frymer-Kensky: “Women of Meta

Women of Metaphor and Mirrors and Voices Paper Read Goldingay, Preface & Sections 1.15, 2.04, 2.06 to 2.11

Kelle: Chapter 3

Frymer-Kensky: “Women of Metaphor…” & “Mirrors and Voices…”

McGehee: Sections 1, 2, 3, 13, 17

Then answer the questions

Identify and share three (3) ideas that you find helpful and/or interesting concerning this theological assertion that are offered in pages 63, 66-67 in Goldingay (2015) and pages 36-39 in Kelle (2017). Briefly explain why you find each selection to be helpful and/or interesting. Remember to include APA citations.
List 5 things that Kelle says in the assigned reading that you find helpful and/or interesting. You may use quotations from the book and/or you may summarize his point(s). In both cases you need to utilize APA citations.
List 5 things that Frymer-Kensky says in the assigned reading that you find helpful and/or interesting. You may use quotations from the book and/or you may summarize her point(s). In both cases you need to utilize APA citations.
List 3-5 things that McGehee says concerning genres in the Bible that you find interesting. You may use quotations from the book and/or you may summarize his point(s). In both cases you need to include an APA citation for McGehee’s idea. (If the Kindle edition does not contain page numbers, please reference the section title instead of a page number).
Share 1 thing that Walton says about the genre of myth that you find helpful and/or interesting. You do not need to use APA citations for this response. An Introduction to the
OLD TESTAMENT
Exploring Text,
Approaches and Issues
JOHN GOLDINGAY
2
3
Contents
Preface
Web Resources
Part One: Introduction
Part Two: The Torah
Part Three: The Prophets
Part Four: The Writings
Part Five: Looking Back over the Whole
Name Index
Subject Index
Scripture Index
Praise for An Introduction to the Old Testament
About the Author
More Titles from InterVarsity Press
Copyright
4
Preface
I
n this introduction to Old Testament study my aim is to help you study
Scripture for yourself. I spend little time telling you what the OT says
or what scholars say. I focus more on giving you background material,
noting approaches to interpretation, raising questions and suggesting
approaches to questions. My goal is to provide you with a workbook,
based on the material I use with my students and on my discovery of what
works with them. After the introduction (part one) the main structure of
the book follows the Jewish community’s division of the OT into the
Torah (part two), the Prophets (part three) and the Writings (part four);
then the conclusion to the book (part five) looks back over the whole. Full
information on other books that I refer to also comes in the conclusion.
The five parts are divided into self-contained two-page spreads, each of
which has a number (101, 102, and so on). You can open the book at any
point and be able more or less to understand that spread. You don’t need to
read the entire introduction before plunging into the study that starts in part
two, or to read part two before part three. There is also considerable
material on my webpage to supplement the material in this book (see
“Web Resources,” which follows this preface).
I have implied already that it’s more important to help people read the
Bible for themselves than to tell them what the Bible says. The
Reformation displaced the pope as the person who decided what the Bible
means, but it’s easy to replace the pope with pastors or professors, in
which case you’re no better off. My aim in this book is to help you study
the Bible for yourself. I am told that there is a joke in Latin America:
Catholics don’t read the Bible because they think it’s too hard to
understand; Protestants don’t read it because they’re sure they already
understand it. My experience is that Protestants in the United States are
inclined to the alleged Catholic attitude. They assume that they need to be
told what the Bible says by an expert. I believe that you can get to
understand it. Further, there are limits to what anyone can teach you.
Learning requires active involvement, thinking things out, ideally
articulating things to other people and arguing things out, and applying
things. It’s a process that involves an interaction between experience and
5
study and prayer.
I am grateful to Gillian Cooper, my Old Testament colleague at St.
John’s Theological College, Nottingham, England, who got me to join in
rethinking our aims and methods in teaching Old Testament in a way that
bears this fruit twenty-five years later; to Robert Hubbard for accidentally
sowing in my thinking the idea of writing this book and for commenting
on much of the material; and to generations of students at St John’s
Theological College and Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena,
California, for questions that stimulated much of what I have thought and
written, among them especially Kathleen Scott, who liked the course so
much that she married me and has commented with insight on the material,
though she wishes there were more of the jokes that come in my lectures
but that Americans don’t understand.
Biblical translations are my own from the Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek
except where otherwise indicated.
6
Web Resources
T
o supplement the material in this book, there is material at
johngoldingay.com under the “OT Introduction” tab. This site
includes more background material and more material suggesting
implications for our own day. You’re welcome to print out and copy any
of it. There are references to this web material throughout the book in the
form of the phrases “see or see further 119 or 245 or 363 or 442 or 507.”
These particular numbers refer to spreads at the end of each of the five
parts of the book where you will find a list of the web material relating to
each part of this book. The numbering of the web material resumes from
the numbering at the end of each of the five parts of the book. The material
also includes responses to many of the questions that students have asked
when they have studied with me.
If you find you have questions that are not covered there, you’re
welcome to email me with them at johngold@fuller.edu. I’ll answer as
many as I can each week, and I’ll add these questions and responses to the
main body of questions and answers on the website. If that process stops, it
means I’ve died or gone gaga.
I expect I shall think of things to add to the web material as time goes
by, and there is much more material under other tabs on that webpage. But
this book itself is self-contained. While a few of the questions I suggest
you think about involve looking at things on the web, otherwise you don’t
need access to the web in order to read the Bible, use this book and do the
study I am suggesting.
7
Part One
Introduction
101
Approaching the Old Testament
102
The Old Testament as Scripture
103
Reading the Old Testament as the Word of God in Its Own Right
104
The Books in the Old Testament
105
How Did Old Testament Books Get Written?
106
Old Testament Story and Old Testament History
107
A Timeline for the Old Testament
108
Fact and Truth in the Old Testament
109
When the Old Testament Is Parable Not History
110
Reading the Old Testament Premodernly, Modernly and
Postmodernly
111
The Geography of Canaan
112
The Geography of the Middle East
113
How Did the Old Testament Come to Be the Old Testament?
114
How Old and How Reliable Is the Old Testament Text?
115
Old Testament Translations and the Name of God in Translations
116
Israelites, Hebrews, Jews; Israel, Judah, Ephraim
117
New Testament Lenses for Looking at the Old Testament
118
The Apocrypha or Second Canon
119
Web Resources
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1 01
Approaching the Old Testament
T
he “Old Testament” is the Christian term for the collection of scrolls
in Hebrew and Aramaic that the Jewish community accepts as its
Scriptures, and to which it often refers as the “Torah [or Law], the
Prophets and the Writings,” or “Tanak” for short (from the initial letters of
the three Hebrew nouns “Torah,” “Nebi’im,” “Ketubim”). Scholars often
refer to them as the “Hebrew Bible.” The books were written at different
times between about the eighth century and the second century B.C. We
don’t know when they became a defined collection, when they became the
“Scriptures.” From a Christian viewpoint, it’s significant that as far as we
can tell, it’s the collection of Scriptures that Jesus and his first followers
would have recognized; most of the books are quoted in the NT.
Nearly half the OT comprises narratives telling the story of the world’s
creation and then the story of Israel over the centuries. Incorporated into
the first part of this narrative are substantial swathes of instructions about
how Israel should live. The OT goes on to include a collection of works
preserving the messages of some prophets and a collection of poetic and
prose works offering teaching about sensible ways to live everyday life
and examples of praise and prayer for people to use.
The OT refers to other historical records, prophets and teachers that are
not included in the OT; we have examples of such works from other
Middle Eastern peoples contemporary with Israel. The ones in the OT are
the examples that Israel preserved as having permanent significance for the
people of God. There are also many other Jewish works from the centuries
just before or just after Christ, some of which came to be used in the
church along with the works in the OT. They are referred to as the
“Apocrypha” (the “hidden” books) or as the “Deuterocanonical Writings.”
The latter of these two terms is clumsier but more appropriate. The word
“canon” means “ruler,” and “deutero” means “second”; the OT (the Torah,
the Prophets and the Writings) are the primary canon, and these are a
second canon. As far as we know, these books never were regarded as
Scripture by the Jewish community, and they are not quoted in the NT.
9
(The NT does quote from Enoch, which is not part of most versions of the
Apocrypha, though the Ethiopian Church did come to recognize it, perhaps
because it is quoted in the NT.) See further 118.
What’s the appropriate way to go about studying the OT? It’s tricky
discussing that question at this point because you can really answer it only
by getting involved in doing the study. So what I am doing here is giving
you conclusions that I have come to.
1. I read these books as the church’s Scriptures, the canon or ruler for
my thinking and life. As we often put it, they are “the Word of God.”
I therefore need to study them self-critically. Where they say
something different from what I’m inclined to think, I assume that
I’m the one who’s wrong. As people often put it, I accept the
authority of the Scriptures.
2. In addition, they are works of literature, the products of Israel’s
history, created through human processes, emerging from their
Middle Eastern context. So I seek to understand them as human,
historical, contextual documents, and not read into them meanings
that would be alien to their writers and their first readers. That
principle includes not reading NT ideas into them. Their being human
and contextual doesn’t mean that they are limited because they came
into being before the modern age and before Jesus, that they are
bound to contain mistakes. It does mean that we have to understand
them in their context.
3. In this connection, I use the methods of biblical criticism, not to
criticize the text, but to understand it. Over time, “biblical criticism”
came to be understood as criticizing the Bible, but it started off as a
commitment to asking questions about the way church leaders and
scholars interpreted the Bible, so as to let the Bible speak for itself.
It’s that use of biblical criticism that interests me.
4. Because most church leaders and scholars in the West have been
middle-aged white men, being critical also includes seeking to study
the OT from perspectives other than those of middle-aged white men.
Since I’m one of those, do read books about the OT by other kinds of
people.
10
1 02
The Old Testament as Scripture
S
tudents sometimes ask how I got interested in the OT. There are
some jokey or superficial answers to the question. My theology
degree program required Greek, whereas Hebrew was optional; but I had
already studied Greek, so I could fit in Hebrew. The OT came first in the
program; if church history had come first, I would have fallen in love with
that instead. Further, I undertook my undergraduate study at a time when
scholarly OT study was going through what seemed a positive and
confident phase, and OT study felt exciting in that respect. More seriously,
I had two outstanding OT mentors: John Baker, who modeled how you
could undertake university academic study of the OT and also be a priest,
and Alec Motyer, a seminary teacher and priest who was a great preacher
on the OT.
Yet these considerations from years ago are not the reasons why I am
passionate about the OT now. My enthusiasm issues from my ongoing
involvement with it. I love the stories about Israel’s ancestors, about the
leaders in Judges, about Jonah and Esther. I love the boldness of the
prayers and praises of the psalms. I love the way the prophets confront
Israel with challenges to faith and to faithfulness. I love the courage with
which Job and Ecclesiastes raise questions. Indeed, it’s the facing of
questions that I love as much as anything. The OT is relentlessly realistic
about human beings and about life, but it never steps away from staying in
conversation with God about such matters.
I also continue to be enthusiastic about getting at the OT’s own
meaning in its context. I want to see things through the eyes of Genesis or
Isaiah or Lamentations. My Christian faith will sometimes enable me to
perceive things in the OT that I might otherwise miss; it will give me ways
into the OT. But I want to see what’s there, and I want the OT to correct
my Christian assumptions when they need correction. And I’ve proved for
myself that when I can work out what these books would mean for the
Israelites for whom they were written, there’s a good chance that I can find
my way to what it might mean for me.
11
I make the assumption that where the OT says something scandalous,
it’s more likely to be right than I am. I sometimes get the impression that
students assume that a professor’s job is to reassure them that the Bible
says nothing different from what they believe already. After all, the
students are good Christian people, and they ought to be able to trust their
worldview and presuppositions. I think that it’s wiser to assume that we
are decisively shaped by the culture in which we live, and that we are
likely to be quite wrong in some of our beliefs and presuppositions. Thus,
when I see the Bible saying something different from what I think, that’s a
moment when studying the Bible becomes especially interesting. So you
won’t find this book doing much to make the OT more comfortable to
read.
Is this passion of mine simply my peculiarity, like my enthusiasm for
jazz? There are two sorts of reasons for Christians to see if they can share
this involvement. One is that Jesus and the NT writers shared it. For them,
the OT simply was the “Scriptures,” given for them to benefit from and be
shaped by (2 Tim 3:14-17). It was vital for them to see that their faith was
in keeping with these Scriptures. The other is that as a consequence the
church accepted them and has passed them on to us as part of the church’s
heritage and rule for life and thinking.
The trouble is that the OT isn’t what we would expect. We would
expect God’s revelation to be nice, so that its stories would give us
examples of people living good lives with God. But the Bible makes clear
at many points that to be the Word of God, Scripture does not have to be
nice or to make us feel good. We would expect biblical history to give us
examples of people living faithful lives and to make it very clear what was
their message. Joshua, Judges and Samuel don’t do so. So we may have to
change our views on what God would want to give us and ask why God
wanted to give us what he did. It is these nasty stories (e.g., the Levite’s
concubine) as well as the nice stories (e.g., Hannah) that are designed to
change our thinking, our lives and our relationship with God.
12
1 03
Reading the Old Testament as the Word of
God in Its Own Right
1. The NT encourages us to get wisdom for life from the OT. These
writings are able to teach us and train us in righteousness (2 Tim
3:14-17).
2. However, it’s not true that the NT lies hidden in the OT, and that the
OT is revealed in the NT. The OT tells us how God really related to
people and really spoke to them. God did so in ways that were
designed for them to understand; they were not obscure. The NT then
tells us that the OT is the inspired and authoritative Word of God,
which we should therefore take with absolute seriousness. It doesn’t
need decoding.
3. The OT thus isn’t a sneak preview of Jesus. Jesus isn’t all God has to
say; God has lots of other things to say, and he has said lots of them
in the OT. If we narrow the OT down to what the NT says, we miss
these things. It is the case that lenses provided by the NT sometimes
help us see things that are there in the OT. But if we want to
understand what God wants us to understand from the OT, we do best
not to think too much about the NT because that tends to narrow our
perspective.
4. It’s not true that the OT God is a God of wrath, and the NT God a
God of love. In both Testaments, God is one who loves to love
people, but who is prepared to be tough when necessary.
5. It’s not true that the OT offers a partial or incomplete or imperfect
revelation. Or rather, there is one thing that the OT doesn’t tell you
but the NT does. That thing is (amusingly) the fact that some people
are going to hell. Neither hell nor heaven comes in the OT. But the
NT does also tell you that it’s possible to enjoy resurrection life: that
because Jesus rose, we will rise.
6. It’s not true that the OT is a religion of law, and the NT a religion of
13
grace. Because of this misunderstanding I don’t follow the practice of
referring to the opening books of the OT as the “Law.” I rather keep
the Hebrew word “Torah” (which means “teaching”). In both
Testaments, God relates to people on the basis of grace but then
expects them to live a life of obedience.
7. It’s not true that the OT is a book of stories about people who are
meant to be examples to us. You only have to read the stories to see
this point. Both Testaments are books of stories about what God did
through people, often despite who they were not because of who they
were. If anyone is an example to us in the OT, it’s God (see Lev
19:2), not even people such as Abraham, Moses or David.
8. One aspect of the wisdom that the NT expects us to get from these
books is that they show how Israel went wrong (see 1 Cor 10:1-13).
We can easily make the same mistakes that Israel made. The Israelites
failed to enter into God’s real rest (Ps 95); we could do the same (Heb
3–4).
9. It’s not true that you can do whatever you like to your enemies in the
OT. “Loving your neighbor” includes loving your enemy; your
enemies usually are the people who live near you, who attack you or
defraud you. Of course, in the NT there’s no event like Joshua
slaughtering the Canaanites; but the NT doesn’t disapprove of such
acts by OT heroes such as Joshua (see, e.g., Heb 11).
10. The OT is the record of how God spoke to the people of God and
acted in their lives, and acted in the affairs of the nations. We can
discover from it more about what God is like and what God says to us
and how God may be involved in our world.
11. So the OT is designed to transform our lives. The way it does so is by
setting our lives in the context of the story of what God had been
doing with Israel, seeing us in a relationship with God (of praise,
protest, trust, repentance and testimony), setting our thinking in the
context of an argument as it encourages us to face questions, and thus
rescuing us from the limitations of what we believe already. The OT
is there to help the people of God live concretely, worshipfully,
wisely and hopefully. It’s to help us see what God is like and to live
with God.
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1 04
The Books in the Old Testament
I
n most English Bibles the content follows the Hebrew Bible, but the
order follows the Greek Bible, called the “Septuagint,” which is
mostly a translation from the Hebrew made in the third and second
centuries B.C. and also includes the Second Canon or Apocrypha (see 118).
So here are two lists of the works that appear in the two versions, in the
two different orders. In the Greek/English list, in square brackets I also
include the books in the Second Canon (though there’s some variation in
different versions of the Second Canon). In this book, partly because we
are following the content of the Hebrew Bible, we will also follow its
order: first the Torah, then the Prophets, then the Writings.
Hebrew Bible
Greek and English Bibles
The Torah
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus,
Numbers, Deuteronomy
The Pentateuch and First History
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbe…
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