Old Testament Theology - Goldingay

It is illuminating to study what Israelites actually believed in Old Testament times, and even what was viewed as orthodox theology in Old Testament times. For instance, books such as Kings and Ezekiel suggest that mainstream Israelite faith often included worship of Yhwh with the aid of images and recognition of a consort alongside Yhwh, and archaeological discoveries also indicate this. But the Old Testament books do not approve of such beliefs and practices, and Old Testament theology concerns itself with the stance taken by the Old Testament books on the nature of “authentic” Israelite faith.

Old Testament theology can denote an attempt to give a purely descriptive account of the thought-world that lies behind the texts or of the faith held by the authors of the Old Testament—one that need carry no implications for what we ourselves might believe. One problem with this understanding is that no one in Old Testament times knew the whole Old Testament.

We might thus more feasibly see the task as an attempt to describe the faith implied by the Old Testament or the faith that emerges from the Old Testament.

One reason Western thought has felt the need for such a critical and constructive exercise is our awareness that the Old Testament incorporates different, even clashing, theological convictions. Old Testament theology’s task is to see what greater whole can encompass the diversity within the Old Testament.

The development of theology was not a development required by the nature of the Scriptures, but an accidental result of the journey of the gospel into Europe. But the Scriptures as a whole belong on a continuum and the books that more clearly have this nature provide evidence that such reflection need not be alien to the collection as a whole

covenant is not as pervasive in the Old Testament as Eichrodt implies, or as his readers infer that he implies. One may guess that one reason why the idea appealed to Eichrodt and appeals to many other readers of the Old Testament is that covenant thinking is prominent in some Christian theological circles.

David Clines has made explicit something generally implicit in Old Testament study, that interpreters evaluate the Old Testament (or anything else) on the basis of what they believe already. In evaluating texts, “there are no absolutes, no universal standards, and so there is nothing wrong with using your own standards.… ‘Ethical’ can only mean ‘ethical according to me and people who think like me.

I identify with those Christians who affirm the entire trustworthiness and authority of Scripture, but I do not attempt to justify such convictions a priori, or to prove the truth of individual statements that emerge from the Old Testament

My conviction that one hundred percent of the Old Testament has theological significance has driven me to seek to work through all its books and ask after the theological implications of all of, for example, Judges and 2 Kings as well as, for example, Genesis and Exodus

There are a number of points where Old Testament faith differs from New Testament faith. It is more interested in creation, the world of the nations and politics; it is more accepting of death and of the ambiguities of human life; it lacks a “positive” picture of life after death or a stress on the Messiah; it understands human sinfulness differently; it stresses reverence for God; it sees us as free to complain at God and to express doubt; it emphasizes enjoyment of everyday family life and food and drink; it values sacramental worship; and it enjoins detailed outward obedience to divine commands. My attitude to such differences is in principle to see them not as points where the New Testament surpasses the Old, but as points where Christians are especially likely to have something to learn.

the church’s “incomplete conversion toward the God of Israel” is a broader and deeper matter. The conventional outline of the Christian story of salvation has four stages: creation, Fall, the coming of Christ and the final judgment. The church’s framework for reading Scripture thus jumps from the “Fall” to the birth of Jesus and enables it to contract out of God’s concern for the world, to forgo “creative theological engagement with the hard edges of human history” in favor of a focus on the personal and private.

From a Christian perspective, then, Old Testament theology is a truncated exercise, but a defensible one. In contrast, New Testament theology seems not only a truncated exercise, but also an indefensible one. It deconstructs. One of the New Testament’s own convictions is that the Old Testament is part of the Scriptures (indeed, is the Scriptures), give or take some questions about its boundaries, and that the Old Testament provides the theological framework within which Jesus needs to be understood. The New Testament is then a series of Christian and ecclesial footnotes to the Old Testament, and one cannot produce a theology out of footnotes.

The logic of these considerations is that I should write a biblical theology.

We need a more systematic theological reading of the Old Testament in light of which to read the New. The agenda for Old Testament theology is set by the Old Testament as a whole and the agenda for biblical theology is set by the Scriptures as a whole, not just those parts of them that especially link with the New. One can see much of the New Testament as a collection of sermons on Old Testament texts. One does not use later sermons, even divinely inspired ones, as the privileged lens through which henceforth to read their text. It is inappropriate to describe the New Testament as the “authoritative interpretation” of the Old without adding that the Old Testament is the authoritative interpretation of the New, especially as the New shows more signs of recognizing the authority of the Old than of reckoning it has authority over it.

I therefore do not focus, for instance, on the Old Testament as “witness to Christ.” The New Testament does occasionally speak in these terms (Jn 5:39; Acts 10:43; Rom 3:21), but the image is used only in a severely metaphorical sense. As the New Testament more often assumes, witnesses are people who have seen something happen and are in a position to talk about it to other people who have not. Jesus’ disciples are witnesses to Jesus more often than the Old Testament is. It antedates Jesus and never mentions him, and it more characteristically witnesses to Yhwh, especially in the narrative books (by their nature). It is this more central witness to Yhwh that I want to reflect on.

one cannot work out from the Old Testament who it points to—as is reflected in Jesus’ disciples’ difficulty in seeing how it pointed to him. He is over the horizon when one stands within the Old Testament. Yet in writing as a Christian, I do so as one who can see important ways in which Jesus is the person who fulfills its job descriptions or its promises, as Jesus sought to show his disciples that he did—even if others also fulfill those job descriptions or the promises

The New certainly assumes that there are things that are revealed in the New, but that is not a basis for reading them into the Old. They are new. They add to the Old; they are not a basis for a de facto abandoning of the Old. What is concealed from the Old is revealed in the New. What is revealed in the Old is taken for granted in the New and then forgotten in the church.

the Old Testament as the story of God’s relationship with the world and with Israel. Volume one concerns the Old Testament’s gospel, or how things were, or what God and Israel have done. It is a work of narrative theology.

Formally the narrative that began in Genesis comes to an end only with 1–2 Kings

The central feature of the Old Testament is that it tells Israel’s story. Along the way, if aspects of Old Testament faith are the same as aspects of Canaanite faith, that does not make them of questionable or limited significance. Indeed, we might turn this argument on its head and suggest we would expect God not to have left other peoples unaware of the basic truths about God.

The explicit Old Testament gospel is that “your God is reigning.… Yhwh has comforted his people, restored Jerusalem, bared his holy arm in the sight of all the nations” (Is 52:7–10; it is from the Greek translation of this passage that the verb euangelizomai “bring good news” comes into Christian usage). Both are part of the biblical gospel, if we may use that term to refer to the macronarrative that may be inferred from the two Testaments as a whole. This gospel begins at the opening of the Old Testament and runs through its story into the New Testament. And “being a Christian or a Jew is not so much a matter of subscribing to one’s community’s core doctrines as of affirming its core story.” The biblical gospel is not a collection of timeless statements such as God is love. It is a narrative about things God has done.

The fact that the Old Testament opens with narrative and is dominated by narrative makes narrative form the appropriate starting point for Old Testament theology.

As a whole, this narrative tells how

God began

God started over

God promised

God delivered

God sealed

God gave

God accommodated

God wrestled

God preserved.

Christian theology has not regularly talked about God in narrative terms. The creeds, for instance, are structured around the persons of Father, Son and Spirit, and systematic theology has often taken God’s trinitarian nature as its structural principle

In the Old Testament the densest concentration of occurrences of the term “good news” with its literal meaning comes in the story of Absalom’s rebellion, where men vie for the privilege of carrying the good news that the rebellion has been quelled (2 Sam 18:19–32). The background of good news is the threat or the actuality of bad news. This particular narrative also shows that the news itself may be more ambiguous than the messenger realizes, though that is another story. The background of the good news in Isaiah 40–55 is the bad news of rejection, destruction and exile. In Paul’s gospel the background of the revelation of God’s righteousness is the revelation of God’s wrath (Rom 1:16–18).

In the Old Testament the densest concentration of occurrences of the term “good news” with its literal meaning comes in the story of Absalom’s rebellion, where men vie for the privilege of carrying the good news that the rebellion has been quelled (2 Sam 18:19–32). The background of good news is the threat or the actuality of bad news. This particular narrative also shows that the news itself may be more ambiguous than the messenger realizes, though that is another story. The background of the good news in Isaiah 40–55 is the bad news of rejection, destruction and exile. In Paul’s gospel the background of the revelation of God’s righteousness is the revelation of God’s wrath (Rom 1:16–18).

The good news is that bad news has neither the last word nor the first word. It stands in the context of a purpose to bless that was set in motion at the Beginning, and a purpose to create that persists to the End.

The moments of achievement turn out not to signal consummation. The moments of calamity turn out not to preclude hope. The narrative invites its community to own the fact that the story has never (yet) come to an end, and it inexorably insists that its community lives within this story

Christian history provides evidence that the story of Jesus does not take forward the Old Testament story as well as evidence that it does take it forward—that is, the Christian church’s story often looks to be no advance on Israel’s story

God takes humanity with great seriousness. The Old Testament story is not merely God’s story. From the beginning it is the story of God and humanity, a story in which humanity has a key role to play in the achievement of God’s purpose in the world. It becomes in particular the story of God and Israel. It is a story that could not exist without God’s initiatives and responses (positive and negative) but also could not exist without Israel’s responses and initiatives (negative and positive)

the fact that narrative precedes the direct affirmations of prophets and teachers itself hints that “the particular is in some sense prior to general rules and principles

The Old Testament’s narrative particularity is one of the features that make it interesting and illuminating, and the reduction of it to generalities sacrifices these

Narrative makes it easier to discuss a complicated issue such as the interrelationship between divine sovereignty and human free will, especially an issue that seems to require us to make a number of apparently conflicting statements—as this one does

the main coherence of the chapters is thematic rather than linear. They represent a series of semi-independent but complementary discussions of the way God, leaders and people may handle the problem of the rebelliousness of leaders and people, with the series also interweaving reflection on what we mean by talking about God’s presence with us

It is a characteristic of postmodernity to be aware (to put it most positively) that our insights are partial. Reality is complex, and the fact that Scripture is divine revelation does not make it less so. Rather the opposite—our theological statements tend to be more univocal than Scripture, and thus less true. Even God (especially God) cannot make truth less complex than it is. Like any cultural context, our postmodern setting blinds us to some aspects of Scripture, but it also opens our eyes to other aspects of Scripture, and one of these is the way scriptural narrative makes it possible to do more justice to the complexity of reality. It enables Scripture to make the variety of statements that need to be made about deep and complex questions. It can convey depth, complexity and ambiguity, as direct statement cannot

The traditional less polite response to the question “What was God doing before creating the world?” is, “Devising Hell for people who ask impertinent questions like that.”

The beginning the First Testament relates is the beginning of God’s work in the world. If it could give an account of God’s own beginning, God as the First Testament understands God would surely cease to be God (cf. Ps 90:2).

reflective poem at the end of the argument between Job and his three friends (Job 28) emphasizes God’s insight or know-how (ḥokmâ; EVV “wisdom”). It closes with a comment on how human beings acquire insight, by revering God and departing from what is bad, but before this it describes God’s own relationship to insight. Perhaps part of the logic is that we can only be expected to accept the claim that reverence for God is the way to insight if we believe that God possesses insight

Ms. Insight stood by Yhwh’s side during the execution of the great building project that brought the cosmos into being. This was not an expression of mere power but of insight. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” Genesis says. “And I was there,” Ms. Insight adds, “and I will tell you about a ‘beginning’ before that” (Prov 8:22)

Ms. Insight’s testimony. When she speaks of herself and of her relationship with Yhwh, she often does so in an ambiguous and allusive fashion. When she tells us that Yhwh “had” her, the verb is qānâ. It is the verb Eve uses to describe “having” her first child, making a link with his name qayin, Cain (Gen 4:1), and the verb Melchizedek and Abram use to describe God as “owner” of the heav

When she speaks of herself and of her relationship with Yhwh, she often does so in an ambiguous and allusive fashion. When she tells us that Yhwh “had” her, the verb is qānâ. It is the verb Eve uses to describe “having” her first child, making a link with his name qayin, Cain (Gen 4:1), and the verb Melchizedek and Abram use to describe God as “owner” of the heavens and the earth (Gen 14:19, 22).

Proverbs’ point is that God made sure of having the help of insight before forming the world

in principle Christians have no vested interest in any particular scientific theory about how the world came into being. Yet the scientific theories often have theological implications that a biblical account of creation does confront. One is the idea that the world came into being by a chance process. Proverbs sees it as a thoughtful one.

John makes Proverbs’ point in another conceptuality and thus amplifies it. Thinking involves words—if we do not have the words, it is hard for us to think the thoughts.

John is also reexpressing Genesis 1, where the divine initiative explicitly involves performative speech: “God said, ‘There is to be light!’ And there was light” (Gen 1:3).

In speaking at the Beginning, God was involved in thinking, planning, communicating and acting. In due course God’s word will come to Moses and to prophets. It will be expressed in the teaching of Jesus and in the gospel message about Jesus (e.g., 1 Pet 1:25). Each expression of this word is in a sense as old as the world itself—it is consistent with or an outworking of thoughts God had before making the world. And insofar as Jesus Christ is the paramount expression

And insofar as Jesus Christ is the paramount expression of God’s mind, the paramount means by which God’s ultimate purpose is put into effect, and the paramount vehicle of God’s communication to the world, Jesus Christ is the word that goes back to the Beginning.

when God says “The waters are to gather together” or “The earth is to produce vegetation,” there is no implication that waters or earth already have the potential to obey these commands. It is the command that mysteriously generates them, as words can. Much later Jesus will address the dead Lazarus and bid him come out of the tomb (Jn 11:43): evidently the command then does have a magical power, because a dead man cannot hear the voice that bids him come forth, yet somehow Jesus

no implication that waters or earth already have the potential to obey these commands. It is the command that mysteriously generates them, as words can. Much later Jesus will address the dead Lazarus and bid him come out of the tomb (Jn 11:43): evidently the command then does have a magical power, because a dead man cannot hear the voice that bids him come forth, yet somehow Jesus’ word is able to break through this barrier of impossibility

command then does have a magical power, because a dead man cannot hear the voice that bids him come forth, yet somehow Jesus’ word is able to break through this barrier of impossibility. But God does not address the not-yet-existent light in this way. All the emphasis lies on the magician’s power. God’s command does not galvanize already-existent light-makers into the action that will implement the royal command. Rather, the previously nonexistent light miraculously leaps into being.

“all things came into being through the word. Not one thing came into being without him” (Jn 1:3).

At the Beginning the reality of darkness was the background for God’s insisting that this reality should be succeeded by light. That indicates God’s purpose for Israel.

Indeed, it indicates God’s purpose for the world, which is primary. In the story of humanity the darkness of calamity has ever threatened the light of life but has never succeeded in quenching the light, in destroying life (Jn 1:5).

According to Egyptian thinking as embodied in the “Memphis Theology,” for example, Ptah brought some of the other gods into existence by declaring their names. Being given names is one of the indications that day, night, heavens, earth and seas really came into being. They truly exist.

God shares power-for-life with the animal world. The prominence of the blessing theme makes for a pointed contrast with the gloomy vision of other Middle Eastern stories of the origins of the world and humanity, as well as with the troubled experience of Israel in, for instance

God shares power-for-life with the animal world. The prominence of the blessing theme makes for a pointed contrast with the gloomy vision of other Middle Eastern stories of the origins of the world and humanity, as well as with the troubled experience of Israel in, for instance, the exile

ṣĕdāqâ denotes doing the right thing by someone in light of your relationship with them. It is nearer “faithfulness” than “righteousness” or “justice.” Thus Second Isaiah sees the people’s deliverance from exile as an act of ṣĕdāqâ (e.g., Is 51:6, 8) when there was no justice about that act; Israel deserved nothing. Yhwh so acts in fulfilling an obligation to this people on the basis of a long-standing commitment that Yhwh cannot evade—and does not wish to

justice about that act; Israel deserved nothing. Yhwh so acts in fulfilling an obligation to this people on the basis of a long-standing commitment that Yhwh cannot evade—and does not wish to. Similarly Paul associates God’s dikaiosunē (righteousness) with God’s pistis (faithfulness) and alētheia (truthfulness) (Rom 3:4–5).

ḥesed, another word with no English equivalent (EVV use expressions such as “steadfast love”). It refers to a self-giving that is remarkable for one of two reasons. Either it denotes a noteworthy commitment that someone makes when they are under no obligation, like Rahab’s protection of the Israelite spies (Josh 2:12)—so that it resembles grace or favor (ḥēn). Or it denotes a commitment that someone continues to make because of an awareness of obligation, even if it costs them or even if the other party has forfeited any right to expect it

Genesis tells a gospel story, but its good news apparently constitutes something other than that. It may assume that creation was an instinctive act of God’s generosity and God’s instinct to share life, but in the Torah the first references to divine love come in describing God’s commitment to Israel (e.g., Deut 4:37; 7:8). Love (or talk in terms of love) becomes necessary only after sin has become a problem in the world.

Forming the cosmos involved getting control of the potentially unruly and overwhelming forces embodied in and symbolized by the sea and its deeps. That is an act of uprightness and decisive faithfulness such as anticipates equivalent acts in Israel’s life. Unsurprisingly, Yhwh’s acts are a seamless whole. While Israel distinguished between Yhwh’s activity in the world and Yhwh’s activity in its own life, it did not separate these

“breath” (rûaḥ) suggests dynamic power. Thus elsewhere that dynamic power means destruction (e.g., Job 15:30 MT; Is 11:4). In Enuma Elish breath or wind denotes a violence that destroys Tiamat but thereby prepares the way for the forming of the world. In Psalm 33, the sequence of word and breath suggests declaring an intention and thereby acting dynamically

The First Testament story never talks about God having a plan for the world or a plan of salvation or a plan for people’s individual lives, and the story it tells does not look like one that resulted from a plan. God certainly had an aim, a vision, some goals, and sometimes formulates a plan for a particular context, but works out a purpose in the world in interaction with the human beings who are designed to be key to the fulfilling of those goals

Our security lies not in the world’s actual story being the outworking of God’s plan (that would be scary) but in its unfolding within the control of an executive who will go to any lengths to see that the vision gets fulfilled—even dying for it. In this sense the lamb of God was slain before the world’s foundation. God has always been that kind of God

God gave birth to the world. Of course it is a metaphor, but then so are statements such as “God shaped” or “God created.” All such statements use the language of analogy. Birthing is an image that tells us something true about God’s relationship with the world, though like all images it has to be set in the context of other images so that we can guard against taking

God gave birth to the world. Of course it is a metaphor, but then so are statements such as “God shaped” or “God created.” All such statements use the language of analogy. Birthing is an image that tells us something true about God’s relationship with the world, though like all images it has to be set in the context of other images so that we can guard against taking it too far.

birthing suggests wondrous mystery.

birthing suggests wondrous mystery. It

birthing involves pain

Perhaps Yhwh is rather unsafely transcendent, for paradoxically the point about the description of God in Psalm 90 is to underline the truth of God’s transcendence

Giving birth is a markedly temporal event, but the psalm sets it in the context of God’s eternity. Hebrew lacks abstract expressions such as “eternal” or “eternity,” but the lack of particular words does not mean that people do not utilize the concepts that would be signified by such words.

the First Testament suggests that God is not atemporal or outside time, though God is omnitemporal and not limited to particular times: “The life of God has unending duration both forwards and backwards in time.”

Perhaps God embraces all time. But that truth must not be allowed to take the edge off the gospel statement that as far as we are concerned, God lives in time, as a person like us. In speaking thus, we again anticipate the statement near the end of the first creation story in Genesis, that human beings are made in God’s image. Human beings live in time, like God who

lives in time, as a person like us. In speaking thus, we again anticipate the statement near the end of the first creation story in Genesis, that human beings are made in God’s image. Human beings live in time, like God who lives in time.

Yhwh does not gain a position of superiority over a group of fellow gods through winning this victory, like Marduk in Babylon or Baal at Ugarit. Yhwh was already king, but Yhwh does thus demonstrate the kingly sovereignty that other peoples attributed to their gods.

Creation and Israel’s own history are correlated under the aspect of Yahweh’s salvific actions. Creation out of chaos is seen as the first in a chain of salvific actions. Here, world order and Israel’s history are united under one purpose, liberation from chaos and oppression. Thus, it can be said that Yahweh is the creator of the world because he is its liberator from chaos, just as he is the creator of Israel because he is its liberator from oppression. Therefore, the notion of liberation belongs to both creation and Israel’s history

If the bad news is that the victory God won at the Beginning does not mean the end of metaphysical conflict, the good news is that the victory God won then can be oft repeated.

The life of the world, the life of nations and communities and the life of individuals are characterized by ongoing conflict. The First Testament gospel sees in that a frustrating of God’s creative purpose. God won a victory at the Beginning. Things were not meant to be this way. They came to be that way through the course of events. But having determined to achieve something, and having determined to overcome forces of disorder, God stays involved with this story. The picture of God’s having defeated forces of disorder is a promise that the world actually is secure from such forces.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” is an extraordinary opening for a gospel.

“The beginning” of Israel’s story was not David, or Joshua, or Moses, or Abraham (or Jesus), but creation.

This gospel tells the beginning of Israel’s story, but the one who begins it is not merely a local Israelite God. The story of Yhwh and Israel is indeed set on the widest canvas.

it is through following the story that we discover what this character is like, as is the case with modern narratives or films that begin in the middle of things. At the end of the story we will thus be in a position to read “in the beginning God …” with more comprehension.

bārāʾ has a narrower rather than a wider connotation than English “create.” It is not very common in passages about how the world came into being. In other words, in speaking of creation the First Testament does not talk about “creation” as much as we do. It is but one of the images for what Yhwh did in bringing the world into being, alongside, for example, giving birth, gaining control and building.

The emphasis of bārāʾ lies first on the sovereignty of what God achieves rather than on the nothingness from which God starts.

“At no point in the whole of Second Isaiah does the doctrine of creation appear in its own right.… It provides a foundation for the message of redemption.” But neither at any point does Second Isaiah talk about, for example, Yhwh’s promise to Israel’s ancestors or Yhwh’s deliverance of Israel from Egypt for its own sake. They have the same significance or status as the story of creation. Each theme “stimulates faith” in Yhwh’s involvement with the people in the present. Each is “but a magnificent foil for the message of salvation.”

The emphasis on bringing things into being with sovereign authority conveyed by the verb bārāʾ suggests that this would be a difficult verb to apply to a Babylonian god. Even Marduk negotiates and bargains with other gods. In Genesis 1, God simply speaks, and things happen. That links with the significance of God’s acting as bōrēʾ, the bringing of newness and order out of chaos and disorder. “Throughout the ancient Near Eastern world, including Israel, the point of creation is not the production of matter out of nothing, but rather the emergence of a stable community in a benevolent and life-sustaining order,” and the affirmation of Genesis 1 is that God produced this order without being opposed by forces that could threaten the purpose to do so

In this context with its references to physical phenomena, the supernatural rûaḥ is hardly the “spirit of God,” except in the sense that the tumultuous dynamic of the wind characteristically reflects and expresses God’s own tumultuous dynamic; the spirit/breath/wind of God blows with force and power, uprooting trees, withering vegetation and whirling prophets hundreds of miles. Perhaps this supernatural wind is simply a “mighty wind.” A reader might again catch a resonance from the Babylonian story, where it is a supernatural wind that tears Tiamat apart. The verb (rāḥap), usually rendered “was hovering/sweeping,” is less clearly a threatening one, but its meaning is uncertain. A supernatural wind sweeping over the face of the heaving waters is an image for power that adds to the potentially threatening atmosphere of formless void, bleak darkness and tumultuous deep. Perhaps it hints at a positive note, at the presence and activity of God in person, in all God’s power and dynamic that confronts the negative power of darkness and deep, but it is an ambiguous hint.

This idea that God built the cosmos to live in is not merely (or at all) an invitation to intimacy. The arrangements in this home indicate that there is appropriate distance between humanity and God. The clouds that often cover the heavens are a means of hiding God’s throne, as they hid God when God appeared on earth (e.g., Ex 19:16; 24:15–16; 40:34–35). The cloud both marks and veils the presence of God. It signals the fact that human beings live with God in God’s home and it protects them from the threatening aspects of that.

Humanity lives in God’s home as secure and welcome guests, invited to feel at home here as long as we live. One implication is that we might feel we should be respectful toward God’s home, to keep it looking nice and avoid damaging it.

Implying that conflict or even the existence of matter preceded the speaking of God in creation, far from compromising God’s sovereignty, implies the good news that this God once by a powerful word brought order out of conflict and world out of matter. By its nature, that first powerful act of speaking was a once-for-all act. The world does not need a new act of creation parallel to the first, however de-created it may seem to have become. It needs only its original createdness to be reasserted.

Heaven and earth are not simply separate entities that have in common that they were formed by the same hand. Yhwh made the heavens and the earth to form one cosmos.

But humanity should perhaps not assume that it can do whatever it likes without imperiling the whole. Since God gave it a role in contributing to the process whereby the whole “works” (Gen 1:26–28), it may have the potential to overturn the whole. Perhaps it is secure from everything but itself.

According to 2 Kings 23:5, there were priests in Judah whose task was to make offerings to sun, moon, stars and planets.

Genesis 1 naturally gives space to the origin of sun, moon, stars and planets, with their practical and theological significance for people. Yet in what it actually says, Genesis 1 demythologizes them and downgrades their importance. Yes, sun and moon rule, but all they rule is day and night.

Whereas other peoples regarded Sun and Moon as gods, Genesis does not even mention these lampposts’ names. They are merely elements in the material universe, and God does not get round to making them till day four of a week’s work (see Gen 1:14–19). They do not even require “creating,” like the creatures of sea and sky (Gen 1:21). That is how insignificant they are.

Division and separation are priests’ business (e.g., Lev 10:10; 11:46–47). So in bringing the world into being, as well as thinking like a planner, speaking like a monarch, birthing like a mother and fighting like a warrior, Yhwh was involved in dividing like a priest. It is a task that affirms and undergirds the presence of structure and order in life. This is not to say that the language necessarily comes from priests. It also follows the language of Enuma Elish. But a priest would be able to rejoice in its links with the priestly system, as a modern can rejoice in the security it suggests about the structure of the universe.

In creating this cosmos God gave no explicit place to death, even though death is implicitly the background of the introduction of life, as darkness is explicitly the background of the introduction of light. Genesis 1 does not resolve the questions this raises about the way death is written into the cosmos, in the nature of humanity and of the animal and plant world. But in declaring that God created the cosmos in such a way as to make its elements distinct over against others, so that separation was one of its principles, it does undergird the distinctiveness (among others) of life over against death.

Humanity does seek to obscure some of the distinctions written into creation.

Are there any distinctions that abide? On what basis can one distinguish between ones that abide and ones that can fall? If any fall, in what sense did God establish them as the permanent foundation of the life of the world and of humanity?

Sometimes Christians have been uneasy about the idea of God having a change of mind, as if it imperiled God’s sovereignty or consistency. But there are a number of occasions when Scripture speaks of God having a change of mind, and it is hard to explain away them all—e.g., as concessions to the way things look to us. The First Testament also denies that God has a change of mind, and when it does that, it is asserting that God is not fickle. God does not arbitrarily say one thing today and another tomorrow. On the other hand, God’s word is not like the law of the Medes and Persians, which is unchangeable even when stupid. When there is good reason, within the terms of other aspects of God’s purpose for the world, God can have a change of mind. There will then be consistencies about God’s policies even if flexibility about their outworking.

An act of deliberation precedes the making of human beings in God’s image, according to God’s likeness. The addition of the second expression contributes further to the emphasis on the event and on the human beings’ distinctive Godlikeness. If the second expression adds new meaning to the first, perhaps it does so by making explicit that humanity not only represents God but also resembles God.

The report of God’s implementing of the plan marks its importance in further ways. Whereas the land animals, unlike the sea creatures, were not “created,” Genesis three times describes the making of humanity thus, in each of three quasi-poetic four-word clauses.

whereas the earth produces vegetation and is bidden to produce the animal world, God created the first human beings without their having a link with the earth. Their origin lies in their link with deity.

Human beings are not merely machines and not merely naked apes, but nor are they souls animating dispensable bodies. It is not surprising that what they do to the body affects the whole person (e.g., overeating, overworking, sex).

Like Enuma Elish, it portrays human beings made from a dead god, along with clay and divine spit, though in this case the god is killed purely for the sake of providing some of the raw material for making the new creatures.

whereas Babylonian thinking traces kingship back to the Beginning, Genesis traces only humanity itself back to the Beginning.

The first human beings are themselves royal figures, living in a royal garden and exercising royal authority there (though they lack the vestments of royalty and are forbidden access to royal insight). While an emphasis on creation can buttress the monarchic status quo, it can thus also disturb it.

the creation story indeed also “answers the question ‘From where does the history of God’s people derive its meaning?’ with the answer: ‘God has given the history of His people its meaning through creation.’ ” “The all-important question” is then “whether the purpose of the creation of the world is the history and existence of Israel, or whether the purpose of Israel’s history and existence is to point to and actualize the meaning of creation.”

Does the world exist for Israel’s sake or does Israel exist for the world’s sake?

Standing at the beginning of the First Testament gospel, this account of God’s creation of humanity and God’s words of blessing remind the chosen people(s) that God’s choice of them is subordinate to a commitment to humankind as a whole.

The people of God is always open to overestimating its own significance, and also to underestimating it.

Creation looks forward to the covenant, but the covenant serves the creation.

Wherein lay God’s image in humanity? Neither the expression itself nor the immediate context spells out the phrase’s meaning, and answers to the question commonly reflect the prejudgments of the circles where they are propounded.

Wherein lay God’s image in humanity? Neither the expression itself nor the immediate context spells out the phrase’s meaning, and answers to the question commonly reflect the prejudgments of the circles

The situation parallels the one that obtains regarding the word God. We need to read the whole First Testament story to discover what that word means. We also need the whole story to tell us who human beings are, what it means to be Godlike

When we become aware of some feature of what it means to be human (we are rational, we are religious, we are moral, we are emotional, we are relational, and so forth), each time that encourages us to ask about the nature of the God in whose image we are made and to look at each in light of the other

theories have in common the assumption that God’s image lies in humanity’s inner nature, where intellectuals might be expected to locate it. Yet “image” and “likeness” suggest something more concrete and visible. An image is the visible representation of something, which suggests God’s image lies in humanity’s bodily nature. That would fit with Genesis 1’s portrayal of God as speaking, looking, making

ty’s inner nature, where intellectuals might be expected to locate it. Yet “image” and “likeness” suggest something more concrete and visible. An image is the visible representation of something, which suggests God’s image lies in humanity’s bodily nature. That would fit with Genesis 1’s portrayal of God as speaking, looking, making, setting—and creating.

The First Testament prohibition on images is based not on God’s spiritual nature but on their inadequacy to represent God’s fully personal nature as one who acts and speaks (Deut 4). Their

First Testament prohibition on images is based not on God’s spiritual nature but on their inadequacy to represent God’s fully personal nature as one who acts and speaks (Deut 4).

When theology drew a sharp distinction between humanity’s inner and outer nature (body and spirit), the notion of incarnation was difficult to comprehend. But if humanity’s likeness to God lay as much in its bodiliness as in its inner nature, this apparent difficulty is reduced

human beings were already the kind of creatures that God would be if God were a physical creature. There was a moral cost involved in God’s becoming a human being (cf. Phil 2), but not a metaphysical difficulty

Humanity’s Godlikeness lies in this relational capacity.

I would like to believe that this is what the story implies, but I do not. Male and female is a biological distinction related to reproduction and common to human beings and animals but

but I do not. Male and female is a biological distinction related to reproduction and common to human beings and animals but not to God. The narrative hardly suggests that God combines male and female, nor is there anything in the context to point to a stress on relationality. Indeed, there are pointers in other directions. The reference to humanity’s being male and female leads into the account of God’s blessing humanity and encouraging it to be fruitfu

and animals but not to God. The narrative hardly suggests that God combines male and female, nor is there anything in the context to point to a stress on relationality. Indeed, there are pointers in other directions. The reference to humanity’s being male and female leads into the account of God’s blessing humanity and encouraging it to be fruitful.

Being in God’s image links to mastering the earth (Gen 1:27), and it is by reproducing and filling the earth that humanity will fulfill this commission. That idea reappears in Genesis 1:28, and thus comes both sides of the reference to sexual differentiation. It is thereby marked as a key idea.

Being in God’s image links to mastering the earth (Gen 1:27), and it is by reproducing and filling the earth that humanity will fulfill this commission. That idea reappears in Genesis 1:28, and thus comes both sides of the reference to sexual differentiation. It is thereby marked as a key idea. Genesis

In Genesis 1 the blessing lies in fruitfulness, and women’s childbearing is indispensable to that. In other contexts the blessing may take other forms, and the way women’s calling complements men’s may also differ.

Eve’s collaboration with her man lies in her capacity to bear children. The stress on that capacity implies an equality of importance

and women’s childbearing is indispensable to that. In other contexts the blessing may take other forms, and the way women’s calling complements men’s may also differ.

Eve’s collaboration with her man lies in her capacity to bear children. The stress on that capacity implies an equality of importance between the two

Implicitly, a woman’s contribution to the life of family and society is at least as significant as the contribution of a man. And men and women are to value the home as much as the city. With its bare statement that God made human beings male and female in connection with the commission to master the world, Genesis 1 makes more explicit that parenthood is the vocation of men as much as of women, and not one that the former leave to the latter once they have made their indispensable initial momentary contribution

neither Genesis 1 nor Genesis 2 suggests that one sex has authority over the other, in isolation I doubt whether we could be sure it implied an egalitarian understanding of the relationship, though the linking of hierarchy and authority with disobedience (Gen 3:16) retrospectively supports the view that the story’s implicit vision is an egalitarian one.

Whether the authors intended it or not, they imply that only when men and women are together do we have God imaged. The two have the same metaphysical status or role. Men do not embody normal humanity, with women being a slightly deficient variant on the norm. It is humanity, not just men as well as not just kings and not just Israelites, that images God.

Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days do speak of the making of woman after man (and pay more attention to the origin of culture) and see the making of woman as a chief cause of trouble for men. There is a strand of thinking in both Testaments that has some parallels with this view, but Genesis declares that at the Beginning it was not so. It expresses a vision for the relationship of man and woman that looks behind and beyond the battle of the sexes.

The fact that men and women have a homing instinct towards each other is explained by their ultimate origin in God’s intention. As in Genesis 1, humanity is complete only when men and women come together. A man thus cleaves to “his woman.”

Genesis 2 does not use the rare Hebrew word for “wife,” bĕʿûlâ (e.g., Gen 20:3), from the verb bāʿal “to own,” which presupposes a real estate understanding of marriage that makes a wife her husband’s property. Israelites no doubt made that assumption, like modern Englishmen passing a woman between one another (“Who gives this woman to be married to this man?”). But the account of the origin of the relationship between men and women does not encourage them in that direction. The union does not involve ownership. The relationship involves a mutual commitment of an ʾîš and an ʾiššâ, two people who are the male and female versions of the same kind of being and thus belong together.

The “cleaving” (dābaq) that results hardly refers merely to the physical act that unites a man and a woman. Indeed, it hardly refers to this at all, since sexual union does not involve sticking together for more than a few minutes. Nor does “cleaving” essentially have anything to do with romantic love or with intimacy. It denotes a personal commitment, the permanent sticking together involved in an ongoing relationship, like Ruth’s to Naomi (Ruth 1:14, 16–17).

Jesus inferred from this story that we need to encourage people to keep that commitment rather than encourage them to sit fast and loose to it. Human beings should not tear apart what God put together (e.g., Mk 10:9). This is an exhortation rather than a law, like his other declarations on the imperiling of marriage (see Mt 5:27–32). Merely banning divorce would not fulfill it, and recognizing when marriages have fallen apart and rejoicing for people to start a new marriage would not necessarily resist it.

in the First Testament helpers are usually more powerful than those they help

The two of them are naked, but they are not ashamed. References in the First Testament to nakedness link it not with sex but with poverty, vulnerability and humiliation (e.g., Job 22:6; Is 58:7). Before meeting Eve, Adam might well have felt vulnerable and overawed before the life that lay before him. Together with Eve, he can face the task God has for him.

Genesis 1–2 imply that humanity’s chief and highest end is to work for God in the world.

“master” (rādâ) is not a term for the regular “ruling” of a king over a people. It refers to mastery imposed by a foe, mastery exercised by one people over another against their will, the kind of mastery Cyrus came to exercise over Babylon (Is 41:2). It does not have to involve exploitation or harshness (see Lev 25:39–53), so it can be exercised in a way that combines power and love, but it does involve compulsion or force.

The man and his woman are made to be companions and coworkers in serving God and God’s world. They are unlike God but like animals in being male and female, but like God but unlike animals in being designed to rule.

The goodness of creation does not imply the perfection or completion of creation. Creation needs to be led toward that completion, and this is humanity’s task. Creation groans in travail and looks for its deliverance (Rom 8:19–23) as God created it, not merely as spoiled through human sin. The goodness of creation did not mean it lacked tension or conflict and that human beings just had to continue to enjoy a tension-free and conflict-free life that was built into the goodness of God’s creative work.

Hebrews 2:6–9 uses Psalm 8 to illumine the significance of Christ (cf. also 1 Cor 15:27; Eph 1:22). We need therefore not to lose the point the psalm made before being reworked in this connection. The New Testament’s reuse of it is part of New Testament theology and is irrelevant to the psalm’s own meaning, which is nothing directly to do with Jesus. The psalm is neither explicitly nor implicitly eschatological or messianic.

Genesis 9:1–7 affirms that the relationship of humanity and animals is indeed affected by what has happened to human beings since creation, but it also makes explicit that this does not mean God has withdrawn the commission to have dominion over the world. The fulfillment of this sovereignty does not have to await the coming of a messiah. Psalm 8 does not speak ideally of a world that could not become a reality in the psalmist’s day. It is a rejoicing in the nature of human experience now and it implies an accepting of a human vocation for now.

Genesis 1 no doubt presupposes that humanity will fail its commission (it knows where the story is going), but it implies that this is a failure to achieve rather than a failure to accept a limit, a sin of omission rather than of commission. Genesis 1 anticipates the subsequent action of the snake, when a creature masters humanity instead of being mastered by it.

The very widespread study of this text over two millennia does not indicate that people read it as providing them with a warrant for what we would call exploiting nature. Some other explanation is needed, and the development of modernity seems more likely to provide it.

The very widespread study of this text over two millennia does not indicate that people read it as providing them with a warrant for what we would call exploiting nature. Some other explanation is needed, and the development of modernity seems more likely to provide it. If the idea that God’s image lies in relationship suits the postmodern age, the idea that it constituted a commission to master the world suited the modern age.

In being created in God’s image, humanity is to fulfill this royal role in the world on God’s own behalf.

As far as we can tell, God did not bring the animate world into being by a series of transcendent, supranatural acts but by an immanent process involving trial and error. Species came into being and became extinct through “chance” mutations and the survival of the fittest. Like the ecology of nature in the state in which we know it, it depended on strife, pain and death.

the exercise of God’s authority is designed to free human beings to be themselves, so the exercise of human authority is designed to free nature to be itself, even if this requires a restraint on the part of individual species of the kind we have considered.

Genesis’s implication is then not that “human beings were designed to master and subjugate”—rather than, for example, to tend and protect. It is that “human beings were designed to master and subjugate”—rather than kings being the ones who had this power.

Genesis then indicates that God’s creation design did include mastery and subjugation, of the earth and the other animals, but implies that the mastery and subjection of other human beings is not part of God’s original design.

It is possible to rule with the compliance of the ruled (cf. Judg 8:22), but mastery and subjugation presupposes resistance or at least unwillingness. Genesis 1 might not exclude the rule of some human beings over others, but Genesis 3:16 implies that this comes about as a result of human resistance to God’s rule.

In the context of an existent but unfinished world, God molds the first human out of dirt like a potter shaping clay and then breathes life into the inert earthen model like a paramedic breathing life back into someone. The picture of God bending down, getting hands dirty, and giving mouth-to-mouth complements the picture of the exalted sovereign. Indeed, Genesis 1 itself suggests a trinity of models for God’s creative activity: the speech-act of the transcendent sovereign, the hands-on involvement of the craftworker and the use of the existent creation’s mediation, commissioned to bring other things forth.

Were it not for the man, the garden would have no reason to exist; fruit trees need someone to eat their fruit. Conversely, were it not for the garden, the man would not be able to exist, for it is his source of food. A symbiotic relationship holds between humanity and its environment, each dependent on the other.

Later we discover that eating from the tree of life would mean living forever (Gen 3:22). Humanity is not created immortal.

Immortality is in the gift of the gods and cannot be reached by human effort. The fact of death has to be accepted.

Immortality is in the gift of the gods and cannot be reached by human effort. The fact of death has to be accepted.

Genesis agrees that death is intrinsic to human existence, as it is to the existence of plants and animals. Life involves a development from childhood to maturity to middle age to old age, with birth and death at either ends of that process. There was not some qualitative difference between the bodies and minds of the first human beings and the bodies and minds that we know.

humanity was destined for a lasting life with God. Perhaps an implicit theological undergirding of this notion is the argument that Jesus later uses: God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—not the God of the dead, but the God of the living (Mk 12:26–27). God is still the God of these people whom we call dead, so how can they really or permanently be dead? If you get into a relationship with God, that conveys life from God.

Whereas commands or statutes may seem to us limiting and restrictive, externally imposed restraints on freedom, the First Testament sees them as protective, liberating and offering entry to wise living.

If Ms. Insight also hints that she is full of delight to humanity at the Beginning, there is further irony. One way of expressing the point of Genesis 2–3 would be to say that when humanity is overcome by the cleverness of a creature that encourages it to seek knowledge by a route that Yhwh has forbidden, it yields to Ms. Folly rather than Ms. Insight.

Proverbs itself does not quite make explicit that God was drawn into Ms. Insight’s rejoicing and laughter in the act of creation, though it inevitably hints at this.

God thus spoke and saw, but did not make or name. The vegetation will soon be given over to entities that will have the power over it that is symbolized by naming. Indeed, God does no more naming.

In making it God sets the world going, and in delivering it God restores it to what it was meant to be, but blessing is what the world was set going for and what it is destined to be restored to.

Jesus will also comment that of course God has never stopped working altogether (Jn 5:17). If God did, the world would fall out of existence.

On the seventh day God “stopped” because the work was done. The verb is šābat, from which the word “sabbath” comes. The fact that God stopped work at the end of the week assures us that the world we live in is not a half-finished project.

The portrait of God completing a week’s work and then stopping assures its readers that the work of creation is over. The world is a stable place. It will stay as it is. God is not about to have another bright idea that may turn our place in the world upside-down. God stops work not out of tiredness, but having completed the task. God’s rest is not a mark of divine effeteness, but of divine strength. It hints not at human insecurity, but at human security. God’s home and the world’s home is finished. It can now be enjoyed.

Genesis does not speak of God “resting” (nûaḥ) on the seventh day, which might suggest being tired and needing refreshment. The object of the sabbath was not for God to find energy for another week’s work. God worked in order then to relax, not the other way round. The sabbath is not for the weekdays, but the weekdays for the sabbath.

There are few indications that the sabbath was especially a time for praise, or seeking help or guidance from God, or teaching. The main point about it is that it is a day on which people stop being creative and acknowledge that their days belong to God.

In having God observe the seventh day, Genesis 1 again affirms one of the foundations of Israel’s life. It marks the sabbath as more than a mere Jewish peculiarity. It was an idiosyncrasy of Israel’s faith that people ceased work for one day after working for six. The creation gospel declares that this rhythm reflects that of God’s work in bringing the world into being. In observing the sabbath, Israel alone is realizing the ideology of creation. The Israelite calendar makes no reference to New Year, the festival of such importance for other Middle Eastern peoples. Instead it puts at the head of the calendar the observance of the sabbath, “a weekly celebration of the creation of the world, the uncontestable enthronement of its creator, and the portentous commission of humanity to be the obedient stewards of creation.”

The Israelite calendar makes no reference to New Year, the festival of such importance for other Middle Eastern peoples. Instead it puts at the head of the calendar the observance of the sabbath, “a weekly celebration of the creation of the world, the uncontestable enthronement of its creator, and the portentous commission of humanity to be the obedient stewards of creation.”

There is something distinctive about Yhwh’s involvement with Israel, but this distinctiveness does not lie in Israel’s being the only people Yhwh is involved with. Yhwh

Yhwh’s distinctive involvement with Israel lay in what Yhwh was set on achieving

Yhwh’s distinctive involvement with Israel lay in what Yhwh was set on achieving through this people. It is through this people that God has wanted to bless the world, and has often done so.

Yhwh’s distinctive involvement with Israel lay in what Yhwh was set on achieving through this people.

What leads to or stimulates God’s act of deliverance? The factors include Israel’s being in serfdom and under oppression, their crying out under their oppression, their cry reaching Yhwh, and Yhwh’s thinking about the covenant commitment to them

Israel’s slavery was state slavery or serfdom. The state owned the land and allowed ordinary people to farm it on condition that they paid taxes and fulfilled the government’s requirements in terms of work on state projects from time to time. No doubt the conditions under which they worked varied and could be worse for foreigners than for natives, as in the modern world. At worst, the government could feel no need to

worked varied and could be worse for foreigners than for natives, as in the modern world. At worst, the government could feel no need to treat them with any form of human dignity or as possessing any rights. And as the story in Exodus unfolds, Israel’s experience becomes like that

Yhwh “brought out” Abraham’s family from Ur (Gen 15:7). Being brought out, coming out, being on the move from one place to another is a recurrent feature of Israel’s experience. In due course Yhwh will bring the people out again (e.g., Ezek 20:41). Yet yāṣāʾ also refers to more than merely a geographical move. It denotes being brought out “from under the burdens of Egypt

By etymology and usage “redeem” suggests buying something back. Yhwh indeed “redeemed you from the household of serfs,” but the verb is then pādâ (Deut 7:8). In doing that, Yhwh behaves like someone rescuing a slave by paying his master for him, though there are qualifications to the analogy: “God did indeed redeem Israel, but he paid nothing”

If someone gets into debt because of poor harvests, for instance, their household will also be implicated in that, but within their extended family they may have a potential gōʾēl, a more fortunate member of their extended family who would be under moral obligation to take action to relieve their situation. The other idea is thus restoration. A gōʾēl acted to put the situation back to what it was before and what it should be. This promise, then, sees Israel as members

take action to relieve their situation. The other idea is thus restoration. A gōʾēl acted to put the situation back to what it was before and what it should be. This promise, then, sees Israel as members of Yhwh’s family and sees Yhwh accepting the obligation to do whatever it takes to restore them to their proper position, no longer bearing the unreasonable burdens Egypt imposes.

The forceful kingship of Yhwh has a different motivation from the forceful kingship of Egypt, motivated by fear (Ex 1:9–10

Exodus does not say whom their cry for help addressed. If the oppressive king is the one who has died, perhaps it addressed the new regime (cf., e.g., Ps 72:12). If they worshiped Egyptian gods (e.g., Josh 24:14; elaborated in Ezek 20; 23), it would be natural if they cried out to these. In the story so far, we have heard nothing to suggest the Israelite community has a living faith in Yhwh. Perhaps, like Job’s cries, groans and appeals for help

regime (cf., e.g., Ps 72:12). If they worshiped Egyptian gods (e.g., Josh 24:14; elaborated in Ezek 20; 23), it would be natural if they cried out to these. In the story so far, we have heard nothing to suggest the Israelite community has a living faith in Yhwh. Perhaps, like Job’s cries, groans and appeals for help (e.g., Job 19:7; 23:2; 24:12), their cry was designed for God but seemed not to reach God

be natural if they cried out to these. In the story so far, we have heard nothing to suggest the Israelite community has a living faith in Yhwh. Perhaps, like Job’s cries, groans and appeals for help (e.g., Job 19:7; 23:2; 24:12), their cry was designed for God but seemed not to reach God. Perhaps it addressed no one in particular and was just an expression of hopeless grief. The variety of words used to describe it underlines the point—it is a sigh, a cry, an appeal, a groan (Ex 2:23–24

When a cry reaches God and God hears it, this issues in a response. Proper reaching and proper hearing are like that. When hearing does not issue in a response, there is something odd (šāmaʿ means “obey,” not just “hear”). And when cries from human beings do not meet with a response from human beings and from God, there is something odd. A central “oddity”—but also a central normality—of the First Testament is that “this community has a bold voice for hurt” and that “this God has an attentive ear for hurt.”

Yhwh may be sovereign in the world, but it is not simply Yhwh’s sovereignty that initiates events in the world. Yhwh waits upon people’s cry.

When Israel cries out, there is no suggestion that it is consciously appealing to Yhwh’s covenant promise to its ancestors, but Yhwh knows that theologically the cry appeals to the promise. Objectively speaking, the basis for Israel’s hope lies there, whether Israel knows this or not. It is the covenant that obliges Yhwh to respond to Israel’s cry.

It is as “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” that Yhwh then appears to Moses (Ex 3:6; cf. Ex 3:15–16).

Jacob-Israel are the sons and daughters Yhwh loved and for whom Yhwh therefore willingly gave up Egypt to Pharaoh in return for having Israel:

I gave Egypt as your ransom, Sudan and Ethiopia in your place,

Because of the fact that you were valuable in my eyes,

You were important and I myself loved you. (Is 43:3–4)

Many peoples have cried out in such a situation and not been delivered. But somehow the juxtaposition of promise, serfdom and groaning does have this effect. And Yhwh’s promise that all nations were to find blessing like Abraham implies an encouragement to other peoples who live in serfdom to cry out like Abraham’s descendants and expect Yhwh to respond.

If we overemphasize the significance of God’s permanent presence, we lose the ability to own God’s real absence and to think of and speak of and plead for an occasional more real experience of God appearing and acting. From time to time God does appear and act. The God who was absent becomes present. God comes down from the heavens.

Frustrated by the midwives, the king orders boy babies to be drowned, but at least one woman declines and saves the boy Yhwh will use to bring about the deliverance. Moses is the boy who is available because he has a mother who thinks the sun shines out of his eyes and determines to do something about the situation, a spunky sister who is as good a liar as her people’s midwives, and an adoptive mother who is a soft touch when she sees a baby (Ex 2:1–10). Again there is no suggestion that any distinctively Israelite religious awareness lies behind their action, or any religious awareness at all. God gets involved in this story by using the results of human instincts and deeds, and specifically those of people who do not count.

Attacking someone and killing them can be an moral act—God often attacks people and kills them, and commissions Israel to do so. The narrative expresses neither approval nor disapproval, though on a broader canvas it implies that Israel owes Egypt neither forbearance nor submission nor respect nor truth.

God thus acts via the man who was available. Initially there is little indication that Moses is someone outstanding, and much that points in the opposite direction. There is again no reference to his taking into account any religious considerations, for or against his actions. He was simply the boy who got exempted from the king’s variegated slaughter, and therefore the one Yhwh had to do something with. He is now a man on the run from the Egyptian authorities, living in a foreign country, married to a foreign girl and working as a shepherd for her priestly father

Moses was just the most ordinary of men, one of whom Yhwh made extraordinary demands, and on whom his people put extraordinary pressures because of those demands Yhwh placed on him. He is wise to try to get out of Yhwh’s commission and perhaps realistic in suggesting there is nothing to make Yhwh settle on him as the ideal candidate for the task that needs fulfilling.

Once God has overwhelmed Moses and he sets about fulfilling his commission to speak, a strange event follows. Yhwh tries to kill him (Ex 4:24). It is one of the most extraordinary statements in Scripture.

circumcision of their son is apparently the sacramental act that turns Yhwh from deathly intent towards Moses. Perhaps it is Moses’ machismo that needs circumcising.

Turning a staff into a snake is a sign for the Israelites and later a portent for Pharaoh (Ex 4:8; 7:9). They are designed to convince a person such as Pharaoh that Yhwh is speaking, and to persuade him to do as Yhwh says and thus acknowledge that his own royal power pales into insignificance before Yhwh’s.

Why does Yhwh’s chastisement of Pharaoh take the form it does? Yhwh gave the answer long ago (Ex 4:23). The king has taken Yhwh’s firstborn and will not give him back. Yhwh will therefore take Egypt’s firstborn and not give him back. The punishment will fit the crime. Or rather, Yhwh will prove possession of authority in the realm where the king pretends to authority.

Yhwh speaks in terms of rights. A father has the right to expect that his firstborn son will work with him and for him, and eventually will accept responsibility for the house and the fields or flocks, and if necessary responsibility for his father and mother and other family members who cannot look after themselves. As Yhwh’s firstborn, Israel is the person on whom Yhwh’s hopes and intentions center.

The killing of Egypt’s firstborn sons (and not daughters) corresponds to the king’s requiring the drowning of Israelite baby boys (and not girls) (Ex 1:22); the Egyptian army meets its death by drowning, the fate the king had imposed on Israel’s baby boys. Yet Exodus again does not say that this event is an act of punishment for the nation’s wrongdoing. When Yhwh describes events as great sĕpāṭîm (Ex 6:6; 7:4), both etymology and context suggest that the emphasis lies on the exercise of decisive power rather than judicial punishment. Yhwh is showing who is really God and showing that the Egyptian gods lack real power (Ex 12:12; Num 33:4).

Yhwh is known as “your God” in delivering the people. But the self-declaration identifies the God who now appears as someone already known to the people’s ancestors. Perhaps they do not acknowledge Yhwh, but Yhwh acknowledges them. Yhwh’s declaration of intent and summons to Moses begins and ends with reference to Israel’s being “my people” (Ex 3:7, 10) and Yhwh is already “the God of the Hebrews” (Ex 3:18).

Freedom in Scripture is the freedom to serve Yhwh. This dynamic suggests another direction in which we might need to reframe the emphases of liberation theology. “Freedom from slavery under Pharaoh took the form of becoming slaves of God.… Therefore, when Israel wishes to testify to deliverance and freedom, it points first of all to the Torah.”

Here there is no statement that the Egyptians were acting immorally. Where they went wrong was in thinking they could win a victory when they did not realize who they were taking on. They miscalculated, with fatal results. Rather, they did realize who they were taking on, for they knew they were resisting Yhwh, and they got what was coming to them. Once again Yhwh was thus asserting power over them, not judging them or punishing them. The song is an act of praise at the power of God. That power is an encouragement to the powerless, though it will become a peril to Israel itself when it becomes powerful.

the lives of peoples, their achievements and their losses, are bound up with their rulers’ policies. The people suffer when Yhwh puts pressure on their ruler and find themselves plundered by the Israelites when they leave, like a defeated army plundered by its victors.

There is nothing mysterious about a king taking a tough stance over a subservient people’s request to leave the country. There is hardly need to speak of Yhwh’s causing that. There is some mystery about the Egyptians’ cooperation in being plundered. It must be Yhwh who causes that (Ex 3:21–22).

Yhwh’s malkût is not a place or an area, as the English phrase “kingdom of God” can imply. It is an activity. Second, God’s kingship is punctiliar rather than continuous. Of course God does reign all the time; a person who is king is king all the time. In due course the First Testament will assert the idea of God’s kingship over Israel and that will look more like an ongoing position of authority.

But when the First Testament initially talks of God’s reigning, it does so to affirm that God asserts kinglike power in a particular context—namely, when another king asserts his power to oppress God’s people. The kingship image will never be a common one in the First Testament, and when it does occur, it is often set over against human kingship (see esp. 1 Sam 12). “Reigning” is not what God continuously does in the world.

from the beginning “God’s reign” is a power concept rather than an authority concept. God has a right to exercise authority in the world, but when God reigns this involves an exercise of power rather than an exercise of authority. Yhwh does not say to the king of Egypt “You must yield to me because I have legitimate authority over you”—though this would have been a quite feasible claim. Yhwh says, “You must yield to me because I am a greater power than you are.”

The exodus story suggests that revelation involves person, words and deeds.

The process of revelation involves recognition of the God who has spoken and acted, and testimony to this God and these acts.

revelation does not start from nothing but builds on tradition. It presupposes that the recipients of revelation have some awareness of God’s person and God’s acts. It is this that enables the new revelation to have meaning.

Moses asks after God’s name so he can pass it on to the Israelites, and Yhwh responds by providing not a label but a theology. But at last Moses is further told, in what looks more like a straight answer to his question about God’s name, that the name of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is Yhwh (Ex 3:15).

Philo once observed that “no proper name can be assigned to the one who truly is”; in revealing the name Yhwh, God is giving people a title to use as if it were a proper name. “And if he is unnamable, he is also inconceivable and incomprehensible.” The logic in Exodus seems to work in the opposite direction. The name “Yhwh” implies that Yhwh is a person, with a unique individuality, and one that can be known.

The title or self-description “I am” (Ex 3:14) could sound to us like an abstract expression, and a profound one. God is the eternal, self-sufficient, all-sufficient one, not a god who comes into being or can die, like other Middle Eastern gods, but one who simply “is.”

Indeed, the verb more likely means “I will be,” for Yhwh has just used the same verb form in telling Moses, “I will be with you,” ʾehyeh ʿimmāk. That takes up the words spoken to Isaac and to Jacob (Gen 26:3; 31:3). Yhwh will often use this verb form again (beginning in Ex 4:12, 15), and every time it means “I will be,” not “I am.” It is indeed “I will be” who has sent Moses to the people (Ex 3:14).

The giving of the name and the spelling out of its implication is thus both a revelation and a comment on the impossibility of offering a revelation. It is more like an open-ended promise. God has the capacity to be whatever Israel needs God to be.

Moses and Israel only need Yhwh to carry on being the same God, which means being the God who can always be something new as new situations require it. When God goes on to promise to bring the people out of their miserable state in Egypt into the promised land, that is not really an extra revelation, but a spelling out of this first revelation in the concrete terms required by a particular situation.

In more traditional cultures this is not so; calling someone by their personal name may seem to imperil a proper relationship with them. It is a bold act for Moses to ask God’s name; perhaps he needs to be able to blame the people as a whole for the need to do so (Ex 3:13). God could easily have said “no.” It is a risky act for God to reveal it, for once the name is “out there,” it can be slighted or misused (cf. Ex 20:7). But Yhwh welcomes being addressed by name.

If Yhwh wants to be known by name and we decline and insist on referring to Yhwh by role, we refuse the personal revelation. And the particular role by which the believing communities have insisted they relate to Yhwh has introduced an extra pervasive gendered and patriarchal caste to First Testament faith that is alien to it. God asked to be known not as “Lord” but by a personal name. We relate to a person, not a mere authority figure.

While the disadvantage of that practice is to dilute the personal nature of the God who has a name, the advantage is that it removes the possibility of misunderstanding the use of this name as implying that Yhwh is just one god among the many gods who have personal names to enable us to distinguish one from another. The name Yhwh refers to the only God.

the question “Who is Yhwh that I should listen to his voice and let Israel go? I do not acknowledge Yhwh. No, I will not let Israel go” (Ex 5:2). They are frightening words, expressive of the common human instinct that rarely finds such explicit expression. Whether or not people will listen to Yhwh’s voice was the issue at the Beginning, where Eve paid heed to the serpent and Adam “listened to the voice” of Eve (Gen 3:17, šāmaʿ lĕ; here it is šāmaʿ bĕ). While Abraham was capable of making the same mistake (Gen 16:2, with lĕ), in general the distinction of Abraham lay in the fact that he listened to Yhwh’s voice (Gen 22:18; 26:5, with bĕ), and this will be Israel’s calling (e.g., Ex 19:5; 23:21–22, with bĕ).

Experiences of God’s marvelous intervention are designed to inspire trust in God in new situations that arise, but they do not guarantee that God will approach the next crisis the same way as the last one.

Although Israel actively fights, as was not needed at the Red Sea, it does not fight alone. Heavenly forces fight alongside the earthly ones—or rather, fight above them. Indeed, the implication is that were this not so, Israel would lose the battle. Yhwh again acts through Moses, and specifically lets Moses’ cane become Yhwh’s cane.

From the beginning Israel lives with permeable boundaries. The boundaries are important; if Israel becomes indistinguishable from other peoples, God’s purpose through Abraham cannot be fulfilled. Yet the permeability is also important, and for the same reason.

The events in Exodus 4–15 constitute a demonstration of Yhwh’s authority. The exodus story is about sovereignty or mastery, about whether Israel serves the king or is free to serve Yhwh. Moses is not merely being sly in asking that Israel be allowed to go to serve Yhwh by celebrating a festival in the wilderness—after which, by implication, they will return. The request itself raises the key issue: whether they are ultimately Yhwh’s servants or the king’s servants.

The events in Exodus 4–15 constitute a demonstration of Yhwh’s authority. The exodus story is about sovereignty or mastery, about whether Israel serves the king or is free to serve Yhwh. Moses is not merely being sly in asking that Israel be allowed to go to serve Yhwh by celebrating a festival in the wilderness—after which, by implication, they will return. The request itself raises the key issue: whether they are ultimately Yhwh’s servants or the king’s servants. Is the king of Egypt the great sovereign, or is the God of Israel? The king responds with that frightening declaration “I do not acknowledge Yhwh” (Ex 5:2).

In the Bible feelings are more commonly located in the stomach, where we often also feel emotions. The heart stands for the center of the person more generally, and commonly suggests the locus of thinking and decision-making.

To say only that Yhwh knows what will happen puts Yhwh in a purely reactive position, whereas the First Testament reckons that a God worth calling “God” is more intentional about world history than this implies. Likewise the God of Israel is more intentional about Israel’s history. Not everything in world history or Israelite history emerges from God’s will; much of it happens against God’s will, though with God’s permission. As God could know everything but does not choose to do so, so God could ensure that everything happens in accordance with the divine will but does not choose to do so.

To judge from other aspects of God’s working with human beings, more likely God softens and hardens in the same personal way that human beings adopt in personal relations. God makes things happen by influencing people. To soften people, God presents them with facts or images or stories of divine love or power, or of human possibilities of action or achievement. These do not force them to a positive response, but give them, for example, extra stimulus and opportunity to trust or love or worship. To toughen people, God presents them with other facts or images or stories—for instance, perhaps, reminding the Pharaoh of the loss he will incur through letting the Israelites go. That, too, does not force or manipulate Pharaoh to decide to hold on to Israel. What happens depends on how Pharaoh responds to the facts or images or stories—on whether he himself toughens his resolve.

The king falls for Yhwh’s plan and shows himself a less intelligent military strategist than Yhwh because he has miscalculated the situation. He will not acknowledge that he is confronted by an opponent capable of enabling Israel to escape from a dead end. He cannot recognize a trap. He cannot resist the temptation to follow the Israelites into the sea. That is the kind of incapacity that decides battles. That is the process whereby the king and his staff change their mind about letting the people go and Yhwh strengthens the king’s resolve (Ex 14:4, 5, 8, 17).

In the course of events as a whole, then, Yhwh’s decision stands as the background to what happens, yet it does not force people to take a path they would not otherwise have taken.

They did not make a distinction between their religious life and their secular life. These were two sides of a coin. Prayer gives expression in the everyday world to the pressures that the people of God feel, and prayer leads to things happening in the everyday world because it stimulates God to take action there (Ex 2:23–25).

Understood in light of Egyptian, yam-sûp suggests Red Sea and/or Reed Sea, but understood in light of Hebrew it suggests Sea of End. It was the sea where Israel thought it was coming to an end, but where the Egyptian army did so.

The Sea of End becomes the sea of beginning.

the Ten Words make no overt correlation with the act of deliverance; their connection lies in the simple fact that by the act of deliverance Yhwh earned the right to declare what Israel’s life should look like. They are a sign that the act of deliverance took the people from the service of Egypt to the service of Yhwh.

“The theological intention of the Ten Commandments is to institutionalize the Exodus.”

Exodus requires the people to keep alive the memory of oppression, not to prevent them from “moving on” because they always see themselves as the oppressed, but to prevent them from slipping into the role of oppressors because they have forgotten what it is like to be the oppressed. It would be odd if people who have been delivered from a household of ʿăbādîm (Ex 13:3, 14; 20:2) could treat people as ʿăbādîm with no right to observe the sabbath and no prospect of an end to their serfdom (Ex 20:10; 21:2).

To put it in the terms of Leviticus 19, Israel is to learn to be Yhwh-like, to be holy as Yhwh is holy.

covenant was “a convenient symbol” for the fact that Yhwh and Israel stood in a relationship that Yhwh had initiated in history, a relationship that continued as a living process—a reality often present when the word bĕrît is not used.

a covenant between Yhwh and this people already exists. God’s covenant commitment to Abram was the basis for the people’s deliverance from Egypt (cf. Ex 2:24; 6:4–5). Exodus 19–24 is not an account of a covenant making, but of the sealing or reconfirming or renegotiating of a covenant.

The reworking of Yhwh’s requirements implicitly operates as if Yhwh has completely fulfilled those promises. Actually Israel is in the midst of a liminal experience, located between Egypt and Canaan, delivered from the first but not delivered into the second. Towards the end of its time at Sinai Yhwh will restate a covenant commitment in the most sustained piece of covenant argument since Genesis 17 and easily the most sustained piece of covenant argument in

pletely fulfilled those promises. Actually Israel is in the midst of a liminal experience, located between Egypt and Canaan, delivered from the first but not delivered into the second. Towards the end of its time at Sinai Yhwh will restate a covenant commitment in the most sustained piece of covenant argument since Genesis 17 and easily the most sustained piece of covenant argument in Exodus-Leviticus-Numbers.

The Abram covenant required the mark of male circumcision and presupposed a broader commitment to a whole and open walk before God, but laid down no further specific expectations or requirements.

Yhwh’s purpose meets its goal here. Consequently, “observance of the Mosaic Torah is the opposite of an obstacle to a loving and intimate relationship with God. It is the vehicle and the sign of just that relationship.” Dividing command from gospel “endangers the dynamic heart of early Yahwistic faith.… Deliverance originating in divine grace and obedience based on the human response of gratitude were indivisible aspects of Israel’s primal experience as a people.”

But the fact that Exodus 19:3–8 is a form of reworking of Genesis 12:1–3 reminds us that this designation links with Yhwh’s lordship over the whole world and works toward the world’s inclusion rather than its exclusion. The stretching of the royal priesthood to include other peoples (Rev 1:6) is in keeping with the Abrahamic vision.

anyone other than a first-time reader sees a chilling irony in Israel’s agreement to the terms for its becoming a kingdom of priests and a holy nation and its brisk undertaking to do all that Yhwh has said. Although the community will repeat its undertaking in Exodus 24 after the more detailed exposition of Yhwh’s expectations in Exodus 20–23, only a matter of weeks will pass before it has fundamentally reneged on that commitment. It will be that covenant-breaking that necessitates some covenant-making.

Aaron claims the people were not worshiping another god, for having described the calf image as the deity that brought the people out of Egypt, he speaks of the subsequent festival as a festival for Yhwh. The fact that the God of Jacob was implicitly characterized as bull-like in strength, a characterization of El, would provide a basis for imaging Yhwh as bull-like. Yhwh takes the opposite view. This is worshiping other gods.

Yhwh no longer speaks as a passionate God who is also faithful, but as a compassionate and forgiving God who is admittedly also prepared to be tough when necessary. That is the nature of “Yhwh, Yhwh,” the name repeated four times in the introduction to this theological statement (Ex 34:5–7). The name is here the people’s reassurance, not their peril.

The representative punishment of some people can avail for the whole. The action makes clear that punitive action is necessary without requiring the entire people to be destroyed.

God is not interested in what we feel inside independently of its finding expression in externals. But the story also notes that the people’s external obedience indeed corresponds to their attitude of heart and spirit.

Yhwh declares, “I am wiping away your acts of rebellion like thick cloud, your failings like thunder cloud. Now turn to me, because I am delivering you” (Is 44:22). Forgiveness is there the basis for repentance, not the other way round. A people that does repent will certainly find Yhwh carries its wrongdoing (see Jonah); a people that does not repent cannot assume Yhwh will do that, but doing so may be one way Yhwh draws it back.

Moses does not speak of himself as Yhwh’s servant when he is trying to get the people to do as he says. In fact, he only describes himself as Yhwh’s servant in conversation with Yhwh, when he is trying to motivate Yhwh to do what he wants when he feels desperate.

Only years after his first acts as self-appointed leader does God actually commission him. His experiences in Midian play a significant role in shaping him, but his leadership also requires his proper drafting into Yhwh’s service.

God does nothing except by means of Moses, but as leader, Moses never exercises any initiative.

Oddly, before he becomes a leader this was not so.

The story gives us no rationale for God’s procedure, though we might guess some reasons. Perhaps God simply likes to give human beings significant roles in the achieving of a purpose in the world: It is in keeping with the rationale for creating humanity.

“Mosaic leadership … does not offer a series of successful solutions but rather a set of perennial problems that may be mitigated from time to time but can never be resolved.” Difficulty and disappointment, not triumphant success, punctuate his entire career. It cannot even be said that he learns from them.

Kings are identified with the agents they work through. Their own aims and reputation become dependent on their actions. So it is for Yhwh.

Faith involves believing in Moses, on the basis of believing in a sign (Ex 4:1, 8, 9). It involves thus believing that Yhwh has sent him (Ex 4:5). It involves—well, just believing (Ex 4:31; the verb has no object). Indeed, there is no explicit reference to simply believing in Yhwh in Exodus 4; the only explicit object of belief is Moses, Moses’ signs and Moses’ having been sent. It is via believing in Moses that people believe in Yhwh.

it is Moses who urges God to act in accordance with God’s own character. It is thus by listening to Moses that Yhwh listens to the people (Ex 5:22–6:1). Moses’ job as intercessor is to shout “why?” on behalf of his people.

Yhwh speaks to a prophet via visions and dreams, but speaks to Moses mouth to mouth and without ambiguity. That makes him more than a prophet (Num 12:6–8). To put it another way, God speaks with him as with a friend, face to face (Ex 33:7–11). The result of spending time talking with God is that something of God’s brightness or strength comes to affect Moses (Ex 34:29). While that is not something the people want to live with all the time, it is allowed, or even required, to come home to them when Moses is telling them what God has said.

The total assembly comes to 603,550, the same number as emerged from the census taken a few months previously (Ex 38:26), implying several million when we add women and children. This is out of all proportion to the actual size of peoples in Moses’ day. The population of Palestine may have reached these numbers only in the twentieth century. In First Testament times, it may never have reached a million. Perhaps numbers that were originally more realistic have been misunderstood

Paradoxically, it is its violence that qualifies Levi (Ex 32:25–29). Its violence goes back a long way (Gen 34:25) and forfeits its inheritance in the land (Gen 49:5–7), but it became something God used, and Levi’s loss of an inheritance found compensation in its distinctive position. More specifically, the Levite males take the place of the firstborn males of every family, to whom God would claim a right (Num 3:11–13).

Israel’s very first acts in the promised land are to give all the males the sacramental mark of their truly belonging to the people of the promise and to celebrate the meal that commemorates its deliverance. To put it in Joshua’s own terms, their circumcision “rolled the shame of Egypt” from them (Josh 5:9). The expression takes up the name of the place that commemorates the event, Gilgal, which recalls the verb “roll” (gālal). The story does not tell us why circumcision had not been practiced in the wilderness or why it speaks of the shame of Egypt.

Perhaps a “wilderness experience” is a sort of spiritual necessity and a people does not grow to maturity without it, though the First Testament shows it is possible to have the wilderness experience in spades without growing to maturity

There is a “profound originality” about

a divine-human pact in which both parties complain endlessly about each other.… Israel complains about Moses, Moses complains about Israel, God complains about Israel, Israel complains about God, God complains about Moses, and Moses complains about God. That such a narrative should have been preserved and elevated to

about each other.… Israel complains about Moses, Moses complains about Israel, God complains about Israel, Israel complains about God, God complains about Moses, and Moses complains about God. That such a narrative should have been preserved and elevated to the status of sacred scripture and national classic was an act of the most profound literary and moral originality

“Total strangers do not complain about each other as Israel and the Lord do.”

“Total strangers do not complain about each other as Israel and the Lord do.” Or they may complain about each other but not directly to each other. That implies some trust and confidence in the relationship. On the other hand, a relationship is in deep trouble if it gets dominated by mutual complaint to the exclusion of acceptance and trust.

The “fear of freedom” that they felt in Egypt reasserts itself and makes bondage strangely attractive.

Yhwh uses natural resources, but heightens their potential or capacity or significance. The people are invited to look to the natural but to expect God to do something supernatural through it. The process will be repeated when Jesus feeds thousands of people with a few examples of the resources available by a lake, some bread and some fish

“Death is transformed into life from within a death-filled context.” Any such individual experience needs to be looked at in the light of the composite pattern that emerges from these stories. The people of God then have to ask whether theirs is an experience of unexplained disappointment or deserved chastisement, and how it tests them and their leadership, and how the stories of God’s provision draw them to come to God over this particular experience

reflecting in a midrash on the narrative speed with which the account relates the people’s three-day journey from Sinai after the narrative slowness of the Sinai story. It imagines the people getting up early, folding their tents, packing their belongings, and marching as fast as they can for three days to get as far away as possible as quickly as possible from Sinai and any possible further law-giving—though of course this ploy does not work.

The First Testament gospel story is a long story because of clefts carved out by God’s letting natural disaster have its way and letting human rebelliousness have its way.

Deuteronomy is not a legalistic document. It sees the gift of Moses’ Teaching as an aspect of the great blessing intended by Yhwh for Israel (Deut 4:7–8). But Deuteronomy closes with repeated challenges to make a covenant commitment to Yhwh.

Moses implies that the people are as stubborn as the king of Egypt was (e.g., Deut 9:6, 13), which would make us wary of ascribing too much value to any undertaking they may now make in response. In fact, in Deuteronomy Israel never replies to Moses’ challenge. It never makes any commitment. That leaves the ball in the readers’ court, like the question at the end of Jonah

The story portrays the ease with which leaders can slip from handling protests with trust to sharing their people’s failure. Leaders and people must not take leaders too absolutely. Leaders are made of the same stuff as their people and fall into the same sins.

“in just the way we obeyed Moses”? Whoever speaks in whatever connection, that precedent is hardly encouraging. Though we might be tempted to think that the presence of the Canaanites is the great obstacle to the fulfilling of Yhwh’s promise to give the land to Israel, the opening of Joshua suggests otherwise. Yhwh is quite capable of giving Israel this land—the verb comes eight times. The real obstacle to fulfillment is not any resolve of the Canaanites t

encouraging. Though we might be tempted to think that the presence of the Canaanites is the great obstacle to the fulfilling of Yhwh’s promise to give the land to Israel, the opening of Joshua suggests otherwise. Yhwh is quite capable of giving Israel this land—the verb comes eight times. The real obstacle to fulfillment is not any resolve of the Canaanites to hold on to their land but Joshua and Israel’s potential lack of resolve to do what Yhwh says.

Achan’s name (ʿākān) makes the point, for while it represents no known Hebrew root, it does represent the letters of the name “Canaan” (kĕnaʿan) in a hidden form. Achan signifies the presence of Canaan hidden within Israel.

So the opening, the center, the close and the individual stories in Joshua describe the people as wholly committed to Yhwh and to a life of obedience to Yhwh’s directions, but also see them as continually falling down on such commitment. The portrait is the one familiar from Exodus and Numbers.

The church is, in Luther’s famous statement, “at the same time right with God, and sinful.” If it does not own the second facet of its nature as well as the first, it risks behaving as if its own publicity were true and then becoming an agent of sin and oppression rather than of freedom—as it has indeed been.

It is apparently fine for Yhwh to test Israel but not for Israel to test Yhwh. Perhaps Yhwh’s testing of Israel shows Yhwh takes Israel seriously and indicates a kind of respect—Yhwh does not unilaterally look into Israel’s heart but gives it opportunity to show what it is made of. Israel’s testing of Yhwh indicates a lack of respect or trust when Yhwh has given Israel ample reason for these.

Yhwh must live by the self-revelation following on the rebellion at Sinai, which made commitment and forgiveness primary in the divine nature, even if that nature also secondarily embraces the need to chastise people for their wrongdoing and the capacity to get angry.

Miriam, Moses and Aaron do share the fate of the wilderness generation as a whole, because they do share in its rebelliousness. But the fact that the leaders do not reach the land also makes it clear that leaders are dispensable.

Israel’s story (the world’s story) is not ultimately about deliverance but about blessing. When things have gone wrong (e.g., the people are slaves in Egypt), then God needs to take some emergency measures to put them right by delivering them. But normal life is then about blessing.

In future centuries, if the community fails to learn from its ancestors’ negative example, it can learn from their subsequent experience of God’s deliverance and pray to repeat it

Naim Ateek suggests that “obsession with the land has had disastrous consequences for the Jews at different times in their ancient history. For it is not the land that carries a blessing to the people, but faithfulness to the God of justice, righteousness, and mercy.” But Yhwh chose to create humanity in bodily form and thus relates to Israel in a way that involves land and is not merely a matter of the spiritual, moral or theological. The story of Yhwh’s involvement with Israel thus intrinsically involves the land

One way the First Testament unsuccessfully seeks to safeguard against obsession with the land replacing obsession with faithfulness and mercy is by linking the land theme with Yhwh’s purpose for the world as a whole. The theme links to a theology of creation and leads to one. The land (ʾereṣ) to which Yhwh directed Abram and which Israel comes to occupy is a particular segment of the land (ʾereṣ) God created

There are human beings and human groups who seem attached to being unsettled, but the norm is to long for homecoming, and for Israel this will be the land’s significance.

As they leave Sinai they are a people on a journey, but the journey will find its goal in settlement. With this in the narrative, the land becomes especially prominent once Israel does leave Sinai and set off for Canaan.

The fact that the land is not empty but is occupied by other peoples raises ethical questions as well as logistical ones. More than force is needed to justify the taking away of a people’s land

perhaps the stories of the ancestors functioned in analogous ways to assure ancient Israel that its relationship with the land did not begin with Joshua’s arrival there. These ancestors had not only received promises from Yhwh about eventual possession of the land but also moved there, traveled around there, lived there, built altars suggesting Yhwh’s claim to the land there, named Yhwh’s name there and bought burial land there. They remained sojourners, but they were there

The First Testament also argues that the land can be given to Israel because it needs to be taken away from the people who currently occupy it, who are characterized by wrongdoing (ʿāwôn, Lev 18:25; cf. Gen 15:16) or wickedness (rešaʿ, Deut 9:4–5). It is throwing up its inhabitants because of the way they treat one another and the way they treat their children, and if Israel adopts the same familial patterns, the land will also throw up Israel (Lev 18:24–30).

Yhwh’s giving of the land is then a key motif in Joshua 1, a chapter that is “strangely unmilitaristic, given that it introduces a book full of war and bloodshed.” Much more focus lies on God’s giving of the land (Josh 1:2, 3, 6, 11, 13, 14, 15a, 15b; three participles, performative qatal, infinitive, and waw-consecutive plus qatal; also two further qatal verbs referring to the literally past gift of the land east of the Jordan; cf. Josh 2:9, 14, 24)

Perhaps it is because Hebrew has no word for “promise” (so that the expression “the promised land” does not appear in the First Testament) that the First Testament speaks of God “swearing” when it wants a stronger expression than “speaking.”

There might then be other claimants to the land, but the king’s grant guarantees the recipients secure possession over against other people’s claims. The point is made more explicit by describing Yhwh as giving the land to the people to “possess” and of the people thus coming to “possess” the land (yāraš, Josh 1:11, 15).

Joshua builds an altar on Mount Ebal, within sight of the altar Abram built on his arrival in the land (Gen 12:6–7), which among other things would suggest the naming of Yhwh’s name over the land as its owner. From time to time the First Testament continues to emphasize that the land belongs to Yhwh, and the idea of gift and possession carries no implication of absolute rights to the land over against Yhwh.

Leaving it uncultivated for one year in seven constitutes an acknowledgment that Yhwh still owns the land, as people recognize Yhwh’s ownership of their time, their crops and their children by substantial and symbolic offerings of part of these.

Worshiping other gods therefore defiles the land and renders the worshipers liable to be cast out into a land where such worship belongs, a land that is inherently defiled (Jer 2:1–8; Hos 9:1–3; cf. Amos 7:17; 1 Sam 26:19). Defilement also comes upon people and land if the people indulge in certain practices in the realm of sexual relationships. It was such practices that defiled the land and caused it to throw up its previous inhabitants, and they will have the same implications for Israel (Lev 18–20).

The land’s boundaries in the First Testament thus reflect political realities of different periods rather than having significance in their own right.

In Numbers 13, the verb often translated “spy out” is ṭûr, which nicely does as a verb for “touring” in modern Hebrew, while the giant bunch of grapes that the explorers brought back with them provides the Israeli tourist authorities with their emblem. The “spies” are the first tourists.

After their entry into the land, things will be very different. They will be spread over the land learning to live ordinary lives in the context of the lives of nations around and other ethnic groups in their midst. Yhwh’s dwelling will be far away and life will be less shaped by the sacral. The instructions they receive on the edge of the land focus less on the world of worship and much more on the practicalities of ordinary life.

Deuteronomy is sympathetic to human need, more relaxed, more humanitarian, more practical and happy to reduce the extent to which the people’s life is overseen from the sanctuary. But the land is a place where the people are to live the life Yhwh prescribes, in contrast to the life lived by its previous occupants (Deut 5:31).

When the people stand poised on the edge of the Jordan, Yhwh promises that they are about to see Yhwh’s “wonders” (niplāʾôt, a part of the verb pālāʾ)—extraordinary and amazing acts (Josh 3:5). Such acts are humanly incomprehensible, not in the sense of defying scientific explanation (though they may do that) but in surpassing imagination or expectation.

Though the Red Sea story and the Jordan crossing story may be significantly shaped by the Canaanite story of Baal’s victory over Sea and River, the psalm does not speak of Sea and River but juxtaposes “sea” and “Jordan” and thus illustrates a feature of the First Testament gospel. “Jordan” affirms that this gospel relates to events that happened in a concrete, this-worldly place, at a river Israelites knew very well, not in an otherworldly realm

The relatively unthreatening River Jordan, which people such as the Israelite spies and Ruth and Naomi were able to pass over without great trouble, becomes a figure for dynamic powers asserted against Yhwh. The rivers and the sea play the role they play in the Canaanite story of Baal’s victory over Sea and River.

As the story of this journey has portrayed the people with systematic ambiguity, as committed to Yhwh but inclined to worship other gods, sometimes obedient to Yhwh but sometimes failing to do what Yhwh says, so the story incorporates a tension in the portrait of Yhwh. Yhwh completely fulfills the promise to bless Israel by giving Israel the land vouchsafed to it, but Yhwh does not wholly give this land to Israel, and Israel thus does not enter into full enjoyment of Yhwh’s blessing.

Why is it the case that the First Testament gospel already interweaves declarations that God’s promises have been fulfilled and that there remains much for God to do? There is a simple answer, implicit in Numbers 13–14, but it constitutes only a half-truth. It is that the promises have found fulfillment insofar as Israel has kept its commitment to Yhwh, while incompleteness of fulfillment issues from Israel’s rebellion

Judges combines the punitive and teleological explanations. Because of their entering into relationships with the local peoples, Yhwh will leave the latter there as adversaries through whom they may learn to fight, and leave their gods as tempting snares to test their commitment to Yhwh (Judg 2:1–5; 3:1–6).

The nature of Yhwh’s promises is such as not to find complete or immediate or trouble-free fulfillment, for reasons we are not given. Conversely, fulfillment of the promises is not earned by obedience. Obedience is vital, but fulfillment issues from God’s purpose and God’s faithfulness.

For Israel’s ongoing life, the tensions embodied in the narratives provide mirrors in which they may find themselves. They invite people to consider how far their experience is one of fulfillment and how far of nonfulfillment or shortfall. Awareness of fulfillment invites them to trust God for complete fulfillment. Awareness of nonfulfillment invites them to look for its reasons or for what God wishes to achieve through it. Awareness of their own commitment invites them to challenge God to fulfill the promises. Awareness o

Israel could have understood the First Testament gospel story in an analogous way and ended with Joshua. It has spoken of God’s failed creation project and of God’s intention to draw the world by blessing Abraham’s family and giving it a land, and that promise has now come true. But it turned out that the end was not the end. After Joshua, Israel did not simply live happily ever after.

First Testament history and Christian history thus turn out to be analogous. Both involve a story whose beginning looks triumphant. All God’s promises have come true; God’s reign has arrived. Both stories subsequently show that matters are much more complicated than that, and a further look at the beginnings of their story enables one to see that the initial, naive reading was oversimplified. It remains an interesting difference that the Christian community did not include in its New Testament the doctrinal conflicts and achievements of the

oversimplified. It remains an interesting difference that the Christian community did not include in its New Testament the doctrinal conflicts and achievements of the second to fourth centuries, the Constantinian revolution, the split of East and West, the Reformation, the missionary movements and the decline of the church in the West. In contrast, its elder sibling let its Scriptures keep expanding, so that the First Testament incorporates a more overt recognition that its story unfolds into ambiguity.

Being a state without having a religious commitment is less complicated, but the story does not suggest that setting the state free from the resource and constraint (the easy yoke) of being God’s servant is likely to produce a happier story. Being a church without being a state is also less complicated, but it imperils or evades God’s concern to reign in the world and not just in the religious realm.

The nation’s earlier history means it is one, and it needs to see itself thus. Thus Joshua 1–12 emphasize how “all Israel” conquered the land (see Josh 3:1; 4:1–9; 10:15, 28–39), though Joshua 13–22 then describe how the land was allocated to the clans individually and thus set the scene for the divided history that must now follow.

Jephthah’s vow obliges him to sacrifice his daughter. Going back on a vow and sacrificing a human being are equally forbidden, but that no one questions giving the first priority over the second is a sign of Israel’s decline (Judg 11:30–40), and specifically of its conforming to the religion of people around who did sometimes sacrifice human beings (more often sons?).

The spread of Yhwh worship around the land means this worship can be offered in a variety of ways, some staying closer to the essentials of Yahwism than others.

The beginning of 1 Samuel suggests that people attending Yhwh’s festival at Shiloh will more likely get drunk there than be moved in prayer. While the Baals have disappeared, that does not stop Israelite worshipers being characterized as sons and daughters of bĕliyyaʿal, for whom worship is a matter of s

The spread of Yhwh worship around the land means this worship can be offered in a variety of ways, some staying closer to the essentials of Yahwism than others.

The beginning of 1 Samuel suggests that people attending Yhwh’s festival at Shiloh will more likely get drunk there than be moved in prayer. While the Baals have disappeared, that does not stop Israelite worshipers being characterized as sons and daughters of bĕliyyaʿal

“The state is a relationship of domination of human beings by human beings, supported by legitimate violence (that is, violence viewed as legitimate).” States are artificial constructs and need such buttressing. The precariousness of their identity makes it necessary to defend them, and even to attack other states. Treating the other as other shores up our own precarious sense of identity—or rather, our precarious identity

them, and even to attack other states. Treating the other as other shores up our own precarious sense of identity—or rather, our precarious identity. Thus “acts of identity formation are themselves acts of violence.” It is the nature of such states to be in dispute with other groups over land and to seek to resolve such disputes by fighting (e.g., Judg 3:12–14).

Another monarchic state, Jabin’s Hazor, is now able to “oppress” Israel because it has superior military resources (Judg 4:1–3; cf. Judg 2:18).

For the sake of survival, this presses Israel itself toward being not just a people, a nation and a country but also a monarchic state with an increasingly urban focus and the same capacity for oppression.

Yhwh’s using such people suggests the instinct to resist social convention and resist eldest-ism, able-ism, racism and sexism. Subsequent leaders include people from unfashionable communities or one-parent families, or whose birth takes place against all the odds.

Yhwh’s using such people suggests the instinct to resist social convention and resist eldest-ism, able-ism, racism and sexism. Subsequent leaders include people from unfashionable communities or one-parent families, or whose birth takes

They then do amazing things, acts beyond ordinary human capacity. It is as if they are driven by the wind with its remarkable, invisible, dynamic power. This involves a less direct, relational or personal involvement on Yhwh’s part than that characteristic of earlier stages in the First Testament gospel. God speaks personally to Gideon and Samuel as God had to Moses and Joshua, but uses others without explicitly relating to them thus. The coming of Yhwh’s rûaḥ

teristic of earlier stages in the First Testament gospel. God speaks personally to Gideon and Samuel as God had to Moses and Joshua, but uses others without explicitly relating to them thus. The coming of Yhwh’s rûaḥ replaces such experience.

The presence of a person’s rûaḥ is like the presence of their hand, face, arm or eyes. The person is there in part, but not in whole. What we experience is the kind of presence that would be expressed in that particular facet of the person. So the presence of Yhwh’s rûaḥ brings the dynamism of the wind, which can pluck up a person or tree and carry them somewhere

Like Yhwh, Jephthah is not enthusiastic about their sudden change of attitude to him because of their predicament. As they did to Yhwh, they cast themselves on his mercy. Implicitly Jephthah recognizes he cannot be God for them. Success will depend on whether Yhwh is involved (Judg 11:9). Evidently banishment has not made him go back on his commitment to Yhwh.

The implication of these sickening stories is that people were able to do what they liked because “at that time there was no king in Israel” (Judg 17:6; 18:1; 19:1; 21:25). Thus “everyone did what was right in their own eyes” (Judg 17:6; 21:25). For all the subsequent international, religious and social disorder of the monarchy, few scenes in its history match the horror of Judges 17–21, which implicitly suggests that kingship did have a restraining effect on disorder

Gideon could have ruled Israel under Yhwh’s kingship. But he refuses even to do that, taking the strong line that Yhwh is the one to rule over the people (Judg 8:23). It is Yhwh who fulfills the role in Israel that a king fulfills in other nations

The first three kings are significant because they come first, because they rule the whole people, and because kingship’s inherent ambivalence comes out clearly in their stories.

All are destroyed by leadership. Saul and David might have lived happy and honorable lives as farmer and shepherd if they had not been made king.

In Samuel’s anointing of Saul there is therefore no allusion to the possibility that kingship is being introduced against Yhwh’s will or with Yhwh’s unwilling acquiescence (1 Sam 9–10; contrast 8:19–22).

The phrase “to follow Saul and Samuel” draws attention to the need to keep monarch and prophet in step. The former has no authority independently of the latter

He does embody the monarchy’s ambiguity. It is God’s way of delivering Israel from the Philistines, yet asking for a king implies rejection of Yhwh as king. Although Saul wins the spectacular victory over the Ammonites that resolves any doubts in people’s minds about whether he is the right person, from then on his story is all downhill.

Yhwh designates him as king on the basis of having looked at his heart (1 Sam 16:7). To judge from what follows, this hardly means Yhwh has seen that he is, for example, a man of spiritual or moral principle. Perhaps it designates him as a man who has the inner potential to get the job done, like Samson, for instance. The point is that Samuel is not to be put off by David’s just being the little brother of the more impressive-looking sons of Jesse. Yhwh knows he has the gifts to lead Israel in defeating the Philistines

Exodus faith stood for liberation from conscripted labor and the state’s oppression of other peoples; Davidic faith stands for the domination of other peoples and puts Israel back under conscripted labor.

While Yhwh had commissioned his anointing as a young man and Yhwh’s spirit had gripped him “from that day on” (1 Sam 16:13), there is no specific talk of Yhwh’s spirit coming on David in connection with his behaving as leader and gaining recognition as king.

David creates a state administration and delegates responsibility for defense, the civil service and worship, and sets going developments that encourage a process whereby Israel is only too like other nations. So is his monarchy, in its accumulation of wives and other marks of a prestige that make him not at all like “his brothers” (Deut 17:14–20). It is this that comes to its apogee and leads to his downfall as a person in the affair involving Bathsheba and Uriah, which leads his family and his life to fall apart

Yhwh’s commitment to David’s line implies not merely keeping a Davidic king on the throne but ensuring that he exercises authority with faithfulness (e.g., Jer 22:1–23:6; Ezek 34:1–24; 37:24–25).

David is showing himself to be a true son of Abraham as he sees that mišpāṭ ûṣĕdāqâ characterizes his “household”—not only his immediate family (e.g., 2 Sam 7:29) but “his entire people,” “the household of Israel” (e.g., 2 Sam 6:15).

David becomes almost a second Moses. As Yhwh gave Moses detailed instructions for the wilderness dwelling and its worship, Yhwh gives David detailed instructions for the Jerusalem temple and its worship (e.g., 1 Chron 23–25; 28:19; cf. the double reference back in 2 Chron 35:1–15).

David’s story sounds a loud warning concerning the fallibility of monarchs, as the stories in Judges sound a loud warning about leaders in general.

While he is a deeply flawed man who behaves wickedly, he does stay faithful to Yhwh in religious matters, making him a standard by which later kings can be measured (e.g., 1 Kings 15:3–5; 2 Kings 16:1–4; 18:1–6)

David is a king “according to Yhwh’s heart” (e.g., 1 Sam 13:14). Other occurrences of such phrases imply this need not suggest he is a king who shares Yhwh’s priorities or way of thinking. It simply identifies David as the king whom Yhwh personally chose and made a commitment to.

Yhwh is unconditionally committed to David’s line. David’s successor must be uncompromisingly committed to Yhwh if the promise is to be fulfilled. Yhwh’s commitment must not be allowed to take away from the reality of human obligation, and the necessity of human obligation must not be allowed to take away from the reality of divine sovereignty.

it is explicit that Yhwh’s commitment to David and his line not only undergirds the history of the kings in Jerusalem for four centuries and undergirds the worship of the Second Temple community but also encourages the conviction that the deposing of the last Davidic king in 587 cannot be the end of the story. The drive of messianic expectation in Israel issues from Yhwh’s promise to David.

It is not that by a synergism human beings do precisely what Yhwh wants but that Yhwh leaves them to do what they want and works that into the pattern.

David’s own words (2 Sam 7:1–2) testify to a bad conscience about the fact that he is living in a palace decorated with cedar; his conscience can be assuaged if Yhwh is doing the same. Perhaps he might rather have asked whether he himself should really be living in such a palace (cf. the comments about palaces in Jer 22:13–16). But how then could he be a real king?

Whereas there are no stories about image worship in Yhwh’s wilderness tent, there are many stories about image worship in Yhwh’s urban palace.

Yhwh’s name is there in the house—it is regularly proclaimed there. Yhwh’s name embodies who Yhwh is, so there is a sense in which Yhwh in person is there. When a prophet speaks “in Yhwh’s name,” it is as if Yhwh in person speaks—which means the words will certainly be effective. When a priest blesses “in Yhwh’s name” (e.g., 1 Chron 23:13), it is as if Yhwh in person utters the blessing—which means the blessing will certainly come about.

Yhwh’s name embodies who Yhwh is, so there is a sense in which Yhwh in person is there. When a prophet speaks “in Yhwh’s name,” it is as if Yhwh in person speaks—which means the words will certainly be effective. When a priest blesses “in Yhwh’s name” (e.g., 1 Chron 23:13), it is as if Yhwh in person utters the blessing—which means the blessing will certainly come about. To pray where the name lives is to pray in a place where you are certain to be heard

Stephen comments, “but the Most High does not dwell in something humanly-made,” and notes how Isaiah 66 also subverts such a notion (Acts 7:48–50). Perhaps he implies that God only agreed to the building of the temple because his love for David meant he could not resist his request, despite the theological incoherence of his desire. God is accommodating to Israel, all right.

Yhwh is not a fickle person who might wake up one day with another idea and abandon the first one. But the commitment is always part of a reciprocal relationship that presupposes (in this case) that the priesthood walks before Yhwh in faithfulness and commitment—or as Yhwh here puts it, honors Yhwh

While Judges 11:25 has suggested a more positive take on Balak, the king of Moab, than Numbers 22–24, the story of Naomi and Ruth is more much radical in its revisionist assessment of Moabite womanhood. Is there such a thing as a good Moabite wife? There is, spectacularly so. Indeed, Orpah and Ruth are embodiments of ḥesed or commitment (Ruth 1:8).

Even within Israel, not all the people experience shalom, and Solomon’s tough treatment of ordinary people plays a significant role in causing the eventual partition of the state (1 Kings 12). He continues the process initiated by David of transforming the state into one just like any other, fulfilling Samuel’s warnings regarding the cost the monarchy will bring to ordinary people.

the two sides to government as these emerge in Romans 13 and Revelation 13. Government is a divinely authorized means of safeguarding order, and a means of oppression that recalls the beast and is inspired by the dragon.

Its building thus helps to cement good relations between the two, and its resemblance to other Middle Eastern temples might contribute to its accessibility to other peoples. It could thus be a means of Yhwh’s reaching out to the nations in fulfillment of the vision that goes back to Abraham, “so that all the peoples of the earth may acknowledge your name and revere you” (1 Kings 8:41–43).

In the First Testament, marriage and politics are subordinate to religion. Solomon’s commitment to Yhwh is compromised by the commitment to these international and interreligious marriages

Yhwh has grounds for abandoning Saul, but a decent Adversary in the heavenly court would have a field day in exposing their thinness. The punishment seems out of proportion to the crime, especially in the context of the ambiguity of events such as Samuel’s failure to show up at Gilgal within the time frame he had set. When we go on to read the stories of David and Solomon, the unease increases. Their ambiguity and wrongdoing far exceed Saul’s

Yhwh’s dealing with these leaders is subordinate to Yhwh’s purpose for their community

Perhaps the answer is that Yhwh rations intervention and gives priority to matters that affect the destiny of the people as a whole

the individual Saul is not the person who matters in this story. It concerns God’s purpose in the world and the achievement of this purpose in Israel’s story. Saul’s story is subordinate to those stories. That is true of someone who stands under the curse, but also of someone who stands under the blessing. Indeed, in part Yhwh’s commitment to David (which he does not deserve) retrospectively explains Yhwh’s rejection of Saul, but both the rejection and the commitment are part of a broader picture

(which he does not deserve) retrospectively explains Yhwh’s rejection of Saul, but both the rejection and the commitment are part of a broader picture, part of the story of Yhwh’s dealings with Israel that handle the tension between Yhwh’s disapproval of kingship and Yhwh’s affirmation of it. Saul “is just the person and ideal which the nation has foolishly imagined, and can only imagine, as its king. And it is this which is made evident in the double sinning which is microscopic to human eyes, but gigantic and absolutely decisive in God’s eyes.

As human beings we are called to be good, but life presses us not to be so. A concern of Greek literature is to wrestle to bear boldly the burden imposed by this fact. Saul’s story raises questions about Yhwh’s dealings with Saul, which have some parallels with the story of Job, but it no more answers them than Yhwh answers Job’s questions. This does not mean there are no answers. It means that the answers are between Saul and Yhwh, and we have no alternative but to leave them there

Saul does not provide us with an example for our own lives, any more than, for instance, Abraham and Sarah or Isaac and Rebekah do. The First Testament narrative does provide us with a moral portrait of God, and if it offers us someone to imitate, it is God, who relates to these characters with generosity, forbearance, compassion and the other characteristics that God claims in a passage such as Exodus 34:6–7. In stories such as Saul’s, however, even God’s character is too enigmatic

In stories such as Saul’s, however, even God’s character is too enigmatic for us to take as exemplary.

“Politics and sexuality, in a macho society, represent twin possibilities for domination.” This is especially so in the story of David, who manifests a deep ambiguity running through all his life and achievements. We learn both more and less about him than we do about any other First Testament character. We learn much about his actions and words, but often do not know what to infer from these

We know Yhwh saw inside him, chose him, spoke to him and delivered him: but what actually did Yhwh make of him? Now for the first time we know.

Trapped by Yhwh and Nathan into condemning himself for his deed, momentarily we discover what David feels—anger at a deed that turns out to be his own (2 Sam 12:5). “I have failed Yhwh,” he grants (2 Sam 12:13). Yes, David, but what is your attitude to that?

The gōʾēl custom reinforces the family’s position as a safeguard for the needy and vulnerable. There is nothing wrong with being a wealthy man, as Boaz is (Ruth 2:1), if you are prepared to use your wealth for the benefit of such people—as the nearer gōʾēl is not (Ruth 4:6)?

Always punishing would frustrate Yhwh’s purpose; so would always intervening in mercy. At this point Yhwh wants to put Eli’s sons to death to restore the imbalance caused by their wrongdoing and to demonstrate the importance of doing right.

Chronicles’ version of the story begins “An adversary arose against Israel and incited David to count Israel.” Only later does Yhwh show displeasure at David’s action and attack the people (1 Chron 21:1, 7). By involving such an adversary, a member of Yhwh’s court whose actions are under Yhwh’s control but may not be Yhwh’s direct desire, Chronicles distances Yhwh slightly from what happens to David.

The presence of both versions of the story invites us to see insight in both. Kings reassures readers by affirming Yhwh’s sovereignty even behind events that have negative consequences. Chronicles reassures them by affirming Yhwh’s fairness even behind events with negative consequences.

the story we have been reviewing does not look like one that issued from a plan or reflected anyone’s sovereignty. It has been the story of a wrestling match with one of the partners having absolute power to overwhelm the other, but fighting with one arm tied behind his back, refraining from exercising that absolute power.

the kind of victory God wants to win cannot be won by overwhelming the other party by force. God wants to be acknowledged as lord with a recognition that involves the whole person and not a mere enforced submission.

Isaiah’s reference to Yhwh’s making Judah unable to see or hear (Is 6:9–10), Jesus’ application of that text to his own ministry (Mark 4:10–12), and Paul’s declaration about God sending a powerful delusion on people to make them believe what is false (2 Thess 2:11). A number of considerations underlie such statements. First, they presuppose a strong understanding of God’s sovereignty.

Second, they constitute a form of elucidation of events that are otherwise inexplicably extraordinary. Why does someone such as Ahab behave so stupidly? Third, they are acts of punishment on people who have already shown themselves determined to resist Yhwh. But fourth, the prophets’ statements, including Micaiah’s, are nevertheless designed to lead people to turn back to Yhwh, and the extravagance of their statements is designed to shock people in that direction.

Yhwh will do anything, even tell lies, to get people to turn back.

The story leaves more questions than it answers, presumably because this is how matters often are for Israel, as for us. “What Israel knows is that history has its own untamed quality”—as the United States experienced in Vietnam. We can no more be sure of the answers to these questions than Israel was.

They are often successful in the exercise of their leadership in building cities, creating empires and winning wars, but they lead the people in such a way as to ignore the central tenets of Israelite faith

a position of leadership can destroy a person who might well have lived in trust and commitment if he had not been a leader. It is frightening to find yourself in a position of leadership. This imposes overwhelming religious and moral demands.

“The destruction of one peasant evokes total dismissal of the dynasty.”

he really thinks, Ahab complains that things have turned out exactly as he said. He wants the truth, but wants it in order to evade it. If he knows what Yhwh intends, he can set about stopping this coming about.

There are times when Yhwh approves of rebellion and times when Yhwh approves of submission—either can be an expression of trust in Yhwh

Hezekiah is brave and radical in his commitment to Yhwh and proves the effectiveness of trust in Yhwh: “Yhwh would be with him; wherever he would go, he would be successful” (2 Kings 18:7). In this context, and followed by the account of his apparently successful attacks on Philistia, the report that “he rebelled against the king of Assyria and would not serve him” (2 Kings 18:7) does not look like a criticism; after all, we know who Israel is supposed to serve.

Josiah does so. “He walked in all the way of David, his ancestor” (2 Kings 22:2). He out-Davids David, because “he did not turn off, right or left”—which could not be said of David. The expression suggests the resolute, unwavering, fanatical pursuit of a goal, like that of an athlete running a marathon or an army walking a path in a minefield (for the literal usage, see 2 Sam 2:19).

The story thus offers a promise that taking God’s word seriously opens up a future. When the people turn to Yhwh and put their life right, they find that God’s commitments still hold. There is a standing promise of compassion for people who turn and obey (Deut 30), and a promise of forgiveness for people who turn and pray (1 Kings 8:46–53). Freezing the story at this point enables it to issue a challenge to its hearers: Will you turn and take seriously Moses’ Teaching and the word of the prophets?

It is a story about unfaithfulness to Yhwh and foolish rebellion against imperial authorities that were actually Yhwh’s servants whom people such as the Judahites ought therefore to be serving (e.g., Jer 27:6, 12–14), about the failures of the parents and grandparents thus continuing to haunt the children for three or four generations. Telling it as it was makes it an act of praise at the justice of the judgment of God.

It might seem that the removal of king and leadership to Babylon in 597 is only temporary. Surely Yhwh’s faithfulness to David and to the temple will mean the king and the accoutrements from the temple will return to Jerusalem? So prophets such as Hananiah argued. Not so, says Jeremiah. The exiles will be wise to settle down. They can afford to build houses and plant fruit trees. They will be in exile long enough to live in the houses and see fruit from the trees (see Jer 28–29).

The hope the story offers is based on assumptions about the love and compassion of Yhwh, on which the people casts itself in acknowledging its wrongdoing and hopelessness. The story’s challenge is, will you acknowledge this way of looking at your story and accept responsibility?

The church in Europe lives in exile; it may not yet have seen the release of Jehoiachin. The church in the United States lives in the time of Josiah, assimilated to the culture that surrounds it. The question is whether it will turn or whether it must follow the church in Europe into exile.

They thus integrate into Babylonian society, but do so without losing their Judahite identity or their community identity. The latter would make them keen to return to their land. The former would make them happy to stay. At different times or for different groups, their position might parallel those of Native Americans or Japanese Americans or Arab Americans or Latinos living in the United States with or without papers.

From Lamentations or the Psalms one could infer only that this is what they believed and what they said to Yhwh. Such convictions reappear, for example, in Ezra’s prayer: Because of our wrongdoing, “we, our kings, and our priests have been handed into the power of the kings of the lands, to the sword, to captivity, to pillage, and to abject shame” (Ezra 9:7). It was Jeremiah and Ezekiel who talked most about these four fates (e.g., Jer 2:26; 9:16 [MT 15]; 15:2; 20:5; Lam 1:4–5; Ezek 5:12; 7:15–18; 12:11). But the terms are a standard expression of how things seem to a later generation (Neh 1:3; Dan 9:7, 8). The presence of these books in Scripture might simply indicate that it is all right for people to accuse God of abandoning them, without implying that Yhwh has actually done so.

From Lamentations or the Psalms one could infer only that this is what they believed and what they said to Yhwh. Such convictions reappear, for example, in Ezra’s prayer: Because of our wrongdoing, “we, our kings, and our priests have been handed into the power of the kings of the lands, to the sword, to captivity, to pillage, and to abject shame” (Ezra 9:7). It was Jeremiah and Ezekiel who talked most about these four fates (e.g., Jer 2:26; 9:16 [MT 15]; 15:2; 20:5; Lam 1:4–5; Ezek 5:12; 7:15–18; 12:11). But the terms are a standard expression of how things seem to a later generation (Neh 1:3; Dan 9:7, 8). The presence of these books in Scripture might simply indicate that it is all right for people to accuse God of abandoning them, without implying that Yhwh has actually done so. For us to know how Yhwh looks at the matter might require a reflection from a narrator or a word from a prophet. And we have that.

The fact that Yhwh had abandoned the people means that the fall of Jerusalem and the transportation of many Judahites were not accidents. Yhwh had declared the intention to bring about this calamity and had done so. Is there ever a calamity that happens to a city—this city, at least—that is not brought about by Yhwh (Amos 3:6)? That is a frightening conviction, but also a conviction with some pointers toward reassurance.

First, the destiny of people and city is not out of control. Events are not without meaning or rationale.

It issues from moral and relational principles. Yhwh’s abandoning the people is a reaction to their abandoning Yhwh. What else could Yhwh do?

We are given up to what we chose. People want to make images, so in exile they find themselves serving humanly made gods of wood and stone that cannot see, hear, eat or smell. That in turn opens up the possibility of seeing their feebleness instead of their attractiveness and therefore turning to seek help from Yhwh with utter seriousness

being abandoned is not the end. Yhwh had threatened, “I will wipe Jerusalem as one wipes a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down. I will cast off the remnant of my possession” (2 Kings 21:13–14). Fortunately God’s threats and warnings are often worse than God’s deeds. God turns from jealous fury and anger (Deut 4:24–25) to great compassion and everlasting commitment: Yhwh grants that “for a little moment I abandoned you,” yet then adds, “but with great compassion I will gather you together” (Is 54:7).

While exodus provided the initial paradigm experience for liberation theology, exile provides an alternative paradigm for peoples who for one reason or another are destined to continue to live as powerless minorities or permanent refugees. “For the Fourth World (as well as earliest Christianity) Babylon is the most meaningful image for a contemporary theology.” It is also a most meaningful image for the church in Europe and the coming church in the United States. It does not imply the church has distanced itself from the culture or needs to do so, true though that may be. Exile is not voluntary withdrawal. It implies that the culture has cast it out and God has let the culture do so in act of judgment on both church and culture.

Yhwh would again put down the king who lorded it over Yhwh’s people in their foreign land, and would again bring them out through the wilderness to Canaan. There are words from Yhwh that give grounds for such expectation (Deut 30:1–10), but the people have to await Yhwh’s moment.

The exile comes about because the community is one with its ancestors in its sin. Its hope is that it is also one with its ancestors in God.

The characteristic understanding of Yhwh that emerges from the exodus story—or rather the Sinai story—is that Yhwh is by nature gracious and compassionate, but is also capable of being tough (cf. Neh 9:17). The characteristic emphasis in the Persian period is that Yhwh is great and awesome, but also faithful to the covenant and committed (Neh 1:5; 4:14 [MT 8]; 8:6; 9:32; cf. Ezra 3:11; 7:28). Yhwh does the right thing in relation to Judah, both in punishing and in showing faithfulness and mercy.

The exile constitutes a mammoth rupture in Israel’s story. Its people lose control of its land, most of its leadership and its thinkers are expelled from it, the temple is destroyed, and Davidic kings cease to rule. The continuing story affirms that this rupture has been bridged. People return to the land.

The story so far shows that more is needed. Yhwh has related to Israel like a parent seeking to take a child toward maturity. Presumably Yhwh could have acted more often to bring images, facts and stories before Israel’s mind to soften and stir it so that it would be more responsive, but Yhwh did not do so. When parents want to focus a child on a particular challenge, they may offer him or her special rewards, but they will not want to “intervene” to do this on a regular basis. Human maturity does not grow that way. Perhaps it is for this reason that Yhwh takes the same stance toward Israel. But the result of this policy was that Israel did not grow to maturity. Its story carries the same implications as the world’s story. The inclination of its mind works inexorably the wrong way (cf. Gen 8:21).

Yhwh has related to Israel like a parent seeking to take a child toward maturity. Presumably Yhwh could have acted more often to bring images, facts and stories before Israel’s mind to soften and stir it so that it would be more responsive, but Yhwh did not do so. When parents want to focus a child on a particular challenge, they may offer him or her special rewards, but they will not want to “intervene” to do this on a regular basis. Human maturity does not grow that way.

The New Testament itself makes clear that there is not a simple one-to-one relationship between Jeremiah 31 and the Christ event, because it looks to a coming fulfillment as well as seeing a fulfillment in Christian experience (Rom 11:25–27). Nor did the Christ event produce a situation in which people no longer teach each other to acknowledge God. Christians still do that and know that in this sense God’s truth is not inscribed on their inner beings. But they do experience a partial realization of this promise.

God acted in grace (ḥēn) in keeping a remnant in being and restoring it to Judah, inspiring the foreign king to act favorably toward it and enable it to rebuild the temple. God was thus less hard on the community than it deserved. There was no basis in Judah for that act of grace. This was what made it an act of grace. God simply turned from punishment to mercy.

When a high priest’s grandson marries the daughter of the governor of Samaria (cf. Neh 13:28), presumably this means both sides see political gain from it, which opens a window on the political significance now attaching to the high priesthood and the potential tension that raises for a governor or for other lay leaders in the community. The high priest is anointed like a king (e.g., Lev 8:12; 21:10–12), and his garb (e.g., the turban) may have royal associations. Indeed, Yhwh commissions Zechariah to crown the high priest in his day (Zech 6:9–13). That at least implies that the high priest stands alongside the “Branch,” so that in the latter’s absence he might exercise a very significant authority.

The postexilic community has been called a theocracy on the basis of its being governed by priests, but government by priests no more implies government by God than does government by a group such as kings or elders. It would be better to call government by priests a hierocracy.

Monarchy, city and temple were all human ideas rather than Yhwh’s ideas, but there was a difference between Yhwh’s original responses to each of these human ideas. Yhwh was much more offended by the idea of monarchy than by that of city or temple (see 1 Sam 8; 2 Sam 5; 7). In part, at least, temple was once designed to serve monarchy. Now monarchy serves temple.

the prophets Haggai and Zechariah urge the people to recommence the work (Ezra 5:1–2). It is an unusual role for prophets—one cannot imagine Amos prophesying thus. Even Nathan had only done so after David had taken an initiative, and then he made a mistake. On the other hand, Ezekiel had seen the people’s attitude to the temple as an index of its attitude to God, and Haggai and Zechariah see it the same way.

Ezekiel had seen the people’s attitude to the temple as an index of its attitude to God, and Haggai and Zechariah see it the same way.

Theologically, the reason for the first temple’s destruction was a failure to frame its worship by Moses’ Teaching; it is as well to put that right. This is the right kind of new start. The work is completed without any ambiguity in the feelings of the people who celebrate the event (Ezra 6:16–18).

The ancestors were presumptuous and resistant to Yhwh’s instructions and not mindful of Yhwh’s wonders—yet Yhwh was gracious and merciful. They made a molten calf and addressed it as God—yet Yhwh continued to guide and sustain them and enabled them to take Canaan. In the land they rebelled, ignored Yhwh’s Teaching and killed Yhwh’s prophets, and Yhwh therefore gave them into the power of their enemies—but then delivered them. The pattern continued, and Yhwh eventually gave them into the power of “the peoples in the land”—but did not make an end of them.

the postexilic community lacks political independence. It can therefore not see God’s activity in making it flourish in numbers or power. That encourages the community to focus on the worship of the temple, because it can see God reaching out to it there and can respond to that grace.

Circumstantial factors thus encourage the giving of this new significance to temple worship. In the context of the demise of the church in Europe in the twentieth century, many Christian communities came to attach a similar significance to their worship. The story of the Second Temple community justifies that, though it also reminds us that this is a theological strategy for survival rather than for triumph.

In Nehemiah 10 the community bans buying things on the sabbath or on holy days. Moses does not require this, perhaps because a prohibition on work implicitly ruled out trade. It might only be when the lives of Judahites are more interwoven with those of other peoples that the question arises whether people are free to buy from foreigners, who are not bound by the sabbath command. The people now agree to this extension of Moses’ ruling, which they see as an implementing of Moses’ ruling.

The profile of conviction regarding what we might call the authority of Scripture is thus instructive. Serious commitment to the authority of Moses’ Teaching goes along with a freedom in rewriting that Teaching. We might compare two New Testament phenomena. One is a parallel combination of commitment to the authority of the Scriptures with a confidence in declaring a word from God that contrasts with that existent word (“you have heard it said …, but I say …; Paul does this too). The other is the combination of commitment to the Scriptures’ authority with a relaxed attitude regarding the fixedness of the scriptural text. Authors quote from the Hebrew text or the Greek, even when the latter has a rather different meaning from the former. They modify the text to bring out its application to their own situation, for example, to generate a closer link between prophecy and fulfillment. The text is quoted in a legal but not a legalistic way.

Serious commitment to the authority of Moses’ Teaching goes along with a freedom in rewriting that Teaching. We might compare two New Testament phenomena. One is a parallel combination of commitment to the authority of the Scriptures with a confidence in declaring a word from God that contrasts with that existent word (“you have heard it said …, but I say …; Paul does this too). The other is the combination of commitment to the Scriptures’ authority with a relaxed attitude regarding the fixedness of the scriptural text. Authors quote from the Hebrew text or the Greek, even when the latter has a rather different meaning from the former. They modify the text to bring out its application to their own situation, for example, to generate a closer link between prophecy and fulfillment.

Yhwh intends this particular land to be the one that Israel enjoys. They are not called to pray for other peoples’ well-being and prosperity in this land (Ezra 9:12). But they take no action to attempt to eliminate other peoples from it, nor does their separation mean avoidance of contact, any more than separation means this for Levi, which Yhwh separated from the other clans (e.g., Num 16:9). They are not required to live as a separate community, but to avoid sharing in the other peoples’ religious observances. Seeking help from other gods as well as Yhwh was a central reason for the exile, and the restored community defines itself as one that excludes that possibility. It needs to take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that, which will vary in different contexts.

Keeping the sabbath is not so much an individual observance as a part of the city’s and the community’s relationship with God (cf. Neh 13:15–22). When there are people in Judah treading grapes on the sabbath, Nehemiah confronts the community leadership not about working but about trading. One would have expected a more direct riposte if these were Judahites ignoring the explicit sabbath prohibition on work, but people belonging to the other communities naturally do not suspend work or trade on the sabbath. Nehemiah’s concern is that there should be no trade in the city on the sabbath. The city shares the holiness of the temple (cf. Neh 11:1) and is guarded by the Levites accordingly (Neh 13:22).

In a more individualistic culture we can imagine a husband and wife from different ethnic backgrounds simply following different religions, though we know that conflicts arise over what happens to their children. Traditional societies are more aware of the family as a unit, so that the stain that comes from relying on other gods affects the whole family and each individual—as Solomon’s facilitating his foreign wives’ worship affected the whole nation in his day.

The abominations (tôʿēbâ, Ezra 9:1) of the other peoples lie in their seeking help from other deities and their use of images, which might be acceptable for them but not for Israelites.

The story neither implies nor excludes the possibility that in breaking up their families the men take responsibility for the needs of their wives and children. Its not doing this indicates that its agenda lies elsewhere, in the resolving of this matter that imperils the being of “Israel.” First World readers are inclined to be appalled by Ezra’s action, though they need to allow for the fact that “a commitment to identity requires a commitment to the internal maintenance of identity.”

perhaps the proposal only has adults in mind. Further, it presumably implies that where the children of these marriages affirm their commitment to Yhwh, like Shecaniah they can be members of the community in their own right (cf. Ezra 6:21).

language plays a significant role in the development and sustaining of a community. Intermarriage really does threaten the community.

The Second Temple community assumes that Yhwh is God of the entire world and pictures the great world leaders recognizing that this is so, yet in its own life believes it needs to stay distinguishable from other peoples who might imperil its distinctiveness. It has to hold on to that distinctiveness but also hold on to a vision for other peoples coming to acknowledge Yhwh.

the majority of people who identify themselves as “Israel” in the exilic and Second Temple periods trace their descent to the clan of Judah (or Benjamin; e.g., Ezra 10:9). They can thus be referred to as yĕhûdîm, which ceases to refer to Judahites as opposed to Ephraimites and comes to have similar connotations to the word Jews.

Taking a god’s image, or in this case the accoutrements of Yhwh’s palace, and placing them in one’s own god’s temple is a declaration of the defeat of one deity and the victory of another. Nebuchadnezzar thought he and Marduk had defeated Yhwh. The return of the vessels is a sign that Yhwh and Jerusalem have outlasted Babylon and Marduk, whatever Cyrus’s theological diplomacy may say.

Yhwh can influence a king’s resolve negatively or positively. The return from exile is greater than the exodus, for Yhwh influences the king to be generous rather than tough. Koch suggests that Ezra himself sees his trek as a second exodus and a partial fulfillment of prophetic expectations.

The identification of state law and church law is dangerous if it means the state can interfere with the church. It is also dangerous if it means that the weight of stately authority supports church policies that may themselves be constricting, as happened in Britain in the sixteenth century. In the United States, opinion differs regarding whether the separation of church and state is designed to protect state or church.

Either of these—identifying state and religious laws or regarding them as two separate laws—would be different from the arrangement presupposed by Moses’ Teaching itself, which seeks to cover all of life and leaves no place for its own implementation by the authority of a foreign king, even one who (nominally) recognizes Yhwh.