4. The structure and purpose of the Old Testament: the mission statement for the Israelites
‘Now the Lord had said unto Abram, “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee; And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed”.’
(Genesis 12:1–3)
‘Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse; A blessing, if ye obey the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command thee this day: And a curse, if ye will not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn aside out of the way which I command you this day, to go after other gods, which ye have not known.’
(Deuteronomy 11:26–28)
The Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible – ‘Bible’ being a translation of the Greek ‘ta biblia’, ‘the little books’ or ‘the scrolls’ – was written down well before the birth of Christ, and makes up well over half the Bible: and the Old Testament is not Christian. It was not only written by Israelites. It was also written for Israelites. In fact it is the mission statement for the Israelites: the assertion that they are the people chosen by God not only to be the moral compass to the world, but also to rule over it.
So what is in the Old Testament? The 39 books can be grouped into four categories, and we can sum them up as follows.
First are the five books known to Greeks as the Pentateuch, and to Jews as the Torah (often translated as ‘laws’, but better rendered as ‘instruction’). These books – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy – tell the story of the people of Israel from the creation of the world, the Flood, the covenant with Abraham, the exile in Egypt, the escape from Pharaoh, the crossing of the Red Sea, and the 40 years in the wilderness. They end when Moses, having led his people through the wilderness of Sinai, dies on the very border of the Promised Land of Israel.
Included seamlessly in this narrative sweep is a mass of law-giving of which the most famous element – repeated, with variations, on three different occasions – is the Ten Commandments.
This first part of the Old Testament tells the story of ‘how we gained the kingdom’: how the Israelites returned to the land that they believed God had given them, and the moral and ritual principles that were to govern their lives in that land.
The second group of books – Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles – are known as the Histories. These books – which are written in the style and form of history rather than of myth – feature such celebrated figures as Saul, David, and Solomon, and tell the story of the life of the Israelites in their newly conquered kingdom, from rule by judges to rule by kings, from unity to division, and finally to the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BC and the exile in Babylon. Put simply, it is ‘how we lost the kingdom’.
The third group is the Prophets. If the first two are ‘what happened’, this group of writers ask ‘why it happened’ – why things went wrong, and what the Israelites should do about it. Most of the prophecies were written at roughly the same time as the Histories, but are kept distinct from them (unlike the unashamed mixing of genres in the Torah) because they are of a different genre – much as modern newspapers seek, not always successfully, to separate news from comment. These are emphatically comment (and seldom news). The prophets – Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, Jonah, and many others – consider the former greatness and present humiliation of Israel, explaining it as God’s punishment for the way the Israelites disobeyed the divine instructions. There is no falling away from the sense of a mission conferred on the Israelites by God: defeat simply strengthens the urgency of the need to understand the divine plan, and put things right.
Finally there are about a dozen books that do not fall into any of the three categories above. Some continue the historical account (Ezra, Nehemiah) in the world of exile and return; some are philosophical meditations on life (Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes); there are religious and secular poems (Psalms, the Song of Solomon), and romantic tales (Esther, Ruth). Some of these are highly charged with religion; some (Ecclesiastes) explicitly deny that religion can explain anything. In the Hebrew Bible these books are simply grouped as ‘Writings’, which is as good a way of describing them as any other.
The date at which the Old Testament books were written bears no relation to their place in the sequence. Much of Genesis, which opens the Bible, was written after 700 BC, but prophets such as Hosea and Amos (respectively numbers 28 and 30 of the 39 books) wrote almost a century earlier, while the Oxford Bible Commentary dates the earliest element of the entire Old Testament, the triumph song of Deborah and Barak (Judges Chapter 5 – the seventh book of the Bible), to the 12th century BC, over 300 years before Genesis was begun. The sequence of 39 books that we have now (see Appendix 1) is the result of very careful editorial (re)arrangement.a
Finally, we should note that the Old Testament contains a full spread of genres and styles: sacred and secular, laws and philosophy, geography and genealogy, songs of praise and songs of love. As the Oxford Bible Commentary puts it, ‘we cannot assume that the writers saw any distinction between “sacred” and “secular” history’.
Footnote
a. The Old Testament as we have it now, Part One of the sacred book of the Christians, is as we have seen almost identical to the Hebrew Bible, the sacred book of the Jewish people. The order of the books in the Hebrew Bible is somewhat different, and there are some differences as to which books are included, but for the most part the early Christian Church simply took over the Jewish scriptures. In fact there are more differences between Christian faiths as to what should go into the Old Testament, than between Christianity and Judaism (Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox, and Ethiopian Christians all have a different set of books in their Old Testament canon).