Psalm 119:89-105 (NIV)
Your word, Lord, is eternal;
it stands firm in the heavens.
Your faithfulness continues through all generations;
you established the earth, and it endures.
Your laws endure to this day,
for all things serve you.
If your law had not been my delight,
I would have perished in my affliction.
I will never forget your precepts,
for by them you have preserved my life.
Save me, for I am yours;
I have sought out your precepts.
The wicked are waiting to destroy me,
but I will ponder your statutes.
To all perfection I see a limit,
but your commands are boundless.
Oh, how I love your law!
I meditate on it all day long.
Your commands are always with me
and make me wiser than my enemies.
I have more insight than all my teachers,
for I meditate on your statutes.
I have more understanding than the elders,
for I obey your precepts.
I have kept my feet from every evil path
so that I might obey your word.
I have not departed from your laws,
for you yourself have taught me.
How sweet are your words to my taste,
sweeter than honey to my mouth!
I gain understanding from your precepts;
therefore I hate every wrong path.
Your word is a lamp for my feet,
a light on my path.
Last week we started a new series getting back to basics with the Bible, asking "what kind of book?" We started to think a little about the importance of genre, recognising that knowing the purpose and style of a text is a first step to understanding how to approach it, and this week we are going to look a little more closely at the genres of the Old Testament.
A quick note on terminology first though, because there is some debate as to whether or not ‘the Old Testament’ is the most appropriate designation for the collection of books that make up the first part of the Bible. This comes in part from a concern that the name gives the impression that the text is entirely outdated or obsolete, but I have always understood it as meaning simply that these are the scriptures that came first, and that is the sense in which I continue to use it. There is also a concern that it overwrites the Jewish origin of the texts, but the church didn’t simply tack Christian writings on to the end of Jewish scriptures. It developed its own canon using all of the material at its disposal, so the Old Testament differs from the Hebrew Bible in both content and structure, and different naming conventions help maintain that distinction. It is of course right that we honour the history of the texts and the fact that they are still the holy scriptures of another faith, which will not always read them the same way we do, but I think we can also recognise that they have been part of our own tradition for two thousand years now, and we have our own relationship to them. So in this context I'll be sticking to the Old Testament.
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Let’s start at the very beginning, with Law. This covers the first five books of the Bible, although as I pointed out last week, we don’t actually find any laws until the back end of Exodus, beginning with the Ten Commandments. Generally speaking, laws set down what behaviour is and isn’t acceptable. They shape society but they are also shaped by society, as they are rooted in basic shared assumptions about how the world should work. However, the biblical law codes do not just tell the people how to behave, they also form the terms of the covenantal relationship between God and Israel. It has often been assumed that the law was understood as a means of obtaining grace, but a number of theologians now believe that we have got the relationship backwards, and that from the very beginning it was understood as a way of responding to grace. That would help explain why the law codes are given such a long narrative prologue, with the stories of creation and the patriarchs and the exodus setting the context and providing the impetus for the life of faith that the law sets out.
Broadly speaking, there are three types of biblical law – civil (to do with the governance of the nation), ceremonial (to do with ritual worship and cleanliness) and moral (to do with right attitudes and behaviours towards God and people) – although they often overlap and it’s not always clear which laws belong where. It has been suggested that the laws are paradigmatic, setting a standard by example. So when Deuteronomy 24:19-22 instructs the people to leave behind any grain or olives or grapes they do not harvest at the first pass for the foreigner and the orphan and the widow to reap, that doesn’t mean that the people should only be generous with these crops but can be greedy with everything else. The point is rather to establish a wider principle about providing for the vulnerable. Reading the law like this is significant because standards last longer than examples. I would venture to suggest that the deuteronomic principle is one we could stand to restate now, even if we don’t all have vineyards in our back gardens.
Old Testament laws often look regressive from our standpoint, but if we can put ourselves into the culture they rose out of, they begin to look remarkably progressive. We can’t ignore that the laws allow for slavery, but we must also recognise that they provide ways for slaves to regain their freedom. And the command that a rapist must marry his victim seems barbaric, but underlying it is a powerful statement that women cannot be used and then discarded. The law as written may not be perfect, but it represents a big step in the right direction when compared with law codes from contemporary civilisations, and if we see the scriptures as a record of humanity's relationship with God, we can allow for some change and development as we understand God's law better.
Some laws just don’t seem to make sense, particularly the food laws. Why is there a prohibition against boiling a goat in its mother's milk? And does the bacon double cheeseburger really need to be forbidden on not one but two counts? I have learned recently that Jewish tradition speaks of Mishpatim (laws that have an obvious reason) and Chukim (laws that there is no clear reason for), and that the latter can be understood as a way of developing obedience to and trust in God. Following the law is then the reason for the law itself. At the same time, it has been suggested that the food laws prohibited those foods which – in the climate and conditions in which the ancient Israelites were living – were most likely to cause allergies or were inefficient to raise or were associated with sacrifice in other religions. The laws may then be a reminder that God acts and speaks for our good, even if we do not always understand it.
You might be wondering why I have given so much time to laws that for the most part we do not follow. Christians have struggled from the very beginning to work out their relationship to the law, with endless head scratching over what it meant for Jesus to say he came to fulfil the law not abolish it, and Paul’s letters giving us some insight into debates in the early church about whether or not practices like circumcision were still required, so it’s important that we engage thoughtfully with these texts. We're doing this series in part to set us up for a deeper dive into the Old Testament and how it relates to the New Testament and what it means for us now, so I won't say any more for the moment, but I hope this will give us a good grounding when we come back to that.
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Let’s move onto History now, which takes us from Joshua through to Esther, telling the story of the founding of the kingdoms of Israel, through good and bad rulers, to the exile and eventual return, with some more personal stories thrown in for good measure. Historical events are themselves objective facts, but historical accounts are rather trickier. They are always told from a particular viewpoint, and they are always shaped by our natural inclination to tell stories of the past in such a way that they have meaning in the present, and as such they are always subject to bias and interpretation. That is true of any historical account, but Ancient Near Eastern history seems to have been even less concerned with fact and objectivity than we pretend to be. Entire reigns are summarised in a couple of sentences, because the details were just not as important as the bigger story they were a part of.
This means that when we are dealing with biblical histories, we will be confronted with issues regarding historical accuracy, but that doesn’t mean that we must reject them. When I studied history at school, we learned about the difference between reliability and usefulness when it comes to historical sources, and that’s an important lesson here. A text may not be entirely accurate, but that doesn’t mean it can’t tell us anything. For example, archaeologists have found evidence of a great fire at some point in Jericho’s history, but no clear indication that its wall was brought down, with or without trumpets, in the period claimed by Joshua. That doesn’t mean that the Israelites never conquered or encountered the city, but it does suggest that they may have at least added a few details for dramatic effect and to emphasise what they believed was most important about that experience, and that in itself tells us something about how they understood their activity and place in the world. The stories we have inherited may have been crafted and embellished, but they are rooted in history, and by paying attention to the way that history is told, we can learn far more than the bare facts. That means modern archaeology and contemporary accounts can be valuable resources rather than opponents, and it also means we can benefit from drawing on what we know of literary techniques and rhetorical devices.
There is of course another way in which the scriptures differ from most modern historical writing, because they are explicitly and unequivocally religious texts. They are not just recording human history, but every account is shaped by a belief in divine action and divine sovereignty, and we are meant to learn as much about God as about kings and battles. Having said that, we would do well not to confuse history with doctrine. Not every example in the Bible is a good one, which means we can’t read every character or action as a model of godly behaviour, but must instead look for what we can learn from them. I think that is particularly true when we come to the presentation of violence in the Old Testament, but that is something else we will return to.
In reading biblical history, we must avoid allegorising (assuming that every story has a hidden message), decontextualising (forgetting the social and geographical world in which a story occurred), selectivity (ignoring the stories we don’t like), moralising (turning every story into a teaching point), personalising (making stories about us), misappropriation (making stories about other things they were not originally about), false combination (slamming two stories together in order to make a point that was never intended), and redefinition (changing the meaning of elements of a story in order to change the story). That doesn’t mean that God won’t use scripture to speak in ways the original authors never imagined, or that we won’t find aspects we can relate to, but it does mean we must avoid any tendency to force new meanings onto old texts.
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The books that we tend to call Poetry and Wisdom are difficult to lump together as a single genre because they are so different to one another, which is perhaps why Jewish tradition puts them in the category of Writings, which feels like a more literary way of saying Miscellaneous. Here we find Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs. I said last week that Lamentations could also sit here, but I learned this week that it is attributed to Jeremiah, which is why it sits with the prophets. I would suggest that the main thing that holds these texts together is the use of the personal voice. They are deeply emotive texts grounded in individual experience, but they also give voice to some of our deepest feelings as they relate to some of our most universal experiences.
The Psalms served a vital purpose within the life of Israel, as they framed and gave voice to the people’s worship, and they continue to play that role today. They include laments, thanksgivings, praise, salvation-history, celebration and wisdom, although these forms are often combined, which perhaps says something about the importance of variety and balance in prayer. It is important to recall that they are words about and to God not from God, and as musical and poetic works they are intended to evoke emotion perhaps more than thought, so as with history, we must guard against translating them directly into doctrine. As beautiful as they are, they frequently contain expressions of anger and hatred, modelling honest discourse with God, if not necessarily the holiest of attitudes.
Other texts in this category deal with love and suffering and existential anguish. Many of them need to be read as whole pieces as they develop a line of thought, and the advice of Proverbs must sit alongside Job’s reminder that right actions do not always mean success. It’s also interesting to consider that this literature probably represents the collected wisdom of many generations, and is an accumulation of shared knowledge about God and society and human nature. Perhaps the best way to approach this set of texts is to understand poetry as a response to God, and that wisdom as the desire to make godly choices, and from there allow them to prompt our own responses and inform our own decisions.
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We may not spend very much time with the prophets, but more individual books are designated as Prophecy than as any other genre. There are prophets throughout the entirety of the Old Testament, but those with their own named books are divided into major and minor on the basis of length, and they can be further categorised depending on whether they were active before, during or after the exile to Babylon. We often associate prophecy with predicting the future, but that was only a small part of it, and often the events prophesied are in the immediate rather than distant future. The main role of the prophets was to enforce the covenant, calling the people to remember all that God had done for them and asked them to do in return.
Although the essential message of the prophets was pretty much the same, it was spoken afresh into each context, and each prophet had their own idioms, so that together they form a kaleidoscopic voice and vision of God. Most of the prophets relied on speech, and their prophecies use lots of poetic and rhetorical devices. Other prophets engaged in what might now be called performance art, enacting their prophecies through symbolic gestures.
As Christians, we believe that we live within a new covenant, but we follow the same God as the prophets, and so we should not be too quick to dismiss them as irrelevant outside of their context. Much of what they say is concerned with justice, and there will be meaning in their words for us too. The call given through Micah to ‘act justly, love mercy, walk humbly with your God’ is surely timeless and universal.
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That was another whirlwind tour, but do return to this at your leisure. Next week we'll be looking at genre in the New Testament, and we might have a think about matters of translation as well if there's time.
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