chapter three THE STORY OF THE BIBLE (OLD TESTAMENT)
chapter three
THE STORY OF THE BIBLE (OLD TESTAMENT)
What kinds of events and people does the Bible focus on, and why?
Christianity is essentially a historical religion. God’s revelation, which Christians cherish and seek to communicate, was not given in a vacuum but in an unfolding historical situation, through a nation called Israel and a person called Jesus Christ. It must never be divorced from its historical context; it can be understood only within it.
This does not mean that the history recorded in the Bible is identical in every respect with the modern view of history. A historian today is supposed to give a full and objective account of all the facts of his period. The biblical historians, however, made no such claim. On the contrary, they were regarded as “the former prophets,” for they were writing “sacred history,” the story of God’s dealings with a particular people, for a particular purpose. They were convinced that God had “done this for no other nation” (Ps. 147:20). So their record is more a testimony than a history. They were writing down their own confession of faith.
Therefore, they were selective in their choice of material and (the secular historian would add) unbalanced in their presentation of it. For example, ancient Babylonia, Persia, Egypt, Greece and Rome—each a mighty empire and a rich civilization—are only included as they impinge on the fortunes of Israel and Judah, two tiny buffer states on the edge of the Arabian desert, which hardly anybody had heard of. The great thinkers of Greece like Aristotle, Socrates and Plato are not so much as mentioned, nor are national heroes like Alexander the Great (except obliquely) and Julius Caesar.
Instead, the scriptural record concentrates on men like Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah and the prophets to whom the word of God came, and on Jesus Christ, God’s Word made flesh. For the concern of Scripture is not with the wisdom, wealth or might of the world, but with the salvation of God. Biblical history is Heilsgeschichte, the story of salvation.
The sweep of this sacred history is magnificent. Although it omits great areas of human civilization which would feature prominently in any history of the world written by men, yet in principle and from God’s point of view it tells the whole story of man from start to finish, from the beginning when “God created the heavens and the earth” to the end when he will create “a new heaven and a new earth” (Gen. 1:1; Rev. 21:1, 5).
Christians divide history into BC and AD, indicating the periods before and after Christ, believing that Jesus Christ’s coming into the world is the watershed of history. So too it is the life of Jesus Christ which divides the Bible into half, the Old Testament looking forward to his arrival and preparing for it, the New Testament telling the story of his life, death and resurrection and drawing out its implications as they began to emerge in the infant church and will one day reach fruition.
In this chapter I shall attempt to give an outline of the story of the Old Testament, and in the following chapter its sequel in the New Testament. Then, having looked at the Bible’s geographical and historical setting, we shall be ready in chapter 5 to consider the message which God chose to give in it.
The Old Testament is a library of thirty-nine books. The order in which they are placed1 is dictated neither by the date of their composition, nor even by the date of the subject matter they contain, but by their literary genre. Broadly speaking, there are three types of literature in the Old Testament: history, poetry and prophecy. The historical books (the five from Genesis to Deuteronomy forming the “Pentateuch” and then twelve more) do tell a continuous story. They begin with the creation of man in Genesis 1 and the call of Abraham in Genesis 12. They go on to tell the story of Israel, the birth of the nation (in the rest of the Pentateuch), its varied fortunes during nearly seven centuries in the promised land (in the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings and Chronicles), and its rebirth under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah. After these seventeen historical books come five books of Hebrew poetry or “Wisdom”—Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon—and finally the seventeen prophetical books, five “major” prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel and Daniel) and twelve “minor” ones (from Hosea to Malachi).
Any reconstruction of the Old Testament story is bound to be somewhat arbitrary. Scholars are still debating, for example, the date of the Exodus and the order in which Ezra and Nehemiah left their Babylonian exile in the fifth century in order to visit Jerusalem. I propose to tell the story according to what I believe is the consensus of most conservative scholars.