As I pointed out in my previous post, the “purity” of Israel was seen as massively important to most of the writers of the Hebrew Scriptures, including the various sources that eventually came to make up the Pentateuch and the other books (Joshua – 2 Kings) that describe the history of ancient Israel.  Nowhere can that be seen more clearly than in narratives about the children of Israel as they journey from Egypt to the Promised Land, after God delivered them from their slavery at the Exodus under their leader Moses. Once Israel escapes (Exodus 1-15), Moses leads them to Mount Sinai, where he is given the Law -- starting with the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20 all the way through Leviticus).  Much of this law is about how Israel is to worship and live, now that they have been chosen by God to be his people.  Once they receive the law, the Israelites journey to the promised land, but they sin en route, and God judges them by forcing them to remain in the wilderness [...]

  In my previous post I began to explain the book of the prophet Amos, the earliest named author of the Bible, in particular his portrayal of the coming “wrath of God.”  My ultimate reason for dealing with Amos is to set up a later discussion of the book of Revelation, where the portrayal of God’s wrath is even more stunning.  But Amos’s message was certainly stunning enough for his original readers, the Israelites living in the northern kingdom of Israel.  Amos was telling them in rather direct and uncomfortable terms that God was soon going to wipe them out in an act of judgment. Prophets were rarely the bearers of good news.  But their condemnations were always brought against people precisely because they had sinned and God was soon to do something about it.  Here is more of how I describe Amos in my book The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2017). ****************************** Amos stresses that the coming suffering for the nation will derive not from the accidents [...]

A few posts ago I more or less backed into a new thread on literary discrepancies found in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament; these discrepancies are key to understanding why the books were almost certainly not written by a single person -- Moses, for example -- but are a combination of sources put together centuries after the stories were first placed in circulation. I talk about this in my textbook: The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction.  Here is how I discuss the matter there: ****************************** The literary inconsistencies of Genesis are not unique to these two chapters.  On the contrary, there are such problems scattered throughout the book.  You can see this for yourself simply by reading the text very carefully.  Read, for example, the story of the flood in Genesis 6-9, and you will find comparable differences.  One of the most glaring is this: according to Gen. 6:19 God told Noah to take two animals “of every kind” with him into the ark; but according to Gen. 7:2 God [...]

In my previous post I began to explain why scholars have thought that the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), were not written by Moses, but later, and that they represent not a single work by a single author, but a compilation of sources, each of them written at different times.  The evidence for this view is quite overwhelming, but in the context of my textbook on the Bible, as in the context here, I didn’t really think it appropriate or useful to dig deeply into all the nuances and ins and outs.  Instead, I gave some of the prominent data.   Here is how I started to do that. ****************************** The internal tensions in the Pentateuch came to be seen as particularly significant.  Nowhere were these tensions more evident than in the opening accounts of the very first book, in the creation stories of Genesis chapters 1 and 2.  Scholars came to recognize that what is said in Genesis 1 cannot be easily (or at all) reconciled [...]

A couple of posts ago I talked about the account of creation in Genesis 1 (with respect to the first two verses, the creation of the "heavens and the earth" and the "Spirit of God" hovering over the water).  One question I repeatedly get asked by blog readers is what we can say about the author of that creation account and of the Pentateuch (or the "Torah"; the first five books of the Old Testament -- Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy).   It's been years since I've talked about it on the blog. Historically, it was always said (as it is still often said by avid Bible readers today) that these books were written by Moses, the great leader of the Israelites in the 13th century BCE, and main figure of all the books of the Pentateuch, except Genesis (the story of his birth is given at the opening of Exodus, and much of the rest of the Pentateuch is about him).   But scholars came to doubt it.  That’s what these posts will be about.   [...]

I will not be giving a full account of the presence of the Spirit of God throughout the Old Testament (or the New) – just enough to give a sense of how the Spirit seems to have been widely understood in a range of authors.  The short story: biblical authors seemed to understand that one way God manifested himself and provided his power to specially chosen people was to send his Spirit upon them. In this understanding, the spirit is simply the divine force that God sends.  It is not seen as a separate “person” from God.  In an undefined sense (that probably the authors didn’t think about much), the spirit is both part of God (as your breath is part of you) and yet is separate from God (remember: spirit and breath and wind are all the same word in Hebrew). As an analogy: when you blow out a candle it is your breath doing it, and that act, the tool used to achieve it (the breath itself), and that which is actually achieved [...]

Just now I was fishing around for an old post for a rerun, and thought it would be nice to do something on the Old Testament.  It's been a while!  Here is one from many years ago that deals with a question I still get regularly today.  You might have it too!   QUESTION: Do you have a suggestion for a book concerning the Old Testament's construction? I believe in the History of God (by K. Armstrong) she mentioned that there were about five distinct writers for the OT. Is this the scholarly view and do you have a book suggestion to delve deeper into it?   RESPONSE: This is an issue that has been on my mind a lot lately [I was writing this in 2012!].  Right now, my current writing project is a college-level textbook on the entire Bible, Genesis to Revelation.   This seems to me to be way too much to cram into a semester, but as it turns out, something like half the colleges in the country teach biblical courses this [...]

So far in my posts on Christology I have talked a bit about pagan views of the divine realm and its relationship to the human.  There is a lot more that could be said about that – in particular with the various ways that humans could be thought of as in some sense divine in the pagan world. But a lot of readers may be wondering what any of this has to do with Christianity since obviously the original followers of Jesus were Jewish, not Gentile, and their views of divinity in relationship to humanity would have been guided by Jewish traditions, such as those of the Old Testament. Fair enough! So before going any further, I thought I should make some posts about divinity in relationship to humanity in the Christian Old Testament. If God could look like a human in the OT, is that what's going on with Jesus?  Was he God, but only looked human?  This entire thread will be dealing with that kind of question.  Interested?  Join the blog! The [...]