No Turning Back: 5 Insights about the Old Testament from Modern Biblical Scholarship
By Peter Enns

Pete blogs at The Bible for Normal People

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These 5 insights overlap a bit, but here they are.

(1) The Old Testament is an ancient Near Eastern phenomenon. 

A rather obvious point, perhaps, but worth putting at the top of the list.

Nothing has changed our understanding of the Old Testament more dramatically than what we have learned over the past 150 years or so about what Israel’s ancient neighbors thought and how they lived–and how much the Israelites not only resemble their neighbors but how indebted they are to modes of thinking that were well in place long before the Israelites ever existed.

No corner of the Old Testament has remained unaffected: stories of origins, cosmology, theology, cult (worship), psalmody, wisdom, prophecy.

The Old Testament cannot be treated in isolation from its environment.

(2) “Myth” is an inescapable category for describing portions of the Old Testament. 

Sidestepping the various definitions of myth people like to argue about, ancient mythic categories are self-evidently present in the Old Testament.

At times the Israelites applied these myths to their own worship (e.g., applying to Yahweh in Psalm 18 descriptions of west Semitic storm deities; Yahweh presiding over a pantheon in Psalm 82). At other times mythic categories were used to distinguish Israelite belief from that of other peoples (e.g., Genesis 1 vis-a-vis the Babylonian Enuma Elish).

Regardless of how they were used, ancient myths serve as a “conceptual structure” for how the Israelites understood their God, at least in various places in the Old Testament.

(3) Israelites did not write their history “objectively.”  

No writing of history is objective anyway, which is an idea few have trouble accepting—and the Old Testament does not escape that truth.

The Israelites wrote the story of their past not to talk about the past for its own sake, but to see their present in light of their past and their past in light of their present. The Israelites were storytellers.

That doesn’t mean the Old Testament is “devoid of history” or some such thing. But it does mean that the Old Testament gives us something very different than what we might call “history” today.

Put another way, #3 follows on #1 and #2.

(4) The Old Testament does not contain one systematic and consistent body of “truth” but various, and even conflicting, perspectives. 

We see this at work, for example, when we compare Israel’s two histories (the one contained in Samuel and Kings and the other contained in Chronicles); laws in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy that conflict; portraits of God’s actions that differ among the Psalms and wisdom literature (Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes).

The Old Testament does not allow itself to be systemized into one smoothly consistent “body of teaching.” The reason is that its various writings reflect vastly different times and circumstances—which brings us to #5.

(5) The Old Testament “evolved” over time until it came to its final expression. 

The Old Testament, technically speaking, is a product of the Judahites in the centuries following their return from Babylonian captivity (529 BCE).

That does not mean the Old Testament was written out of whole cloth at the time. Much older writings and traditions were brought together and also combined with new literary creations. All of it was then edited together to form what would eventually become the Old Testament we know.

Israel’s Scripture came to be over time. David did not read the book of Genesis. The prophets do not say, “As we read in the book of Leviticus.” Whether or not the traditions contained in these books were known is an interesting and fruitful discussion, but that is not the same thing as whether the literary productions were in existence.

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There is much much, more to the Old Testament than these 5 points, of course. And accepting the Old Testament as scripture doesn’t depend on fully working out these 5 points. In fact, whosoever wishes can safely ignore all of this and move on with their lives of faith. I mean that.

But when we want to dig into why the Bible “behaves” as it does, and especially if we are curious about engaging the Bible on a historical level, these 5 factors simply can’t be brushed aside.

Any notion of, say, inspiration or revelation that seeks to gain traction cannot be formulated in blissful isolation from or in antagonism toward these 5 points. The ship has sailed, the horse is out of the barn, cats are beyond herding, worms are out of the can—pick your metaphor.

Any “doctrine of Scripture” that does not address these issues synthetically—working with them rather than against them—will at the end of the day be of little help—and produce much harm—for Christians navigating the sometimes rough terrain of an ancient faith in a modern world.

[If you’re interested, I’ve written about some of these issues in more detail, especially here, here, and here.]

Adam is the prototypical king who is called to conquer the Promised Land.

• Seth D. Postell

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Awhile back we did a post called “Fundamental Mistakes in Reading Genesis 1-2.” One of the points of that piece was that, when reading the creation story, people miss clues that show all was not right with the world. I believe that people have misinterpreted God saying “It is good,” making that mean “everything was perfect” at the beginning of the Bible. If you go back and read the article, you will see that I mention several aspects of the creation story which show a good but imperfect world — even a world in which there was enmity toward God and the presence of death. The world which God set in order was “good,” that is, habitable for life (in contrast to the dark, watery wasteland of Gen. 1-2), but it was not a pristine, perfect “paradise.”

One of the most important clues to this is found in Genesis 1:26-28 —

Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”

So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” [emphasis mine]

In his book Adam as Israel: Genesis 1-3 as the Introduction to the Torah and Tanakh, Seth D. Postell quotes Iain Proven who shows that the term “subdue” and the rest of the “creation mandate” in this text is “both royal and overtly militaristic.”

The second verb (in English “subdue”) is a translation of the Hebrew verb kabash. It is the language of conquest, usually military conquest. It reappears in passages like Numbers 32:22,29 and Joshua 18:1, where we read of the land being “subdued” before God and his people; or 2 Samuel 8:11, where we read of David “subduing” all the nations. Warfare therefore lurks in the background of this verb.

Humankind, then, according to Genesis 1, was introduced into a world that required “subduing.” It was not a paradise humans entered, but a battlefield!

Viewed in universal terms, this indicates that from the beginning God chose humans, those who carry his “image” in the world, to repair the world (the Jewish concept of tikkun olam). The original mandate for humans is that we should represent God in the world and to work with him to overcome evil and its effects on the world.

The story of “Adam and Eve” beginning in Genesis 2:4 shows what happened to this original mandate. Adam and Eve (representatives of all humankind) failed to exercise “dominion” and “subdue the earth” and thus lost access to the Tree of Life, subjecting themselves and the world to the domination of sin, evil, and death.

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Before this is a story about all people, however, it is first a story about Israel.

The first representative couple, Adam and Eve, like Israel, was chosen to dwell in a special land of abundant provision and to keep God’s commandments. They were given access to the Tree of Life, by which they might forever live in God’s blessing. However, they failed to “subdue” the inhabitants of the land (as represented by the serpent — which by the way was a common Canaanite fertility symbol), and were thus cast out into exile to the east of Eden (as Israel was exiled to Babylon).

We are used to thinking of Adam and Eve in terms of being first humans, first to sin. But if we read this in the light of the Hebrew Bible, we see that it is more specific than that.

• Genesis 1 and following introduces Israel’s story. It shows the beginning of God’s plan to repair the world through a chosen people.

• Adam represents the first Israelite, and the first “king” of Israel.  Adam is the first in a long line of chosen representatives who are given the opportunity to “subdue” the inhabitants of the land and “exercise dominion,” yet who fail to do so completely. The rest of the Hebrew Bible is one long historical chronicle of those failed efforts.

The Hebrew Bible itself, most of it composed, edited, and put together during and after the Exile, was written to trace this history, to help Israel see why they had gone into exile, to help them see their true identity and calling as God’s chosen people, and to give them hope for the future — particularly by pointing them to a King who would not fail, the Messiah.

In this story, Adam is not so much the first sinner as he is the first failed savior.

By the way, I have an idea (not fully formed in my mind yet), that this understanding of Adam may help us see more clearly what Paul was getting at in passages like Romans 5.

Perhaps Paul is not saying that Adam introduced sin and death into a world in which it was previously absent, but rather that Adam allowed sin and death to begin “exercising dominion”  (see Rom. 5:17) over the world in a greater way when he failed to exercise the dominion God called him to achieve. Jesus, however, did exercise that dominion, and made it possible for humankind to reign in a new creation (see Romans 5:17).