Old Testament or History of Israel?

The latest part of the Old Testament (perhaps the Book of Daniel, which probably reached its final form c. 165 âñå) is well over 2,000 years old. For the earliest parts (possibly the Song of Deborah, Judges 5, which some scholars would date before 1000 âñå) we may need to go back nearly another 1,000 years.

At the most basic level the texts will need to be translated, for few will be able to handle them with confidence in their original language. To an overwhelming extent, however, the mechanics of translation rest upon an agreed consensus. Of course there are individual words and phrases which pose problems. Thus, if one were to compare different translations of the Book of Job, very different renderings of the poetic sections could soon be found. But even here there is no dispute about the essential shape of the story, and in most parts of the Old Testament the difficulties are far fewer. Indeed, when there has been discussion concerning the translation of the Old Testament into English, it has focused much more on the appropriate English style to be adopted rather than on the difficulty of rendering the Hebrew. It is therefore very unlikely that this consensus will be shaken in its broad outlines by any fresh discoveries of ancient texts. (The theories put forward from time to time that the Old Testament’s origin is quite different from that normally supposed, to take a recent example that it originates not from Palestine but from Arabia, normally die with their propounder and rarely get beyond the crankish.)

We may therefore reasonably be confident that we can make sense of the actual words, but how are they to be interpreted? Here we are confronted with a much more basic issue of principle.

Until the Renaissance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ce, the Bible was mainly taken as a body of texts which could be used to prove the truth of Jewish or Christian beliefs. From that period on, however, a dominantly historical method of approach has gradually pre­vailed. It could be said to be laid down by the very first words of Genesis, ‘In the beginning’. (This translation of what is actually the first word in the Hebrew Bible, b'reshith, appears to be common to all the main modem versions.) From the very outset, that is to say, it appears as if we have to do with a story of humanity’s past, a story which begins with the creation of the world itself and then of human beings, and then concentrates its attention upon a particular people through their various adventures.

We have just seen that the beginning of Genesis seems to invite a historical approach; in fact, of course, for at least a century the early chapters of Genesis have proved to present the main difficulty for such a historical approach. The creation of the world in six days; a paradise garden; a talking snake; the possibility of all humankind being descended from one primeval pair; a universal flood—these and other difficulties have meant that for most people Genesis 1-11 cannot be taken seriously as history but must be understood as stories setting out one understanding of human origins. We shall return later to consider what significance can legitimately be attributed to this material if it is not history.

From Genesis 12 onwards, however, it is remarkable that for a very long time serious and reputable scholars (including those who were not themselves believers) felt able to affirm the basic historicity of the biblical material. Details have, of course, been questioned, such as the great age to which the figures in the remote past are said to have lived, but these have been regarded as peripheral to the main thrust of the story. The idea of semi-nomads from the East entering Palestine, as is told of Abraham and his clan (Gen.

From that point onwards in the biblical text histori­cal uncertainties become steadily fewer. In Judges we read of an experiment in a form of government which failed to respond to the realities of external pressure, and so the usual form of government for states in the ancient world—kingship—was resorted to, though not without misgivings (1 and 2 Samuel). From then on the little states of Judah and Israel existed in a world where the great powers posed an increasing threat to their independence, and both eventually succumbed, Israel to Assyrian and Judah to Babylonian invasion (1 and 2 Kings). There followed the experience of exile; and again an apparently agreed historical consensus has been achieved. For the northern kingdom, Israel, the exile to Assyria appears as the end of the story; these were the ‘ten lost tribes’ of later legend. By contrast, those from the southern kingdom, Judah, who were exiled to Babylon, retained their identity, and were able to take advantage of the greater tolerance of the Persians, who succeeded the Babylonians in power. In due course the exiles returned to Jerusalem, rebuilt the Temple, and established themselves anew in the service of their God (Ezra). From that time on historical records are much scantier, and it is not until the time of the Maccabee uprising against Syrian domina­tion in the 160s bce that we are able once again to reconstruct a more detailed picture ofjewish life and religious practice. But that is virtually the end of the historical period of the Old Testament; the most detailed account comes in the Book of 1 Maccabees, which is in the Apocrypha and not part of the Hebrew Bible.

Some such account as this would be recognised by many as a rough outline of the Old Testament seen as a historical record of the community’s experience, with particular emphasis on the way in which it perceived God’s dealings with it. It can be reinforced by placing within the appropriate historical contexts the life and teaching of the various prophets whose message is so distinctive a part of the Old Testament. Some of these (Samuel, Elijah, Elisha) are the subject of stories in the Books of Samuel and Kings; others have books named after them, recording the words with which they condemned the people either in the time of Assyria’s rise to power in the eighth century (Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah), or at the time of the Babylo­nian threat in the sixth century (Jeremiah, Ezekiel), or when Persian rule allowed the re-establishment of the Jerusalem community later in the same

Table 6.1: Chronological Table

As is indicated in the text, there are many uncertainties concerning the history of Israel and its forebears, particularly with regard to the pre-monarchical period. The table below is therefore no more than a rough guide: the italic entries for the earlier period are no more than approximations. For the later period, greater precision (to within a decade) is usually attainable, and where there is corroborating evidence from other sources (e.g. the Babylonian Chronicle referring to the last years of the kingdom of Judah), a high degree of chronological accuracy can be achieved.

The last events referred to in the Old Testament are almost certainly those of the period of rebellion against Hellenistic rule (the successors of Alexander), c. 165; the Book of Daniel in its completed form almost certainly dates from this period. The so-called ‘intertestamental period’ is usually regarded as beginning at approximately that time; see the chapter in this volume on ‘The First-Century Crisis’ (pp. 91-110).

* These dates refer to the lifetime of the prophets whose words have been gathered in books; the books themselves, all of which contain substantial later additions, cannot be precisely dated.

century (Haggai, Zechariah). Within such an outline by far the greater part of the Old Testament is successfully accommodated; only the Psalms and, in particular, the wisdom books (Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes), which by their very nature are timeless and resist a historical approach, have to be treated in a different manner.

The broad outline sketch which has just been set out will for many people provide the kind of framework upon which their knowledge of the Old Testament is based. Certainly many of the most widely used and influential introductory books about the subject follow such an outline. Yet in recent years its appropriateness has increasingly come to be questioned.

Historical Difficulties

First of all, then, we must consider the kind of historical difficulties which would now be widely felt to be passed over much too lightly in the outline given above. There it was implied that something like a reliable historical outline could be begun with the arrival of the patriarchs in Palestine, perhaps in the nineteenth to eighteenth centuries bce, the period referred to by archaeologists as the Middle Bronze Age. By contrast, recent studies both of the material in Genesis and of the history of the Bronze Age, in so far as it can be reconstructed by archaeological and other means, have radically ques­tioned this assumption. Many scholars would doubt whether we have any grounds for speaking of historical figures called Abraham or Jacob; others would accept the likelihood of their existence, but would feel it to be quite impossible to disentangle any reliable evidence relating to their life or histori­cal context from the religious significance which has been given by a later age to the stories which it told about them.

The problems relating to Moses and the story of the Exodus are slightly different. Here a useful starting-point is provided by the fact that Moses is an Egyptian-type name; it is in fact precisely comparable with that of the Egyptian Pharaoh Ra-meses, without the prefix of an Egyptian god’s name. It is indeed likely that a band of slaves did at some point escape from Egyptian domination, but this is a far cry from the story in the Book of Exodus, Chapters 7-15, in which a series of devastating plagues reaches a climax with the death of all Egypt’s first-born and the destruction of its army. Such events would have had shattering and long-lasting effects on the history of any society, yet the well-documented history of ancient Egypt offers no hint of any such crises. Here as elsewhere the folk-memories of particular groups of people, shaped by their expression in the worship of their God (‘I am the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt’, Exod. 20:1) have misleadingly come to be regarded as if they are the very stuff of history.

Historical elaboration of a rather different kind has been at work in the Books ofjoshua and Judges. In Joshua, the story of Israel’s establishment in the ‘promised land’, Canaan, has been set out in the form of a series of glorious conquests. Unfortunately the two chief stories, describing the destruction of Jericho and Ai (Josh. 2-8), are very far from being sup­ported by the evidence from archaeological excavation, which suggests that neither of these cities was the site of significant habitation at any possible time of Israelite invasion. In Judges, the impression is given of a deliberate experi­ment, under divine command, with a form of government which would differentiate Israel from all her neighbours. Others had kings, whereas Israel was to be ruled by judges’, raised up for them by God. In fact it seems much more likely that this represents not so much a historical account as the religious reflection of a later period. Israel, like other nations of that time, came to kingship as the only conceivable form of government when it had developed sufficiently to take on the characteristics of a nation-state.

Recent scholarly discussion has raised another issue which in many ways would put the historicity of the earlier biblical books even more into question. The biblical tradition appears to state beyond the possibility of dispute that the ancestors of Israel had come into Canaan from the wilderness, after a long period when they had led a nomadic or semi- nomadic existence. This tradition has recently been challenged, and it is now maintained that Israel’s establishment in Canaan was a matter of a rising of an oppressed lower class rather than of immigration from elsewhere. It is almost certainly true that the very sharp contrast between Israelite and Canaanite set out in, for example, the Book of Deuteronomy is much exaggerated. Whether the more drastic suggestion, that Israel never experienced that way of life conventionally pictured as the forty years in the wilderness before entering the land flowing with milk and honey, will win general favour is as yet uncertain.

Whether or not the particular hypothesis just dis­cussed is accepted, the point is now very widely recognised that the appar­ently historical picture of the people’s development set out in the books from Genesis to Judges cannot be taken at face value as a historical record. Rather, in its final form it represents the religious viewpoint of a much later age. This is not to deny that ancient traditions are embedded in these books; that is a matter for the detailed discussion of particular episodes. It is rather that the overall presentation offers a continuous story of a group developing from a family into a nation, a story which is simply not borne out by detailed historical or archaeological research.

Uncertainty as to historical reliability remains even into the time of the monarchy. It is noteworthy that both David and Solomon are credited with the round figure of forty years as the length of their reign, which suggests that exact information is not available. It is also striking that the accounts of their lives contain much of a legendary character: David and Goliath; Solomon and the two mothers with one child. Clearly, though, the historical basis is by this time becoming more secure. We have detailed lists of court officials from the reign of David, which suggests that a formal basis of court annals was emerging; and this increasing precision of historical detail is characteristic of the period of the divided kingdoms, from the death of Solomon down to the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians (c. 920-597 bce).

The last century and a half of this period has also had a great deal of light shed upon it by the fact that the royal annals of the Assyrian and Babylonian kings have become available as a result of excava­tions in modern Iraq, the Tigris-Euphrates basin. By and large this material can be correlated in a good deal of detail with the biblical record of the period in 2 Kings, and it is very clear that by this period we are on firm historical ground, whatever may be said of the historicity of the earlier Old Testament stories.

Even so, however, difficulties in the way of recon­structing a clear historical outline remain. Two major problems in particular may be noted. The first of these concerns the understanding of the period from the Exile onwards. In the biblical account a sharp distinction is made between the fate of the exiles from the two kingdoms. Those from the northern kingdom, Israel, who were sent into exile by the Assyrians in the eighth century, simply disappear from view; their exile is described in 2 Kings 17, and then no more is said. From this silence has arisen the legend of the ‘ten lost tribes’, though that is not itself biblical. By contrast, great stress is laid on the idea of the exile of the Jerusalem community as being an event of strictly limited duration, which came to a datable end (Ezra 1-2).

This sharply contrasted presentation almost cer­tainly owes more to religious polemic than to historical accuracy. There never were ten ‘lost’ tribes; the Assyrians themselves (not given to modesty in their claims) refer to the deportation of some 27,000 people, a tiny proportion of the population of northern Israel. In other words, life in the former northern kingdom will have continued under Assyrian rule, no doubt with additional hardship, but without the dramatic changes implied by 2 Kings 17.

Again, the exile of the Jerusalem community is pre­sented in some of the texts in theological rather than historical terms. It became an article of faith, for example in the Book of Ezra, that the true community consisted of those who had been through the purging experience of exile in Babylon. But once again history and theology point in different directions. The historical record is likely to be close to that in Jeremiah 52, which speaks of4,600 exiles, rather than the total depopulation implied in the Books of Chronicles and in Ezra, looking back from a later standpoint. In 2 Chronicles 36, we have a picture of the land as completely deserted during the exile; Ezra 1-2 picture a mass return of exiles from Babylon. Such a picture is very unlikely historically; the Persian rulers allowed a greater diversity of local cults, so that permission to rebuild the ruined Jerusalem Temple may plausibly be seen as part of their policy. But mass migrations of former subject peoples is much less probable, and it is very unlikely that there was a large-scale return of exiles in the later part of the sixth century. Instead, we should envisage from that time on a continuing Jewish community in Babylon.

In some respects, the lack of knowledge of the development of the Jerusalem community during the Second Temple period, that is, from 515 âñå until 70 ce, has had still more serious effects on modern understanding. Too oftenjesus and his earliest followers have been pictured, not as the products of the Judaism of their own day, but as rebels against it, whose Old Testament links were exclusively with the earlier period, and with the prophets in particular. In fact, there is little evidence to support such a view; rather, for a proper understanding of the ‘Jesus-movement’ it is essential to see him against the background of contemporary Judaism, about whose religious beliefs and practices our knowledge has greatly increased through such discoveries as the Dead Sea Scrolls. In this wider context, it soon becomes apparent that the followers ofjesus had much in common with other groups in Judaism whose prime concern was a total commitment to God’s service. So, for example, despite the bitter opposition to the Pharisees characteristic of some parts of the New Testament (e.g. Matt. 23), we can now see that there was a great deal in common in belief and practice between the Pharisees and the earliest followers ofjesus.

The other weakness in the type of historical sketch offered at the outset of this section relates to its handling of the work of the prophets. What is commonly called the historical-critical method lays down certain preconditions for the right understanding of the prophetic books. If they are to be seen in their true historical contexts, then it is essential that it should first of all be established which parts really do come from the sup­posed historical period. So a great deal of scholarly attention has been devoted to the analysis of the present form of the books, with the declared intention of stripping away those parts held to be ‘secondary’. And the word ‘secondary’ has come to mean not only ‘of later origin’ but also ‘of lesser importance’. There has, of course, been one great exception to this general rule. In the case of the book of Isaiah it has been agreed on all hands that Chapters 40-66 are from a historical setting later than that of Isaiah himself, and for Chapters 40-55 in particular it has been argued that another setting—Babylon in the 540s—can confidently be postulated. And so we have a modern scholarly creation: an anonymous (and quite possibly imagi­nary) figure, the prophet known as Second or Deutero-Isaiah. Thus a wealth of well-loved and profound material is saved from the charge of being ‘secondary’.

Such an approach to the prophets can be questioned in various ways. Two particular difficulties can be mentioned here. First, concentration on the parts of the material judged to be original has meant an excessive concern with particular sections dotted through the final form of the existing books; and the existing form of the prophetic books has either been ignored or regarded as purely fortuitous. This seems to be a very curious approach to any piece of literature. Secondly, a dangerous process of circular argument is often involved. The state of Israelite society in the eighth century, for example, is often asserted to have reached a particularly decadent condition; and the ground for such an assertion is the preaching of the prophets like Amos. But the claim is also made that God raised up Amos and the other prophets because of the peculiar decadence of the society of his day. Apart from the logical fallacy involved, this takes no account of the possibil­ity that polemic may have been a part of the preacher’s art, and accepts at face value charges which are at least as likely to involve some measure of poetic exaggeration. After all, what preacher worth listening to would ever say that his congregation were not so wicked after all?

One final comment must be made relating to the mainly historical type of approach to the Old Testament, since it affects a particular way of understanding the Old and the New Testaments together which has been much in vogue among some scholars. It involves the form of argument that there was a radical difference of understanding of the historical process in ancient Israel by comparison with other ancient peoples. For Israel, it is alleged, history was linear, purposive, an unfolding of the purpose of God. Other peoples, by contrast, held it to be cyclic, a constant return to the point of departure, a conception based on a religious understanding rooted in the fertility of nature as experienced in the recurring seasons of the year.

In fact there is little evidence which would support the claim to so drastically different an understanding. Certainly Israel did see in the unfolding of events the hand of its God at work: the books from Joshua to 2 Kings, often called the ‘Deuteronomistic History’, provide a clear illustration of this. But other nations in the same way saw the hand of their gods guiding their own history. Thus, the ‘Moabite Stone’, discovered in the nineteenth century, shows how the successes and failures of Moab, a people bordering on Israel, were believed to correspond to favour and punishment bestowed by Chemosh, the god of Moab. The extent of the Old Testament means that it can supply us with more elaborate examples of this principle of divine responsibility, but the principle itself could certainly be applied to the history of other nations.

It should also be remembered that there was much in Israel to show the importance of the seasonal round of fertility in its religious observance. The festal calendar, as set out several times in Exodus- Deuteronomy with minor variations, is based on three festivals at fixed times of the year, whose observance was intimately bound up with the need for continuing fertility in the land. (It is important for readers in northern climes to remember that in Palestine the time of new birth is not the spring, after winter bleakness, but the autumn, after the parching heat of summer has dried up the land; the first rains of autumn, the ‘former rains’, are the signs of new life, when the land can once again be worked.)

The implications of this resume of some of the prob­lems posed when we attempt to take the Old Testament material as straight­forward historical record may seem overwhelmingly negative; but this would be a false impression. For those who brought the Old Testament to its final form a primary means of understanding God’s dealings with his people was to set them out in history-like terms, as an extended story. To achieve that purpose many ancient traditions were used which can throw much light on the history of the ancient Near East. But the purpose itself was inspired by religious aims, rather than by any motivation which we should describe as historical. In other words, we must not suppose that the history of ancient Israel is itself the key to unlock the door of true understanding of the Old Testament. Taken simply as a history book, the Old Testament would be seriously defective; and to attempt to understand it in those terms would be equally unsatisfactory. For an understanding both of ancient Israel and of the Old Testament religious motives have to be taken into account.

The Religion of Ancient Israel

Modern service books in Judaism and Christianity commonly contain both the actual words to be used in the service, and instructions to the participants as to how the service is to be carried out, with instructions as to how the role of each is to be fulfilled. A basic problem in any attempt to understand the religion of ancient Israel consists in the fact that the instructions how worship is to be ordered appear in one part of the Old Testament, the main surviving worship texts in another. The Book of Leviticus especially offers detailed and precise instructions concerning the carrying-out of sacrificial worship in particular; whereas it is to the Psalms that we must turn if we are to learn more of the ‘innerness’ of worship, from the viewpoint of the participant. In the Psalms what is implicit in many other parts of the material becomes quite explicit: the Old Testament is a religious collection, bearing witness to the religious aspirations of the community which brought it together. And those aspirations are expressed more directly, and often in more memorable lan­guage, in the Psalms than anywhere else.

One meaning of the word ‘psalm’ is: one of the 150 such pieces that make up the Book of Psalms. But a wider meaning would be: a hymn of praise addressed to God. If we take that wider meaning we shall see that ‘psalms’ are not confined to the Book of Psalms. Other parts of the Old Testament also reflect this felt need for the expression of praise to God. So at times the flow of a narrative is ‘interrupted’ (as we should feel it to be) by a ‘psalm’: such is the thanksgiving for the deliverance of the Exodus (Exod. 15), or the song of Hannah at the birth of the child Samuel (1 Sam. 2), or the hymn uttered by Jonah in the belly of the fish (Jonah 2). At other times the collection of prophetic words, normally directed toward the people in the fashion of a preacher or messenger, includes praise directed to God. We find such passages in Amos, normally the most severe in his condemnations of the people (Amos 4:13); or in the hymn in Isaiah 9:2-7 familiar to many from its use in Handel’s Messiah. Psalms, whether in the Book of Psalms or elsewhere, remind us that the Israel which gathered its traditions together did so as a worshipping community.

Praise and prayer addressed to God are characteristic responses of a religious group, and go beyond any specific time and place; and so it is not surprising that many Psalms, or phrases from them, retain their impact even when most of the rest of the Old Testament is completely unknown. ‘The LORD is my shepherd’, ‘The heavens declare the glory of God’, ‘By the waters of Babylon’—these opening words ofPsalms 23,19 and 137 are among many which can still resonate even beyond a formal religious setting. But the Psalms were surely not free lyric compositions; they did emerge from a particular context of worship, and much scholarly effort has been devoted to attempts to reconstruct the detailed form of that worship.

Such an attempt is much more difficult than might at first be supposed. It is probable that many of the Psalms originated in the time when Judah was a nation-state, with its own king ruling in Jerusalem, where the Temple was a national cult centre. (The Psalms are often referred to as ‘Psalms of David’, and though this need not imply that he was the author of any that have come down to us, it does remind us that the king, a religious figure, was at the centre of the nation’s cultic life.) But if most of the Psalms originated in the time before the Exile, in the form in which they have come down to us they represent a collection gathered for the worship of a later period, the time ofthe'Second Temple’, which lasted from c. 515bce until its destruction by the Romans in 70 ce. In other words, like many of the hymns in a modern hymn-book, psalms that originally had been composed for one situation came to be used in quite a different context, and the details of the earlier situation are now lost to us, perhaps beyond recall.

There is one important consequence of this for our understanding. In so far as we can reconstruct the character of the worship in the earlier age, it appears to have had a natural joyous character, expressing itself with dance and music, and perhaps with sexual rites, which became quite unacceptable from the viewpoint of a later period. At that time what we might regard as a more ‘puritan’ ethos had emerged. The community had come through the harrowing experience of exile; God had shown his dis­pleasure with the people once, and might do so again. So the texts relating to worship, in the form in which they have come down to us, are dominated by an awareness of sin, and an anxiety that everything possible might be done to remove the taint caused by sin.

This emphasis is very clearly marked in the Psalms, where nearly half of the 150 individual pieces are of the form known as ‘laments’, where the community or an individual (perhaps speaking as rep­resentative of the community) express awareness of sin and plead to God for forgiveness. It is even more characteristic of Leviticus, where, as we have seen, detailed instructions are provided for the carrying-out of a variety of rituals in the proper manner. Overwhelmingly the emphasis is on the maintenance of the proper standing of the community before God by a series of rites, of burnt offering and the like, all concerned with the need for the proper expiation of sin. In many ways the climax of the Book of Leviticus is provided by the strange rite described in Chapter 16, to be performed on what came to be known as the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), a day which continues to be central to the observances of modem Judaism.

Such a change of emphasis meant that many Psalms, which had no doubt originally been used in the performance ofjoyous rites of thanksgiving to God, came to be interpreted as referring to the future, to a time when the people could once more be assured of the divine favour. For the present the community could no longer assume that its relation with God was basically secure; always the appropriate rituals had to be carried out to ensure that it might be so. The consequences of this concern for human sinfulness were to be very deep-rooted in both Judaism and Christianity.

It is from such a standpoint as this that we can achieve an important insight into the role of the prophets. Neither the traditional Jewish approach to the prophets, as interpreters of the Torah, the Law of Moses, nor the traditional Christian understanding of them as foretellers of the future, is wholly satis­factory. The prophets were clearly men who were addressing what they believed to be messages from God to their own contemporaries; to that extent the description of the prophets as ‘forthtellers, not foretellers’ is reasonable enough. But too often the prophets have been regarded as set over against the religious establishment, free preachers opposed to the cultic orthodoxy of their day. So the denunciations of sacrificial worship found in all the main prophetic collections—Amos and Hosea, Micah and Isaiah from the eighth century, Jeremiah and Ezekiel from the sixth—have been under­stood as calls for a religion free of the trammels of cultic detail. Thus when Hosea, in perhaps the best-known of these passages, proclaims in God’s name

I desire steadfast love, and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God, rather than burnt offerings

(Hos. 6:6) this has often been taken as an outright rejection of all forms of sacrificial offering.

Such an understanding is almost certainly mislead­ing. It would, for a start, be completely anachronistic to suppose that free individual religion without involvement in the cultic practice of the commun­ity would have been a possible option in the eighth century âñå; that is a concept much more characteristic of the Liberal Protestantism of the last century or so. But even in Old Testament terms to picture the prophets as opposed to cultic practices is misleading. Rather, it was precisely because of its importance that any corruption in the people’s worship was to be con­demned severely. Other parts of the Old Testament, for example the Books of Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers, spell out in great detail the importance of sacrificial worship; the prophets are not to be seen in opposition to such practice, but as messengers bringing warnings. And one of those warnings most frequently expressed was concerned with the dangers of corruption in worship.

The possible causes and nature of such corruption might, of course, differ according to circumstances. In Hosea it seems as if he was combating the supposition that sacrifice and burnt offering could make the community acceptable to God regardless of its failure to observe God’s will in the rest of its life. In Amos, a southerner preaching in the north, we find sweeping denunciations of social ills, but also the underlying assumption that the very existence of particular northern sanctuaries was a matter for condemnation. The irony of

Come to Bethel, and transgress, to Gilgal, and multiply transgression

(Amos 4:4) seems to make it clear that the very act of joining in worship at those sanctuaries was wrong; only at Jerusalem could the Lord’s voice truly be heard. And so it would be possible with the other prophets to pick out particular emphases in their denunciation. But all would be motivated by the same basic conviction that Israel’s worship must reflect its unique position as a nation specially chosen by God.

The prophets were, that is to say, part of the religious and political establishment of their day, but they were also prepared to rebel against the viewpont of that establishment if it appeared to them to be right to do so; and herein lies one of the lasting values of the Old Testament. There are scattered pieces of evidence that elsewhere in the ancient Near East religious functionaries were prepared to reject the official line, to act under the conviction that they had received a direct command from God, but nowhere is that independence carried as far as among the Israelite prophets. It may well have been due to the great prophets that the conviction arose that Yahweh, the God of Israel, alone could properly be worshipped, that no other god was acceptable; it was certainly part of their message that his worship demanded worthy forms of behaviour which must pervade all aspects of human life.

Some of these prophetic concerns are carried still further in the Book of Deuteronomy, though the language employed there is for the most part less stirring. Deuteronomy is often regarded as a kind of repository of much of prophetic preaching. Though ostensibly a series of sermons from the mouth of Moses given before the people had ever entered the Promised Land, it is in fact almost certainly a product of the period leading up to the Exile, when Israel’s existence in Canaan was once more in jeopardy. Here are set out some of the convictions that have shaped the expression ofjudaism ever since, notably theShema: ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might’ (Deut. 6:4). Here is expressed the belief that Israel’s relation with its God was a wholly unique one, quite unlike that of other surrounding peoples. This is clearly a religious judgement rather than a historical one. Israel is not to be regarded simply as a state among states; it is essentially a religious community, set apart from all other peoples.

The particular way of expressing this belief in Deuteronomy was by use of the word ‘covenant’, a concept which has been of immense significance in Judaism and Christianity ever since. (What we habitually speak of as the Old and New ‘Testaments’ would more accurately be called ‘Covenants’.) The two great prophets roughly contemporary with Deuteronomy, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, both make frequent use of this way of describing the people’s past history, which they saw as largely a story of religious infidelity, and of its hopes for the future based on a ‘new covenant’ (Jer. 31:31-34, a passage much used in the New Testament and applied to the work of Jesus; Ezek. 34:25-31, another passage of importance for the New Testament because of its use of the theme of the ‘good shepherd’).

The idea of covenant was no doubt not a wholly new one at the time of Deuteronomy and the sixth-century prophets, but it does seem as if that was the period at which the word was employed most creatively and extensively. Characteristically it was projected back to the very beginnings of human experience, so that the deliverance of Noah from the great flood was pictured in terms of an everlasting covenant (Gen. 9:8-17). Similarly, the act of the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai, the conventional mode of describing the guiding principles by which the com­munity’s life was to be determined, was expressed in terms of a covenant (Exod. 24:3-8). By such means was the community enabled to come to terms with the greatly changed situation which its overthrow as a nation-state imposed upon it; in future, its relation to its God would increasingly be that of a religious community rather than that of a nation-state. The whole notion of a ‘covenant people’ is one which is much more appropriate to the religious group than to the secular state.

Deuteronomy is in many ways the book which best conveys to the modern reader the central concerns of the Old Testament, and there is much else in its contents which could legitimately be discussed here: for example, the particular emphasis on the one community worshipping the one God at the one holy place. But there is one particular emphasis in Deuteronomy and the literature associated with it (e.g. the Deuteronomistic History, Joshua—Judges—Samuel-Kings) which must be considered, for it has provided one of the strengths and one of the problems of theistic belief ever since.

One of the central concerns of Deuteronomy is to show that the community is rewarded or punished in accordance with its behaviour. The climax of the speech or sermon put into the mouth of Moses emphasises the two ways which are open to the people, and the inevitable consequences of each course of behaviour (Deut. 30). A large part of the Deuteronomistic History is devoted to showing how the people’s behaviour had in fact been a choice of the wrong way, falling away from the worship of the one God, and that this had been the real cause of the disasters that had befallen them. The defeats that had been inflicted by their enemies, the Philistines, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, had all been the result of God’s own action in punishing his faithless people.

Some kind of theology of history along these lines is essential for the maintenance of beliefin a God whose demands are in any way to be predictable, and it is a type of theology which has played a major part in the Judeo-Christian tradition ever since: what happens in history is held to be in accordance with the divine will and purpose. But whatever may be said of this view with regard to the history of whole communities, it poses acute problems if the attempt is made to apply it to individuals, as if their success or misfortune could also be directly correlated with good or bad behaviour. Certain parts of the Book of Pro verbs seem to inculcate this belief (e.g. Prov. 10:3), and it is also found in some Psalms. The Book of Psalms contains individual psalms of a type very different from those which we considered as witnessing to Israel’s worship; such is Ps. 37:25:

I have been young, and now am old; yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken or his children begging bread.

Perhaps the most thoroughgoing exposition of this view, that one can assess another’s virtue by his prosperity or its absence, is put into the mouth of the friends of Job. But when we come to consider the Book of Job, we have left all strictly historical considerations far behind; the Book of Job is in a real sense timeless, and it is now appropriate to consider the third of our questions (p. 75 above): is there not a case for approaching the Old Testament as literature, without particular regard for historical ques­tions? Though attempts have been made to discover a historical context for the Book ofjob, the interest and passion that it has aroused have overwhelm­ingly been caused by the fact that it is perceived as great literature.

The Literary Study of the Bible

The study of the Bible has for the most part been undertaken by those who have had some active link with the believing community, Jewish and Christ­ian. For a variety of reasons, that has led to the strongly historical concern which we have already noted. It may well be that one reason for the decline of a purely historical concern is the fact that there has been an increased interest in the Bible (and the Old Testament in particular) as a literary phenomenon; and this interest has been by no means confined to those who are themselves religious believers.

Before considering this point more generally, how­ever, we may return briefly to the Book ofjob, which of all Old Testament books has exercised great fascination for literary figures from the widest possible background. William Blake, Thomas Carlyle, H.G. Wells, C.G. Jung are figures that come to mind, and in an often quoted judgement Job has been compared with Dante’s Divine Comedy and Goethe’s Faust as part of the great literature of the world. Yet it is also religious literature, and poses in the most acute form imaginable (for the context of the poem is a bet laid in heaven, of which human beings can know nothing) the problem of the inexplicability of human affairs. The supposition of Job’s friends, arguing along the lines set out for the community in Deuteronomy, that human prosperity reflects acceptability with God and ill fortune implies wrong behaviour, is rejected. In the end Job is vindicated and his fortunes are restored; and arguments still rage whether this is a satisfactory ending to the Book. Clearly, in life good behaviour is not always rewarded: should the Book ofjob have reflected that ambiguity? It is striking that the Old Testa­ment also contains another treatment of this theme, in the book Ecclesiastes, which is in many ways even more questioning of the accepted religious solution that good behaviour always receives its due reward.

Job and Ecclesiastes offer us two timely reminders. First, neither of them can be placed in any historical context; the ascription of Ecclesiastes to Solomon is universally agreed to be simply a literary device. Secondly, they demonstrate in a remarkable way the ability of the particular religious system which brought the Old Testament into its final shape to include within its canon of sacred writings at least two which raised basic doubts concerning the divine-human relation which was at the very heart of that system. Whatever else they are, Job and Ecclesiastes are works that challenge received beliefs.

One of the most striking features of the approach to the Bible in the first instance as a piece of literature is this capacity for raising disturbing questions. Some of the stories that have had the deepest effect on our culture come into this category. A prime example would be the com­mand to Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac, told in Genesis 22. It will always be a profoundly disturbing account; yet if historical questions are to the fore, then it becomes possible to envisage it as illustrating changing social and religious conditions, the abandonment of an earlier custom of human sacrifice, and the like. Explanations of this kind, it is now widely agreed, are wide of the mark; and if we read Genesis 22 as a story, then it is no longer possible to avoid the issues it raises as to the kind of God who could be pictured as making such commands, the nature of Abraham’s response, and so on.

Similar points can be made about the stories in the opening chapters of the Old Testament, concerning Creation and the univer­sal Flood. As historical record these stories are clearly unacceptable. By using such labels as ‘myth’, we may get some insight into the processes which underlie the telling of such stories. In Genesis 2 and 3, for example, it is easy to see how the story sets out to explain aspects of human existence which may be puzzling or even terrifying: the ambivalence of relations between the sexes, the fascination/repulsion of snakes, the pain experienced by women in childbirth, the need for and the unproductive nature of manual labour. All these questions are set within a context of divine creative activity. But underlying all these detailed points is the power of the story in itself. This is not simply a didactic message given story form to make it more acceptable; the story has its own compelling force. As with the parables ofjesus, we are first gripped by the story itself; only subsequently do we reflect upon its implications for our leading of our lives and understanding of them.

Not surprisingly, therefore, this literary approach has spawned a whole new area of biblical study, and the disputes which have often reached bitter proportions in other literary studies, concerning struc­turalism, semiotics and the like, have not left biblical scholars unscathed. (Indeed, the expression ‘literary criticism’, when applied to the Bible, is now very ambiguous: sometimes it means the type of historical and source criti­cism referred to earlier in this article, sometimes it is concerned with the type of literary study here being discussed. Caveat lector!)

Of more immediate relevance is the relation of this type of study to the authority of the Bible within a religious community. Perhaps not many would now wish to maintain the historical inerrancy of the Bible in the sense that the accuracy of every statement in it is an essential prerequisite if the Bible is to retain any authority. But there are very many who would feel, in more general terms, that the historical approach outlined earlier did provide the possibility of objective criteria which are no longer available if the Bible is to be approached primarily as literature, which seems a much more subjective matter. (Whether that last point is indeed true is an issue that is much discussed, but can hardly be raised here.) In fact the objective/subjective tension corresponds closely to another division which is widely experienced among religious believers. There are those who regard their faith as a series of propositions, which must be substantially true if the faith itself is to be maintained; this approach corresponds closely to the desire to have a series of verifiable historical claims. There are others who would express their conviction rather in terms of accepting the Jewish or the Christian story as that which makes best sense of the world in which they live and reflects most closely their own deepest feelings; for them a more subjec­tive approach will not be a weakness.

There is one other aspect of the literary approach to the Old Testament which even the briefest survey must note. As we have seen, traditional study of the prophets by historical-critical methods has been much concerned to establish what was original to the prophet in question, with what was secondary being in effect discarded. Thus with Amos, for example, critical scholars have been almost unanimous in regarding the last few verses of the book (9:11-15) as a later addition, a kind of‘happy ending’ which had no place in the preaching of Amos himself. Here, as will be seen, is a tension which can never be entirely resolved. If our main concern is with the individual figure of the prophet Amos, preaching a devastating message of doom to his contemporaries in the eighth century bce, then we shall regard all the probably later additions as detracting from the ‘real’ message. If, on the other hand, our first concern is with the Book of Amos, part of the sacred tradition of the Jewish (and later Christian) community as it has been handed down through the centuries, then the message will be a different one: a conviction that beyond imminent and very real disaster a happy outcome could nevertheless be awaited. According to whether we seek the history and religion of ancient Israel, or the sacred writings handed down, we receive a different message. Neither is ‘right’ at the expense of the other; their differ­ence should still be recognised.