Week 2
Ancient Israel and the Covenant
The ancient Israelis had a vision of history in which there was a covenant with God. There was a contract, there was an agreement between the Creator and the individual people who sign the covenant. So, we now have an agreement whereby these people will live and continue to discover truth and discover the essence of life in history, and proceed step by step to fulfill the plan. It is not complete in the beginning. When Abraham is called out of the Middle East to begin this story it is just the beginning of the story. There are thousands of years ahead when the story has to continue and come into being. So the essence of the Jewish story is constant striving, constant work, and constant study.
The Hebrew Bible
The book becomes important in the story, the very book we are going to look at in a second, The Hebrew Bible. That Bible itself is understood to be not complete, not perfect, but needing constant study, editorial work, editorial commentary, and so it grows. It is constantly being studied and constantly being added to. That is where you get the extraordinary accent on scholarship in the Jewish faith. That is something that has been given to the West because, of necessity, the Jews understood from the very beginning that the document they were slowly building was the record of their covenant with God. Therefore it was essential that it be accurate, that it be circulated, that it be translated, that it be preserved.
Accent on History
The key thing the Jews give us in Western Civilization is an accent on history. Everything about the Jewish insight is the revelation of the Divine plan in time. We have to stop and think about this because we often don’t realize it. We look at a story in time and think that is so terrible, why did they do that? Human sacrifice! In ancient societies, every single society practiced human sacrifice, and for a long time. One of the stories we will look at tonight is Abraham and Isaac, one of the great stories of all time. The point of that story is the end of human sacrifice.
RECOMMENDED READING
Our text this week is the first book of the Hebrew Bible. The scholarship on the Bible is massive and difficult for the ordinary student. But some understanding of how the Bible was formed is absolutely essential and therefore I am happy to recommend to you all a wonderful book. It is called Who Wrote the Bible? and it is written by Professor Richard Elliott Friedman, of the University of California at San Diego (HarperCollins paperback, ISBN 0060630353). Prof. Friedman has written an important book about an important subject that is a pleasure to read: it is elegant and informative. It will change the way you think about the Hebrew Bible.
Who Wrote the Bible,
Harper Collins,
ISBN 0060630353
Review:
The contemporary classic the New York Times Book Review called “a thought-provoking [and] perceptive guide,” Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard E. Friedman is a fascinating, intellectual, yet highly readable analysis and investigation into the authorship of the Old Testament. The author of Commentary on the Torah, Friedman delves deeply into the history of the Bible in a scholarly work that is as exciting and surprising as a good detective novel. Who Wrote the Bible? is enlightening, riveting, an important contribution to religious literature, and as the Los Angeles Times aptly observed in its rave review, “There is no other book like this one.”
This is the best book in English about the origins and writing of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament.
It is a brilliant exciting book. You will never forget it.