Old Testament Theology: An Introduction

By Prof. Walter Brueggemann

In this first volume in the Library of Biblical Theology series, Walter Brueggemann portrays the key components in Israel's encounter with God as recorded in the Hebrew Bible. Creation, election, Torah, the divine hand in history; these and other theological high points appear both in their original historical context, and their ongoing relevance for contemporary Jewish and Christian self-understanding.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abingdon Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781426723407

Prof. Walter Brueggemann

Walter Brueggemann is William Marcellus McPheeters Professor Emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary. A past president of the Society of Biblical Literature, he is one of today's preeminent interpreters of Scripture.

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PREFACE

In my Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Fortress Press, 1997), I have offered my primary extended interpretive statement about Old Testament theology. I have worked with the thick metaphor of testimony and have sought to develop the theme and metaphor in terms of the unsettled, open-ended pluralism of the text itself. As it happens, the attempt to listen carefully to the rich variety of voices of faith in the Old Testament (which cannot be easily brought together) served well the appeal to a postmodern hermeneutical perspective. I have had and now have no desire to be postmodern except as the polyvocal character of the text itself indicates such an interpretive perspective.

On the whole, that book has been well received. The primary objections to the book have come, as might be expected, from those who continue to be committed to modernist historicist assumptions, in which they have more confidence than do I. In any case, the present volume does not seek to respond to criticisms of that volume nor to emend any of those arguments. (It is, in my judgment, important to notice that the shrillest modernist critiques of my book in fact have exhibited no interest in the argument of the book nor have they paid any attention to the interpretive gains offered therein.) But that statement is as it is, and I am content to leave it at that.

The present volume has a quite different intention, namely, to provide an entry point into the Library of Biblical Theology, the ambitious, multi-volume project edited by Leo Perdue. I have understood my task in this volume with reference to the projected series. Thus, I have attempted no new programmatic statement, nor have I sought to offer a particularly novel angle on any of the topics I have discussed. Rather, I have sought to state a more-or-less straightforward consensus view, with openness to colleagues in other disciplines. As is usual in my work, I have kept one eye on the immense contemporaneity of the text. My judgment is that U.S. society in general, and mainline church life in particular, face enormous challenges and must undertake great risks for the sake of our common faith and our common humanness. It is my conviction that the biblical text offers a place from which to mount such a risky venture of faith. Such a venture requires thoughtful critical grounding, passionate trust in the truth disclosed in the text, and a wisdom about the world in which the text is to be lived out. I have sought to offer my exposition from that perspective.

I am pleased to be included in the series and am grateful to Leo Perdue and to the editorial staff that have seen the book through. As is regularly the case, I am grateful to Tia Foley for bringing the manuscript to fruition. I trust the discussion offered here will contribute in useful ways to our continuing interpretive task.

I am pleased to dedicate this book to M. Douglas Meeks, my long-time friend, colleague, companion, and teacher. Doug, more than anyone else, introduced me to the thickness and urgency of theology in the service of the church. Through our long years of team teaching, he introduced me to the mysteries of critical hermeneutics and has been, all this time—along with Blair—a good and trustworthy friend. My vocation has been strengthened because of his presence in my life, and I am grateful.

Walter Brueggemann

Holy Week 2007

I. INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION TO THE TASK

The aim and task of Library of Biblical Theology series is to offer a coherent, wholistic presentation of the faith claims of the canonical text in a way that satisfies the investigations of historical-critical scholarship and the confessional-interpretive needs of ongoing ecclesial communities. That same aim and task of course pertain to a subset of biblical theology: Old Testament theology or, alternatively, theology of the Hebrew Scriptures, the subject of this present volume. From the rich ferment of recent and current study of Old Testament theology, it is evident (a) that there are many alternative legitimate ways of enacting such an aim and task, (b) that there is no one single right way to perform such a task to the exclusion of other presentations, even if a particular perspective receives passionate and high-minded advocacy, and (c) that in order to offer such articulation, one must adopt an interpretive perspective that has some particularity to it. It is not possible, so present study would evidence, to proceed in a given way without some antecedent interpretive perspective.¹ Thus it is proper that we begin with a recognition on some viable alternatives that have claimed some significant adherence.²

We may identify three general variables that are characteristically present in efforts at Old Testament theology. First, it is clear that the Old Testament did not originate in a historical-cultural vacuum, but was formed fully within the matrix of ancient Near Eastern culture and history. The archaeological gains of the past 200 years have given scholarship what seems to be a reliable sense of that culture and history that in large sweep consisted in a series of empires to the north of the land of Israel that rose and fell through various political encounters and military ambitions. To the south, the several dynasties of Egypt maintained a coherence and stability that anchored the southern end of the Fertile Crescent. The land of Israel that primally concerns the Old Testament is endlessly an arena of contestation between Egyptian power in the south and the sporadic imperial ambitions of the powers in the north. In the Old Testament period, this latter concerned the sequence of Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian Empires, culminating at the end of the Old Testament period with the conquest of Alexander and the cultural domination of Hellenism.

It is clear, moreover, that these significant political-cultural establishments over the many centuries were not simply concentrations of power; they were, at the same time, of necessity, centers of artistic and cultural reflection, for human communities are inescapably symbol-constructing and symbol-practicing enterprises. As a consequence, the cultural-liturgical legacy of these centers of power and meaning produced an important and abidingly influential literature. In addition to a legacy of law and wisdom, the great political centers were also the great liturgical centers that generated, practiced, and preserved great liturgies through which the ruling regime was made legitimate and, derivatively, through which the world was made safe. Such liturgies that are at the same time theologically serious and politically interested regularly celebrated the ruling God as creator and preserver of the world, and the ruling king (dynasty) as the proximate regent and shepherd of the realm.

A specific subset of this general liturgic-mythic practice that pertains especially to the Old Testament is the Canaanite religion evidenced by the ancient library at Ugarit (Ras Shamra) that details the liturgic-mythic practice of religion of Israel’s closest neighbors whereby, Baal, the God of generativity, presides over the well-being of the agricultural economy (Hosea 2).³

This liturgic material is now reasonably well known. There is no doubt that in context the practice of such liturgic generativity was taken with great seriousness. There is also no doubt that over time, the community that produced the Old Testament appropriated much of this common material and made use of it in its liturgic practice and in its theological self-understanding. The issue for Old Testament theology is the question of the extent to which Israel appropriated such material, the extent to which it radically transformed the material, and the extent to which it rejected the material that it found inimical to its own theological commitments. The answer to these questions determines the extent to which the Old Testament reflects common theology that was generic in the ancient Near East and the extent to which Israel’s faith is distinctive and without parallel in its cultural environment.⁴ The issue admits of no single, one-dimensional answer, because it is clear that appropriation, transformation, and rejection were all strategic possibilities in any given point in the theological articulation of Israel. This cultural-liturgical reality amounts to a crucial issue for Old Testament theology, because it concerns what is definitive in Old Testament faith, that is, what are the core claims that characterize the God of Israel and Israel as the people of that God. Over the stretch of the twentieth century—largely due to the confessing situation of the church in Germany and the decisive influence of Karl Barth mediated through Gerhard von Rad and G. Ernest Wright—Old Testament theology placed the accent characteristically upon Israel’s distinctiveness, and so emphasized the contrast between the faith of Israel and the religious claims of its cultural environment.⁵ Since the 1970s however, much of Old Testament scholarship has retreated from the boldest claims of theological distinctiveness and has more or less accepted that Israel’s faith is best understood in close relation to that cultural-religious environment. It is evident, moreover, that one might acknowledge decisive accent points in Israel’s faith, that is, God as Creator, and nonetheless recognize in such a theological theme a common theological heritage that is widely shared in the ancient Near East.⁶

Second, Old Testament theology, in the mainstream of modern Western critical scholarship, must take into account the critical tradition of scholarship, for decisions about the date, context, and sequence of the literature will be important for theological interpretation. Whereas much theological interpretation tends to disregard these critical matters and treat the material as an undifferentiated mass, scholars within the field of Old Testament study cannot disregard these differentiations but characteristically proceed on the assumption that the date and context of a piece of literature will inescapably reflect the interpretive interests of that time and place. For that reason, it has been a primary task of critical study to locate and situate distinct pieces of literature, in the conviction that the text characteristically reflects not the situation reported in the text, but the situation of the reporting tradition.

In taking up the critical tradition that is indispensable for theological interpretation, we may begin with the older critical consensus that goes under the label of Wellhausianism. This consensus was reached over two centuries of scholarship that was largely German and Protestant, and was given its normative articulation by Julius Wellhausen.⁷ This consensus, known as the documentary hypothesis, proposed a series of redactions (editions) of the narrative and legal material of the Pentateuch that stretched from the early days of the monarchy to the exile. While that literary analysis is now critiqued and refined, the distinction of layers of literary material in the text continues to be a widely held assumption of critical scholars. But the hypothesis of Wellhausen is not concerned primarily with a sequence of literary redactions, even though such layers of traditions are readily acknowledged. Rather the important matter that is attached to the theory of literary editions was a hypothesis about the course of Israelite religion, so that the early sources were correlated with primitive religion, middle range sources with ethical monotheism, and later sources with punctilious legalism. That is, the hypothesis about the history of the literature was pressed into the service of a history of religion. While scholarship continues to practice some form of source analysis, the theory of the evolutionary development of Israelite religion in a unilinear fashion is now largely rejected. There is no doubt that this nineteenth-century hypothesis was deeply influenced by evolutionary categories of interpretation rooted in Hegel and maximized by Darwin. It is now clear that Israel’s faith did not develop in such a unilinear way, but was in every setting of its life, complex and pluriform in practice and in expression.⁸While acknowledging this critique of the hypothesis, it is fair to say that the most elemental assumptions of Israel’s religious history in the hypothesis continue to hold great sway among scholars, even though the assumptions have been shown to be imposed upon the material in a most inappropriate way. That is, there is still a widespread assumption of the move from primitive to ethical to legalistic. Aside from the specificity of the hypothesis, the crucial learning is that the fundamental assumptions of the interpreter that may lie beneath any critical judgment that is decisive for interpretive outcomes.

It is now clear that the documentary hypothesis, of course including a hypothesis concerning the history of Israelite religion, was not an innocent scholarly matter, as our hypotheses characteristically are not innocent. This is true even though scholars in the rising modern period no doubt proceeded in what they took to be an objective manner. It is evident that the hypothesis has a distinct Christian bias with an inchoate super-sessionism implied, for the evolutionary dynamism of the hypothesis assumed that Israelite religion would keep moving until it arrived at a better faith, in the instant, Christian faith. Thus, taken at its worst, the hypothesis had an anti-Jewish tilt; for what was readily labeled as belated priestly legalism constituted what in fact was the funding of Judaism, albeit portrayed in Christian usage in a caricature. It is the case that this scholarship was largely the work of German Protestants who had a vigorous bias against cultic discipline and practice, and a great bias for ethical concerns. This bias, positively and negatively, permitted a less than critical, less than self-aware hypothesis that has dominated scholarship. The problem in critiquing the hypothesis has been to value the discernment of literary layers in the tradition, without attaching to those several layers stages in Israel’s religious history.

The truth of the hypothesis is that the tradition of Israel’s faith that became the Old Testament is complex, multilayered, and multivoiced; that it has a dynamism that is intrinsic to the substance of faith; that that dynamism moreover changes over time and through circumstance, and each such fresh articulation in a new circumstance, while rooted in what is remembered and treasured as normative, creates something of a theological novum. The attempt to order that dynamism and to identify the layers of that dynamism—the work of the dominant hypothesis—is hazardous indeed; but it is also an inescapable effort. Thus we are left, as theological interpreters, with the residue of that erstwhile critical consensus. The hypothesis has been committed to a certain notion of evolutionary dynamism, but it is important to recognize that the developmental dynamism, voiced in the hypothesis has enough of truth in it to have given credence to the hypothesis over a long period of time.⁹ Alongside that credence, however, the hypothesis has conveniently served a propensity to explain away whatever is found to be objectionable in the tradition as superseded by what comes later.

By the 1970s, the consensus hypothesis of Wellhausianism began to collapse; by the turn of the century, the primary attention given to the hypothesis is by precritical scholars who continue to assault the hypothesis even though it now has few advocates. The collapse of the hypothesis was produced by a variety of factors and forces, but in general was a subset of the general collapse of the dominant paradigm of the West that featured the Vietnam War, the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Paris student revolt, and the rise of a liberation consciousness that refused dominant paradigms of power and truth. In Old Testament studies, the key factor has been a widespread loss of confidence in the older claims made for archaeology as having a capacity to connect, in some detail, text and alleged context.¹⁰ The earlier work of John Van Seters and Thomas Thompson, followed by the so-called minimalists, has made a strong case, in part embraced even by William Dever, that the claims made for the historicity of events and therefore the historicity of a context for the literature cannot be demonstrated, or in some measure even made credible.¹¹ The effect of this scholarly judgment that is now widely shared—though not unanimously—is to suggest that the early history of Israel is a quite belated memory (invention, fabrication) and not reportage. The critical conclusion that the ancestral narratives in Genesis are not historical has been followed by a widely shared critical judgment that the events of the thirteenth–eleventh centuries (Moses, Joshua, Samuel) are not historical, and the existence of David and Solomon is now widely contested. More radical critics, drawn to more negative critical judgments, raise issues about the historicity of Hezekiah and Josiah, so that clear historical ground for what the Bible asserts is at the earliest, for the most radical judgments, in the sixth or even fifth centuries.

The effect of this loss of confidence in historical reportage is the capacity to make the judgment that the several traditions concerning the early period of Israel’s biblical history are ideological constructs that are precisely designed to fund the faith of the later community in the sixth or fifth century. And what was taken as religious development over the centuries is now best viewed as side-by-side renditions of faith that evidence profound and ongoing contestation about the character of God, the nature of faith, and the identity of Israel.

The critical matters in Old Testament scholarship that surround Old Testament theology are now deeply contested and unsettled. The influence of the old hypothesis persists because it did, in its own interpretive context, make a coherent sense of the text available. But whatever persists now about that hypothesis makes its way in a new situation in which historical claims are deeply problematic. As a consequence, the older phrase, God acts in history, is problematic as it is now is to be taken as a confessional (or an ideological) statement that for the most part is seen to be constructive and not reportage. It is clear that such constructive confessionalism was multisided in ancient Israel and certainly in the period of emerging Judaism that Christians have long preferred to view in a simplistic reductionism. These continuing and unsettling critical problems of course concern Old Testament scholars more than they do other biblical interpreters. But other biblical interpreters as well, including theologians, cannot, in present circumstance, proceed without reference to these problems. As I shall indicate below, the conviction that what was taken as historical reportage in some sense constructed still leaves open important interpretive possibilities, notably that the text is constituted as a canonical claim with immense normative authority or that it is an ideological claim with a self-serving agenda barely concealed in the formation and transmission of the tradition. If we were to agree, as the minimalists now claim, that the formative work on the tradition was to serve the community that emerged from the deportation in the sixth and fifth centuries, this makes historical critical work no less urgent. Only now that critical work is not to hypothesize about the long development of religious tradition, but to focus on the more specific context of the post-deportation Judaism to try to learn the meaning of the contestation that is reflected in the complexity of the text. Old Testament theology, even in such a context, still depends upon historical-critical judgments that we make as best we can. It is the case, I suspect, that historical critical judgments operate either openly or covertly, even among those who seek to bracket out such vexed questions.

Third, alongside critical readings of the Old Testament that are crucial for Old Testament theology, there is no doubt that much theological interpretation is done in confessional, ecclesial communities that may be informed by critical study but in the long run intend to serve a particular community of faith. It is clear that the relationship between critical and confessional reading is always an uneasy one that admits of no final settlement. We may identify three such undertakings that pertain to biblical theology.

First, it is clear that Old Testament theology, in mainstream scholarship, has been, until recently, almost an exclusively Protestant Christian domain, or more particularly a German Protestant domain.¹² It was only after Karl Barth and the Confessing Church in Germany that Old Testament theology as a distinct and self-conscious discipline developed. In the wake of Barth, it is not surprising that such work was German and Protestant. Its strong representative figures in the mid-twentieth century were the Lutheran scholar Gerhard von Rad and the Calvinist scholar Walter Eichrodt.¹³ It was a common assumption with Eichrodt and von Rad (and many less influential interpreters in the same period) that Old Testament interpretation led inescapably to the New Testament and to the affirmation of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Both von Rad and Eichrodt were of course alert to the complexity of the move from the Old Testament to the New and did not make a simple-minded connection between the two. Nevertheless, the connection is definitional for Old Testament theology in the mid-twentieth century, because their interpretive work was in the Old Testament, a designation that clearly and unapologetically implied the defining connection to the New. It is right to say that such a characteristic interpretive move was not intended or understood by them to be supersessionist or anti-Jewish, but was simply an unexamined interpretive maneuver that was taken for granted in Protestant Germany, given a lack of other conversation partners! The connection between the Old and New Testaments is characteristically made either as a promise-and-fulfillment scheme or as salvation history for which Jesus Christ is the fulfillment and culmination.¹⁴

Well through the twentieth century this common practice and unexamined interpretive maneuver held sway in the discipline. It was only with the direct and sharp challenge of Jon Levenson that scholars began to become alert to the implicit supersessionism that was embodied in this characteristic interpretive maneuver.¹⁵ Indeed, Levenson’s defining question, Why Are Jews Not Interested in Biblical Theology? is answered that biblical theology does not interest or engage Jewish interpreters because the regnant categories of interpretation are relentlessly and uncompromisingly Christian. Levenson’s programmatic alert has, over time, had an immense impact upon the field.¹⁶ While Christian scholars of course continue to write in and for the church, and so toward the distinctive Christian claim made for the gospel, there is a growing awareness among Christian scholars that claims made for the connection between the Old and New Testaments cannot be made in absolutist and exclusive terms.¹⁷ Alongside such Christian claims, it must be readily acknowledged that other readings, of course specifically Jewish readings that eventuate in Judaism, are equally valid and so must be taken seriously by Christian interpreters.

Such an acknowledgment does not preclude Christian interpretation, but invites modesty and humility that knows other legitimate readings stand alongside such convinced readings. How we are to write as church theologians with an uncompromising allegiance to the gospel and at the same time acknowledge the equal legitimacy of Jewish reading is an open issue with which we will continue to struggle. In any case, we are a long distance now away from Bultmann’s dictum that Old Testament history is a history of failure.¹⁸ The move toward the New Testament will inescapably be made in church interpretation; but it surely is now recognized that it is not the only interpretive move that can be made. Given the long history of Christian domination, moreover, room must be made for readings that place our own readings off center.

Second and conversely, in the latter part of the twentieth century the task of biblical theology has been freshly undertaken by Jewish scholars.¹⁹ Levenson has forcefully called attention to Christian hegemony in the discipline; but it is also Levenson more than anyone else who has made significant contributions to biblical theology that exhibit a characteristic move from the text itself to the rabbinic tradition in a way that parallels, mutatis mutandis, Christian moves from the text to the New Testament.²⁰ While it is deeply rooted in Jewish tradition, Levenson’s work offers the sort of compelling interpretation that evokes the engagement of interpreters well beyond the Jewish community.²¹ That is, it is work to which informed Christians must pay attention. Particular attention should also be called to the programmatic essay of Goshen-Gottstein, who has reviewed the historical problem of Jews doing biblical theology and then concludes that the undertaking of such a task is a high priority for the next phase of scholarship:

It was probably necessary to wait for the first half-century of Jewish academic Bible study to pass until we could allow ourselves the luxury of facing the bias on each side and put the question afresh: What is Tanakh all about? I have my ideas as to how a future Tanakh theology would be organized, based on the evaluation of legoumena on the relationship between God, people, and land, and how such a base line might contrast with later Jewish theologies. These and many other issues of content and method could not be raised in the first English outline which cannot be more than an attempt to direct our attention to what to me is a central and urgent issue of biblical studies. I can only hope that this essay will help to set the stage for a more realistic and deeply truthful atmosphere in the common work of Christians and Jews in the academic study of biblical religion.²²

The new opening suggested by Goshen-Gottstein and pursued by Levenson has taken place in a slowly changing social context after the Shoah. The brutal elimination of Jews with the silent permit of Christians has required a new humility among Christians about hegemonic claims, both political and exegetical.²³ That new humility has permitted a recognition of the legitimacy of Jewish exegesis—not to say Jewish existence—which exhibits the shame of every Christian Final Solution, even final solutions of an exegetical variety. Many factors have helped to create a new situation in which Jews may be regarded, by Christians, as important companions in the interpretive process, without a compromise on either side about the seriousness of confessional, ecclesial commitments.²⁴ The new environment that makes fresh critical reading possible is strikingly articulated in the statement of Jewish scholars, Dabru Emet.²⁵ This is a most welcome reference point for future work. That welcome reference point both requires and invites Christian interpreters to position themselves alongside Jewish readers and not in a position of dominance over as has been mostly assumed in actual practice. Such alongsidedness, when taken seriously, makes it possible to recognize that many Christian interpretive efforts have in fact been deceptively self-serving and quaintly parochial in ways that do not have to do with core confessional commitments.

Alongside conventional Protestant dominance in Old Testament theology and newly emerging Jewish engagement with the discipline, we may identify as a third confessional, ecclesial practice of recent interest in what has come to be called canonical criticism.²⁶ The term is notoriously elusive and the meaning of the phrase is not agreed upon. Taken generically, the task of so-called canonical criticism is to consider the biblical text in the way it is given us through the traditioning process that has been shaped by the believing community without excessive regard to the complicated prehistory of the text or excessive preoccupation with critical study that has tended to break the wholistic theological intentionality of the text by analytic fragmentation. This work tends to be postcritical, taking criticism into account but moving beyond it with confident theological nerve approximating what Ricoeur terms a second naiveté.²⁷ We may distinguish two more-or-less programmatic efforts at such a canonical approach. First, James Sanders has been occupied with the ongoing and open-ended dynamism of the text and the textual-interpretive tradition that is always pushing toward the normative. At the same time, however, that push toward the normative is always being challenged by dialogic openness that responds to the particular environment in which the text is being formed, transmitted, and interpreted. Most recently Sanders has written:

The Bible is a dialogical literature that in turn gave rise to two dialogical religions based on it. The issue of the date of closure of the various canons of the two religions, the Tanak and the Talmud, and the double-testament Christian Bible, is elusive and difficult to pinpoint, now that we are freed of the Yavneh/Jamnia or conciliar mentality. Is it so important after all? Whatever a church council has done to declare its canon closed served to recognize and ratify what had come to be practiced in the majority of believing communities, as well as to curb the intra-canonical dialogue. Any such effort within Rabbinic Judaism would simply have become part of further debate. The closures enveloped enough internal dialogue for the process of repetition/recitation, which had started it all, to continue unabated in the communities that find their embracing identity in their canon. No closure can curb the dialogue that is inherent in a canon of scripture, which, over against the magisteria and regulae fidei that developed after closure in all churches, mandates dialogue about its continuing relevance and authority. A canon is basically a community’s paradigm for how to continue the dialogue in ever changing socio-political contexts. Leaders within a community, the scribes, the translators, the teachers, the preachers, the midrashists and the commentators, precisely those convinced of its continuing relevance, have been and are tradents of the text, those who bring the text’s past into the present in the contemporary terms of their ongoing community.²⁸

Sanders’s concern is to resist the notion that the canon—the normative text—is flat, closed, and one-dimensional in a way that precludes the work of ongoing dialogue.

Second, and by far the more influential, is the work of Brevard Childs in which the notion of canon has evolved to different understandings over time.²⁹ The initial impetus for Childs’s programmatic work has been his awareness that critical study had not only fragmented the text, but has weakened if not nullified the large theological claim of the text that governs all parts of the text and that delivers the text, within the community of faith, as a wholistic, normative, theological statement. Thus his work is initially a response to the outcomes of historical critical work that eventually has detracted from the theologically normative character of the biblical text.

In important ways Childs stands in continuity with the work of the great German Protestant interpreters of the twentieth century and is peculiarly and gladly indebted to Barth in his readiness to take on the core theological task of interpretation, even at the cost of overriding historical critical interest. But Childs is also deeply critical of the great German scholars who were his teachers, because they permitted the critical issues to detract from a definitive and intentional theological focus. In his major and formidable book of 1993, Childs offered what is for now the culmination of his canonical reflection, that the Old Testament and New Testament are two witnesses to Jesus Christ. It is clear that Childs is, without compromise or apology, doing Christian theology; he is of course aware of Jewish biblical theology, but understands that as a quite distinct task in which he has no interest and with which he has no quarrel. Childs of course is a master of historical criticism as is evident in his several commentaries; but his work is to move beyond critical study and not to be deterred by it. I suggest that with Childs the task of relating critical study and theological exposition to each other is not of great interest, but continues to be in any case an unresolved issue. In his work of 1993, Childs offers a full exposition of The Discrete Witness of the Old Testament (95–207) and The Discrete Witness of the New Testament.³⁰ This is followed, after a small pause, by Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible.³¹ It is clear that Childs, along with the rest of us, has not found a compelling way to integrate those discrete witnesses to his reading of The Christian Bible. That work of integration is a task that requires our continuous attention, even while we receive important clues from Childs.

We may distinguish three terms that are crucial for Childs that will serve us well as we consider the task of theological interpretation:

1. The Final Form of the Text. By this Childs evidences his lack of interest in the prehistory of the text that has been a primary preoccupation of guild scholarship. The text as we have it is the product of the believing community, so that the very form of the text as given in the canon is itself a defining theological datum. This focus of interpretive attention will be appealing to theological interpreters outside the world of Old Testament scholarship who incline to take the text as it is.

2. The Plain Meaning of the Text. In this usage, Childs stands within a long tradition that takes plain meaning not to refer to a surface impression of the text, but the meaning that has been found in Christian practice, meaning that points characteristically to Jesus Christ as the true subject of the text. This point has been made especially clear in his recent study of the history of interpretation of the book of Isaiah; characteristically Christian theology has read the book of Isaiah with reference to Jesus, even though it is clear in Childs’s own commentary on Isaiah that Childs does not disregard more conventional historical interpretation.³²

3. The Rule of Faith. This phrase, though admittedly somewhat enigmatic, refers to the normative confessional presuppositions of the church with reference to the Christological and trinitarian claims formulated in the great early councils of the church. It is Childs’s insistence that in the end, biblical theology of the Old and New Testaments must focus on the Rule of Faith that gives center, focus, and coherence to all of the canon:

The church struggles with the task of continually discerning the truth of God being revealed in scripture and at the same time she stands within a fully human, ecclesiastical tradition which remains the tradent of the Word. The hearing of God’s Word is repeatedly confirmed by the Holy Spirit through its resonance within the church’s christological rule-of-faith.

In sum, the proposal being made is not that of developing a canon-within-the-canon, nor is it of identifying the canon with accumulated ecclesiastical tradition. Rather, the complete canon of the Christian church as the rule-of-faith sets for the community of faith the proper theological context in which we stand, but it also remains continually the object of critical theological scrutiny subordinate to its subject matter who is Jesus Christ. This movement from the outer parameters of tradition to the inner parameters of Word is constitutive of the theological task.³³

Childs’s powerful advocacy seeks to establish that proper biblical interpretation is not only within an ecclesial community—as distinct from the critical guild—but also with a theological intentionality that characteristically submits the elements and details of the text to the larger theological claim that pervades the whole, a claim that is its canonical sense.

While Childs’s proposal is highly contested and easily critiqued for its reductionism, he has posed primal questions for the task of biblical theology. While I am deeply impacted by the work of Childs, I have not, even as he judges, fully subscribed to his way of reading the text. I believe that much of what he attributes to the text is an imposition that fails to take the text in terms of its own seriousness. I find much more congenial to my own perspective the dynamism of Sanders that keeps the normative in some tension with the adaptable. It is clear that in the formation of the canonical text, the canonizing pressure so accented by Childs was not able to overcome the detail of the text that does not conform to that intentionality. One may judge that the material was so intransigently powerful that the canonical intention was not able to prevail; or alternatively one may conclude, as do I, that such overcoming was not such a grand intention as Childs proposes. In any case, these are elements of the current discussion that need to be taken into serious account.

It is not surprising that the subject of Old Testament theology encompasses a rich array of experimentation that stretches all the way from ancient Near Eastern parallels to the classical formulations of church faith under the heading of "Rule of Faith." I have traced in brief form the impact of ancient Near Eastern culture and liturgy, the classical tradition of criticism, and the compelling power of the ecclesial confessional community. And yet, after all of that, it remains to be said that the world attested in the Old Testament is so strange and so new—beyond all of our horizons and categories—that it will not readily or fully submit to any of our preferred themes or categories, either historical or theological or canonical.³⁴ After we have done our best work and vigorously pursued our most passionate modes of reading, the text—and the God featured in the text—remain inscrutable and undomesticated. Partly the reason for that inscrutability and lack of domestication is that the text in its final form is complex and pluralistic, hosting a variety of traditioning and interpreting voices that become normative traditions. More than that, however, the inscrutability and lack of domestication in the text are a consequences of the God attested in these pages who is Holy Other. This God, in the end, is no more accommodated to the normative traditions of the church than to what was culturally hegemonic in the ancient Near East. However this strangeness and newness are to be understood, it is evident that articulation in Hebrew rhetoric and grammar serves this elusive, irascible God well; the rabbis have always seen that there is a curious, playful, undecipherable dimension to this God and to the way in which the canonical voice brings that God to articulation. Old Testament theology has as its task the attempt to make some coherent sense out of this material; but such coherent sense is characteristically hazardous because our explanatory modes of discourse run immediately in the direction of idolatry, of producing a God who is discernable, explicable, and therefore to some extent manageable. The one who meets us here, however, is as hidden as discernable, as inscrutable as explicable, and as subversive as manageable. The attempt to write an Old Testament theology is a risky business, as risky as touching the ark of the covenant (see 2 Samuel 6:6-8).

It follows, does it not, that every risky attempt at Old Testament theology including this one, disciplined and informed as it might be, is a quite personal effort, even if lined out from and toward responsible scholarship and serious faith. It is personal and to that extent inescapably subjective, even if it is cast in the sure tone of infallibility that tempts both academic and ecclesial interpreters. This characterization of our work is fully and variously acknowledged:

It needs only to be mentioned at this juncture that no one is in a position to know in which direction a possible new consensus may lead. However, since this outlook is not likely to change in the near future, the following discussion will dare to venture an opinion here and there about debated issues (e.g., the existence or dating of the so-called Yahwist). While taking such a position is risky, the attempt will still be made. This effort proceeds with the full recognition of the danger that the presentation is both its entirety and each of its parts cannot be fully informed by the current (and perhaps a very particular) scholarly stance. However, one cannot simply throw up one’s hands in despair at either lagging behind the contemporary scholarly understandings of various issues or, having assimilated them, finding that the discussion has moved forward.³⁵

In a Christian context there exists today a field of inquiry within Old Testament studies that cannot be divorced from personal position or even axiomatic attitudes, and I do not think I am far off the mark if I suggest that this inquiry plays a much larger role within the total academic activity than we like to admit to ourselves in our idealized picture of what modern nondenominational scholarly biblical study is about. . . . Yet the more we deal with aspects of meaning, of the biblical text in its final form—from textual unit to canon and message—the less can we avoid our personal background and attitude.³⁶

Given that severe reality that evokes humility, the interpreter must nonetheless proceed as best he or she can in an intrepid way. I do so with a full heart, enormous indebtedness to many colleagues, and hope for freshness yet to be given.

II. THE PRIMAL DISCLOSURES

CHAPTER TWO

A PRIMAL REVELATION (EXODUS 3:1–4:17)

YHWH appeared abruptly to Moses at Horeb (Exodus 3:1-6). It is this reassuring, demanding, summoning meeting that sets in motion the narrative of the exodus emancipation of the slaves and from that the entire account of Israel’s life with YHWH. It could well be argued that this meeting is the decisive one for all of Old Testament faith. I will not insist upon that, but only that it is a characteristic meeting of disclosure, arguably the most definitive, that exhibits many of the most characteristic elements of Israel’s faith.

Our beginning focus is upon the theophanic encounter (Exodus 3:1-6), but that encounter is embedded in the larger narrative of Exodus 2:25–4:17 that will eventually concern us. The theophany itself amounts to an abrupt intrusion into the life of Moses and the life of Israel, unexpected and inexplicable. That of course is precisely the nature of YHWH who, in the narrative of Israel, is an originary character without antecedents. YHWH appears in the narrative fully identified and established. There are, of course, many religious antecedents to YHWH and a religious environment of the ancient Near East, and scholars have used great energy on that data.¹ In the narrative, however, YHWH is underived and capable of direct intrusion into the narrative life of Israel without preparation or antecedent. Thus there is, in the purview of Israel, no prehistory to YHWH.

The theophanic report permits us to make four observations that pertain to the general project of Old Testament theology:

1. YHWH’s appearance to Moses is not self-exhibit. It is rather purposeful, summoning, and demanding. Thus the very first utterance of YHWH in this narrative is the double address to Moses to which Moses must give prompt and submissive response: Here I am (v. 4). YHWH’s initial utterance is as a sovereign who dominates the situation, who will impose a purpose on Moses, and who will be obeyed.

2. YHWH’s self-commitment concerns YHWH’s holiness that derivatively causes the ground on which YHWH stands to be holy (v. 5). The utterance of the term holy at the outset makes a primal claim for YHWH. YHWH is not, as the other gods of Moses’ environment, useful or available for any human intention. YHWH is for YHWH’s self and YHWH’s purposes, and is on that account unapproachable as an ominous presence. Moses is put on notice that this is no user-friendly God. While the term holy is used almost in passing, this beginning point leads to a trajectory of holiness that includes the well-known song of the divine counsel in Isaiah 6:3: "And one called to another and said: / ‘Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; / the whole earth is full of his glory’ " (emphasis added).

Through the course of Israel’s life YHWH is an overwhelming and demanding presence, a presence that is capable of life and death, of judgment and rescue. The term holy is used twice more in the Exodus narrative. In Exodus 12:16, the Passover and celebration of unleavened bread is a holy convocation, marking Israel’s distinctiveness as YHWH’s rescued people. And in Exodus 15:13, the term holy abode refers to the goal of the exodus trek, referring either to the holy land or to the Jerusalem temple. These latter usages are, of course, derivative from YHWH’s own unparalleled self.

3. Related to YHWH’s holiness is Moses’ fear at seeing God (v. 6). This refusal on Moses’ part is a characteristic acknowledgment in Israel that YHWH is a fully embodied, fully visible person. For the project of Old Testament theology, it will not do to spiritualize away the fully embodied character of YHWH, for Israel’s theological articulation has no fear of or embarrassment about such an embodied sense of God. That is, there is no apology for what modern categories apologetically label anthropomorphisms. This embodied sense of YHWH is, of course, commensurate with an Old Testament affirmation of the goodness of embodied creation and a fully embodied human personhood. A great deal of unfortunate mischief has been caused by modern embarrassment about such so-called anthropomorphisms of Old Testament rhetoric, a practice that constitutes no problem or awkwardness for Israel’s own discourse in faith. The materiality of the entire project is of immense importance; theological interpretation must resist rightly every effort to overcome such primitive materiality. And of course for Christian interpretation and its commitment to the incarnation, this embodiment of YHWH is acutely important.

4. YHWH, in addressing Moses, identifies YHWH as the God of the Genesis ancestors (v. 6). Common critical judgment holds that the ancestral narratives developed without connection to the Mosaic tradition.² It is clear, however, that the canonical tradition takes great care to make an intrinsic connection. The importance of that connection in this instant is that it is the God of Promise who now addresses Moses; in the verses that follow, the old promises made to the family of Abraham are now deployed to the community of Moses. And because the core promise is to the land, the Moses tradition can now anticipate the deportation from Egyptian slavery as the beginning of the journey to the land. The slaves and all the generations that follow are now recipients of YHWH’s promissory fidelity.

Thus the narrative of theophany gives us primal themes for the larger task of Old Testament theology:

• YHWH as a God of purposeful summons

• YHWH as holy in all the ominous severity of that term

• YHWH as fully embodied as an acute agent in the life of the world and the life of Israel

• YHWH’s promissory commitment to the community of Moses that is focused on the gift of the land

The theophanic report, in fact, continues through verse 10, but the divine statement of verses 7-10 will be held in abeyance until we consider the premise of the theophanic narrative in Exodus 2:23-25.

The theophanic entry of YHWH into the life of Moses and Israel is to be understood in context where it is clear that the entry of YHWH into the life of Israel is not simply by divine initiative. Exodus 2:23-25