How to read the Old Testament properly

Getting the Old Testament
BY STEVEN L BRIDGE HENDRICKSON, £12
Unlike Christians overly dependent on an orderly, literal understanding of the Bible, Steven Bridge finds God in the countless contradictions of the Old Testament – the places that make most Christians squirm. Why are there two creation stories in Genesis? Why does God tell Noah to bring two of every kind, then seven of every kind? Why was a supposedly loving God so mean and unfair in punishing all living things with the Flood?
Many fundamentalists gloss over these contradictions or try to explain them away. For Bridge, it is the contradictions themselves that hold the greatest depth and teachings about God.
Fundamentalist Bible readers believe that contradiction or inconsistency would somehow disprove God’s existence or Christ’s salvific work. This is their slippery slope: if you don’t believe in creation in seven days, then why believe in Noah’s Ark. This leads to doubt about ... well, everything, including Jesus’s miracles, and his death and resurrection.
Bridge believes in no such slope, arguing that the Bible’s contradictions show different yet compatible, mutually enriching, views about God. Different Hebrew language in Genesis, for instance, indicates the Priestly or Yahwist sources (two others being the Deuteronomist and the Elohist sources).
In other words, four separate, though compatible, traditions existed at the time of composition of the books of the Hebrew Bible, just as the Catholic Church has Carmelite, Franciscan, Benedictine, and various social justice traditions, all of which enrich one another.
Just as these Catholic traditions find unity through Rome and the liturgy, the underlying theology of the Old Testament – God’s omnipotence and omniscience; the demand for justice and moral living; God’s close interest in humanity and therefore history – is remarkably consistent. That said, readers will have fun with the chapter of Ecclesiastes, where the author, Qoheleth, challenges much of the biblical conventional wisdom. Unlike the prophets, “Qoheleth discovers no consistent application of justice. Wickedness, oppression, and corruption prevail, and they frequently outweigh the good accomplished by virtue.” Qoheleth does eventually, grudgingly, acknowledge some biblical theology, such as God’s goodness and “sovereignty over all”.
Each chapter of Getting the Old Testament opens by discussing a current issue of American culture.The one discussing the Book of Daniel mentions the bestselling books The Bible Code and The Bible Code 77, which assert that by reading the “code” found in the Hebrew Bible, such as every 50th letter of the Books of the Law, we can discover important future events.
While such books are written by earnest believers, they show a lack of understanding of the role of the prophets in ancient Israel, and what their books can really teach us today.
Bridge notes that the biblical prophets were not “primarily interested in predicting the future”. He highlights the Greek word prophetes, which means “one who speaks on behalf of another”.
The prophets spoke on behalf of God, because the Israelites of the day had turned away from the Lord and their religious roots, and had therefore fallen into grave sins, both social and individual. The prophets called the nation back to faithfulness to God because they had begun to worship the other Near Eastern divinities of the day, fashioning idols out of metal and setting up altars and shrines. They even engaged in prostitution as a way to please the fertility gods.
Bridge notes: “Virtually all of the prophets take God’s people to task for their failure to live up to their end of the covenantal agreement.” The second great theme of the prophets is justice. The people were not looking after the poor. The prophets ridiculed the pious rituals of people who refused to treat the indigent well. Such rituals were meaningless to God given the social circumstances. God called His people to social justice through the prophets.
Perhaps the strangest prophet is Daniel, whose bizarre dreams drive the end-of-the-world sector of American Christianity even today. As throughout Getting the Old Testament, Bridge challenges the reader to a deeper understanding of this prophetic style by reading from the original context, rather than from today’s context, which produces all sorts of theological nonsense.
He argues that most of Daniel’s prophecies were written down after the events themselves had taken place (ex eventu), and that the Book did so in order to instil reverence for God in its readers rather than factual truth.
The information – the political programme – found in Daniel is presented in a bizarre manner because of the tense, deadly political situation of Daniel’s day, Bridge writes: “It was far safer to write about multi-metallic statutes, large rocks, beasts from the sea, rams, goats, and little horns.” Yet Daniel does possess a wonderful underlying theology, which is missed by those today caught up in the storm of modern-day prophetmaking: “Theologically speaking, the harsh discriminations and injustices that the Jewish people suffered all but demanded divine retribution. Daniel’s author imagined just such a response. He sought to affirm that, despite appearances, God was still in control. In fact, the entire political history of the ancient Near East, from the Babylonians to the Greeks, was all part of God’s design. It all had a purpose.” Every now and then it is healthy for Christians to read such books as Getting the Old Testament, because they drag us away from the temptation to become influenced by the forcefully argued and emotionallycharged renderings of the Bible by Christian fundamentalists.
Bridge shows that it is these fundamentalists who are missing out on the Bible’s true riches, by refusing to enter into the dangerous crevices and strange, seemingly senseless juxtapositions and irrationalities of the Old Testament.
Brian Welter