Resurrecting the Old Testament

Katharine Dell

What relevance could these texts, produced by the ancient Israelites, possibly have for a church which had broken away from its Jewish moorings?’ (Marcion)

Marcion is perhaps the most famous Christian apologist who had a low opinion of the relevance of the Old Testament for Christians. However, Christians who largely ignore the Old Testament are falling into three traps. They are firstly misunderstanding its nature and the richness and diversity of its material; secondly, working with an inadequate idea of its authority in its relationship to the New Testament; and thirdly, missing out on much of its meaning and relevance for today.

The Old Testament is often categorized as legalistic, bloodthirsty and morally and theologically inconsistent. Those who resolve to read the Bible from cover to cover generally get to Leviticus—and get lost amongst detailed rituals for sacrificial worship and long lists of names; and if they get as far as Psalm 137—‘Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!’—they give up in despair (or else put tactful brackets around the offending verse, as in many psalters). They might have cause to be confused in trying to reconcile the picture in Isaiah 40—55 of a universal creating and redeeming God of love, who cares for his people, with that of the fiercely nationalistic God of Joshua and Judges, who fights only on behalf of his own people and wipes out other nations at a stroke.

As with most accusations, there is some truth in them. Legalism did characterize some of later Judaism—Jesus spoke out against the hard and fast attitudes engendered by it. But if we apply some basic literary criticism to the Old Testament, we discover that the early religion of Israel knew nothing of this legalism—rather, the bond between God and his people was a natural one flowing from God’s grace, until the people started to go astray. Then the prophets had to try to win them back by stressing their covenant obligations to God. It was only later in their history—after the Exile—that the law became central as the means by which the people demonstrated their obedience to Yahweh, and hence lists and legalism became more common.

In response to the caricature of the Old Testament as bloodthirsty, the example I cited of Psalm 137 demonstrates the danger of taking verses out of context. These verses, seen as part of the whole psalm and in its historical context of captivity in Babylon, can be more readily explained. It is hardly surprising that in the midst of their suffering in exile, the Israelites felt anger and hostility towards their persecutors, the Babylonians. The psalm in fact tells us of a very human reaction to oppression—bad-mouthing your persecutors. Further, Psalm 137 is not typical of the whole Old Testament. Leviticus 19:18 states, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’—quoted by Jesus—and there is a strong tradition in the Old Testament which speaks of salvation to other nations than Israel.

On the issue of inconsistency, we need to remember that the other side of the coin is diversity. Because the Old Testament was formed over a long period of time, many different situations arose and many varying theological ideas were formulated. We have to allow for development, so that whilst God was perceived in one way early on—in very nationalistic ways, for example, fighting wars on behalf of the Israelites—the conception and understanding broadened and deepened and changed significantly in ever new contexts. Thus the God of the exilic age was seen in more majestic terms as the God of the whole world. If we look at the Old Testament as a whole, we can trace how central religious concepts arose and developed—doctrines of God, creation, salvation and redemption—not all at the same time, but gradually and through the many and varied events of history.

And it is clear that without the theological developments that took place in the Old Testament, the New would not have been born. As John Goldingay writes in his book Approaches to Old Testament Inter-pretation (Apollos, 1990, p.34), ‘The Old lays the theological foundations for the New and sometimes explicitly looks forward in a hope which the Christian sees confirmed or fulfilled in Christ.’ It was, after all, into a Jewish world that was expecting a Messiah that Jesus came. Jesus quickly came to be seen as the fulfillment of the promises witnessed to in the Old Testament. As Brevard Childs comments, ‘Although Christians confess that God who revealed himself to Israel is the God and Father of Jesus Christ, it is still necessary to hear Israel’s witness in order to understand who the Father of Jesus Christ is’ (Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context, SCM Press, 1985, p.9).

There is a long tradition of interpretation of the Old Testament amongst Christian scholars, both in conjunction with the New Testament and outside that specific context. The interpretation of the Old Testament in the light of the Christian revelation starts in the New Testament itself. So, in Matthew 5:18, Jesus says, ‘Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them.’ The Jewish scriptures have authority as the scriptures of Jesus—he taught his disciples often using them as his starting point. The same chapter in Matthew continues, ‘You have heard that it was said to the men of old "You shall not kill"… but I say to you…’ (v. 21). Jesus built upon these scriptures, expounded them and sometimes contradicted them. They contained the word of God for his people as revealed to the patriarchs and to Israelites and Jews in the history of their nation. Hence they were authoritative for Jesus and for those who wrote the New Testament. For Christians, with Christ a decisively new step in the relationship between God and humankind was made, and yet it did not reduce the former revelations to irrelevance, rather it emphasized continuity. As the author of the epistle to the Hebrews put it, ‘In many varied ways God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son.’

In fact the New Testament writers express themselves overwhelmingly in terms of the categories and concepts of the Old Testament—the notion, for example, of a just and loving God who acts faithfully for his people; ideas about sin and forgiveness. Many basic theological categories found in the New Testament are taken from the Old. Titles and phrases from the Old Testament are used to make sense of the significance of Jesus, and the language of sacrifice is used to make sense of Jesus’ death. And these insights go on to be relevant today. As Goldingay writes, ‘Thus Christian theology needs to be open to Old Testament insights on the nature of God, on the world and on everyday human life as God’s gifts, on the continuing theological significance of Israel, on what it also means for the church to be the people of God, and on how the individual believer relates to God’ (Approaches to Old Testament Interpretation, p.35).

Yet there is a further dimension to this, and it is whether the Old Testament is worth reading for its own sake. Does it have its own authority apart from the New Testament? The Old Testament spans many centuries and contains a diversity of genres of literature—stories, poems, myths, narratives, sayings, laws—reflecting a huge range of insights into human beings, their relationships with each other and their relationships with God. No one would deny that there are some difficult and indigestible texts in the Old Testament, but isn’t it better to wrestle with difficult texts, as Jacob wrestled with God at the Ford of the Jabbok (Genesis 32), rather than ignore them? Many texts from the Old Testament can and should be read as a foreshadowing of Christ—the servant songs of Isaiah 40 to 55 spring to mind as poems which illuminate in a profound way the self-offering of Christ on the cross—and yet is it not important also to read other texts that don’t fit so easily? Many texts are never read, and, if they are, they are read in a context that is a far cry from their original context and their original meaning. Of course there is a place for distinguishing between oppressive texts such as Psalm 137 and more liberating ones such as the Exodus story. Yet different texts speak to different generations and so even unpalatable ones may have a role to play in the future. Walter Brueggemann, in his book The Bible and Postmodern Imagination, stresses that in a post-modern age we need to find fresh and challenging, even subversive interpretations of texts. He writes, ‘It is my judgment that church interpretation… has tended to trim and domesticate the text not only to accommodate regnant modes of knowledge, but also to enhance regnant modes of power’ (SCM Press, 1993, p.vii). He calls for an act of counter-imagination in which texts are used to challenge the reader and lead to the possibility of real change and growth. There may be some mileage in this kind of model which is alive to the richness and complexity of our scriptural heritage and which may help to reawaken interest in the fascinating document that is the Old Testament.

Katharine Dell is Lecturer in Old Testament Studies in the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University, and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College. She is the author of two books on Job and is also writing a volume on Job for The People’s Bible Commentary.

This article first appeared in the January-April 2000 issue of Guidelines.