SCM Core Text

SCM Core Text

Walter Houston

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780334043850
• eBook ISBN: 9780334052142
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

This book introduces students with a little background in biblical studies to the scholarly study of the Pentateuch (Genesis to Deuteronomy). Existing introductions to the Pentateuch are either mainly concerned with historical criticism or taken up with a survey of the contents of the five books, or both. This book is distinctive in that every chapter is concerned with the whole Pentateuch, and in that it approaches the subject from three completely different points of view, following the way in which biblical scholarship has developed over the past 30 years. The first part attempts to understand the text as it stands, as narrative, law and covenant. The second surveys the work that has been done on the history and development of the text, and its historicity. The third is concerned with its reception and interpretation. There are many detailed examples throughout, and aids to study include tables and boxes in the text, questions to enable students to come to grips with the issues either in private study or in class, and detailed guides to further reading.

1. Approaching the Text

What is the Pentateuch and why is it worth reading?

The first five books of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, have always been recognized as a distinct unit, often known as the ‘five books of Moses’ or as the Pentateuch, from the Greek, meaning ‘the five scrolls’. For Jews it is the ‘Torah’ or ‘teaching’.

Why is it worth reading? That depends on the reader. I am assuming that the majority of readers of this book will be Christians. Many of the foundations of the Christian faith are found here, foundations that are taken for granted in the New Testament. It speaks of creation, of sin and the fall, of God’s promise, of the calling of God’s people, of liberation and of hope. Many readers, it is true, are put off by the numerous pages of laws and cultic regulations. But they should persevere. After all, the ‘Law’ includes the Ten Commandments, and the two ‘great commandments’ identified by Jesus: ‘You shall love the LORD your God’ and ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ And those are by no means the only passages of moral value in these pages. That is to say nothing of the stories – Adam and Eve, Jacob and Laban, Joseph, Moses and the burning bush …

For Jews this text has an even greater importance. It is this text and no other that is written to this day by hand on a great scroll and kept in the Ark in prominent view at the end of every Orthodox synagogue. It is this text, this scroll, that once a year is carried with high rejoicing round the synagogue. It is this text that is taken out to be read through, Sabbath after Sabbath, right through from beginning to end every year, with no exceptions for the duller parts of Leviticus. No other part of the Hebrew Bible is treated in this way, only selected portions of the prophets being read alongside the allotted passage of the Torah.

This central place of the Torah in the Jewish community is already illustrated in the Bible itself, when in Nehemiah 8 Ezra reads from it for an entire morning to the people gathered in the square in front of the Water Gate, with the Levites assisting the people to understand it. The narrator implies that this was the first time the people here gathered had heard it. It makes a tremendous impression on them: they weep when they hear the words, but the Levites encourage them to rejoice instead.

In the light of this, we might describe the Torah as the foundation document of a community. We could compare it to the Gospels in Christianity, to the Qur’an in Islam or in a different way to the US Declaration of Independence. It enables the Jewish community to understand themselves and their place in the purposes of God: it gives them their identity and their meaning, tells them where they have come from and where, in the purposes of God, they are going and prescribes their way of life and behaviour.

Not only the Jewish community: the Samaritans also recognize the Torah as Scripture and use it in similar ways. The Samaritans are today a very small community, only a few hundred strong. But it is likely that at one time they were more numerous. For them it is their only Scripture, and it is their foundation document as much as that of the Jews. Jews and Samaritans dispute the claim between them to be the inheritors of the tradition of Israel.

Is there any reason why non-religious people should be interested in these books? If they are interested in knowing something of the roots of western civilization, yes, of course there is. It is simply not possible to understand western art and literature without knowing the Bible, and that means above all the Pentateuch and the Gospels.

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So don’t go beyond this chapter without setting to and reading the Pentateuch itself. Read it fast. It’s no longer than a modern novel. Don’t stop to puzzle over difficulties. Read a book at a sitting, or half a book, depending on the time you have available: Genesis one evening, Exodus the next, and so on. And when you carry on with this book, have the Bible open beside it. I quote some important texts in full, but usually I just give a reference.

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The significance of the Pentateuch

The significance of the Torah for Israel is far more than what is conveyed by the name ‘law’, which is used to refer to it in the New Testament (see Chapter 3, p. 42), precisely because it is basically a story. According to this story, Israel was chosen and called by God, through their ancestors Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to be God’s peculiar possession or ‘special treasure’ (Exod. 19.6; Deut. 7.6), and God delivered them from state slavery in Egypt. With them God made a covenant, by which they committed themselves to observe the commands for their life, national and individual, which God gave them, which are set out in the Torah.

It is this last feature that may be thought to justify the name ‘law’, and much of traditional Jewish scholarship is devoted to elucidating these commandments and working out how precisely they should be observed. It is the conviction of many Jews that it is Israel that has taught the world justice and compassion, which are taught in the Torah and are the essence of the character of God (Exod. 34.6–7).

Christians also regard the Pentateuch as part of Scripture, and Christians too claim the name ‘Israel’ (see Gal. 6.16). It does not on its own play the foundational part in their traditions that it does in those of the Jews and Samaritans. But it is indispensable, furnishing the basis of such central doctrines as those of creation and the fall. As for the story of Israel, the promises to the patriarchs, the exodus from Egypt and the covenant of Sinai, these have often been seen as the first stage in a ‘history of salvation’, leading eventually to the coming of Christ (see below, pp. 172–6). The way the Pentateuch is understood by Jews and by Christians is the subject of Chapter 8 in this book.

The foundational function served by the Pentateuch for ‘Israel’ enables us to begin to understand why it contains such diverse materials. For both story and law or moral instruction are relevant to this function: both origins and custom or moral ethos help to define a community.

The shape of the Pentateuch

All the same, this only enables us to understand it in the most general terms. It does not elucidate the precise shape that confronts us, let alone explain the details. It is divided into five ‘books’, originally scrolls, hence the Greek name Pentateuch. The writing of the entire Torah on one scroll is a more recent development, subsequent to the biblical period. There is a fairly new start at the beginning of each book, although the breaks before the beginning of Exodus and Deuteronomy are much more pronounced than those at the beginnings of Leviticus and Numbers, where the narrative is more directly connected to what has gone before.

The structure of the content is that of a story, which begins in Genesis with the creation of the world, with the failure of the first humans and the world’s narrow escape from un-creation in the Flood. Genesis goes on to the story of the promises made by God to Israel’s ancestors, to be their God and to give them a country to live in. It ends with their migration to Egypt. Exodus relates the story of Israel’s deliverance from slavery in Egypt through the agency of Moses and their arrival at Mount Sinai. There God makes a covenant with them and gives them commandments and laws, and instructions for the erection of a movable sanctuary in which God may dwell with them. In Leviticus God speaks from this ‘Tabernacle’ or ‘Dwelling’ to give cultic regulations and moral laws; and in this book the sacrificial cult is initiated. In Numbers we have further laws and an account of the wandering of the Israelites after they have failed to take the opportunity to enter the promised land. In Deuteronomy, standing once more on the borders of that land 40 years later, they hear Moses give them a very long sermon including more laws and moral exhortation, concluding with the announcement of another covenant; Deuteronomy and the Torah as a whole ends with Moses’ death. Israel’s taking possession of the land is left to the book of Joshua, which is not part of the Torah, though there is no radical break in the narrative.

Questions

Summarizing the contents of the Torah in that way draws attention to some of its unusual features. There is not only the combination of narrative and law, which I have already pointed out. The points where the text begins and ends raise questions. If this story is the foundation story of Israel, why does it begin with the creation of the world and ten more chapters concerning the early history of humanity? And why does it end where it does, without relating the fulfilment of one of the promises God had made to God’s people far back in the text? These questions suggest the basic question ‘What is the Torah about?’, ‘What is its theme?’

Closer examination raises questions of different kinds: why are there two accounts of creation? Was the divine name revealed in primeval times, as Genesis 4.26 suggests, or only to Moses, as Exodus 3.15 suggests and Exodus 6.3 more definitely asserts? Are the Israelites permitted to sacrifice in many places, as Exodus 20.24 suggests, or only in one, as Deuteronomy 12 commands?

The questions raised suggest two different kinds of answer. Some can only be answered by investigating the history of the text. Others demand that we try to understand its present meaning. And many can be answered in different ways as the reader changes stance. As with other biblical texts, the scholarly study of the Pentateuch includes ‘synchronic’ study, which treats the text in its final form (or forms), as a literary text; ‘diachronic’ study, which attempts to discover the circumstances and motives of its writing, the historical process by which the text has come into being; and the study of ‘reception history’, the study of how it has been read and understood and responded to by actual readers, past or present. One common way in which these three aspects are described is as, respectively, ‘the world of the text’, that is, the world which is created in the reader’s mind by reading it, ‘the world behind the text’, and ‘the world in front of the text’.

The task ahead

The three parts of this book correspond to these three modes of reading or study. I am not offering studies of the individual books in this guide. I aim to enable an understanding of the Pentateuch as a whole. We shall start in the synchronic mode, with the world of the text, because we should start with what is known before we move on to what is unsure, and with that text which we are required to understand before we can form hypotheses about its origin. Then we shall tackle some approaches to the historical study of this text, before returning to look in more detail at what it has meant to its readers through the ages and today.

Part A

Here we shall try to form as clear a picture as we can of the Pentateuch as it stands, of what it appears to convey as a finished work and the genres, methods and forms it uses to convey it.

There are two fundamentally different types of material in the Pentateuch, using different styles, structures and literary forms, and requiring different approaches and methods in their study: that is, narrative and ‘law’. But I want to suggest that these are not simply two separate parts of the Pentateuch as a whole. Rather, the whole Pentateuch is a narrative, which includes laws and instructions as part of the story, spoken by characters in the story (God and Moses) and helping to drive the plot. And at the same time the whole Pentateuch is Torah, commonly translated ‘Law’: part of the purpose of the story is to validate the commandments and instructions as obligations on the hearers. Therefore Chapters 2 and 3 are ‘The Pentateuch as Narrative’ and ‘The Pentateuch as Torah’.

The overall structure of the Pentateuch is narrative, so we deal with the Pentateuch as narrative first, in Chapter 2. Modern literary study has developed concepts and methods for the analysis of narrative. Much work of this kind has been done on various parts and passages of the Pentateuch, but biblical scholars seem generally to have fought shy of the ambitious task of applying it to the Pentateuch as a whole. An exception is David Clines’s work on the theme of the Pentateuch.1

In Chapter 3 we ask how the Pentateuch functions as Torah, and we look in detail at passages of commandment and instruction. One question that arises here is whether ‘law’ is indeed the right description for much of this material, or, if it is, how its function differs from that of written law in modern society. Recent scholarship on law in ancient Near Eastern societies will be drawn on to illuminate the issue. But the primary question is how the Torah defines the identity and responsibility of Israel, in relation to God and to each other, or in other words the religious and moral commitments demanded of them. In the chapter I will show how this is done both narratively, as the body of covenant commandments builds up, introduced by the Ten Commandments, and thematically, as many areas of life are addressed in widely separated parts of the Pentateuch.

We shall move next, in Chapter 4, to that key feature of the text which relates and links narrative and law, the promises of God and his commandments, and thus makes the genre of Torah comprehensible to the reader. This feature is the series of covenants between God and humanity which occur throughout the story. A great deal of work has been done on the concept of a covenant in the Hebrew Bible. Simply understood, a covenant is a solemn promise made in the context of a relationship – we shall go into the definition in more detail in the chapter. It is certainly significant that the making of a covenant is an action, and so it is the natural way of presenting a relationship of commitment in narrative form.

Part B

Here we move into the realm of historical criticism, and the historical criticism of the Pentateuch is a dominant and indeed foundational aspect of modern Old Testament scholarship. One of the difficulties in introducing people to this aspect is the ‘so what?’ question. Suppose – to take the example of the best-known and still dominant conception of the literary histo...

Table of contents

• Copyright information
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. Approaching the Text
• Part A
• 2. The Pentateuch as Narrative
• 3. The Pentateuch as Torah
• 4. Covenant-making in the Pentateuch
• Part B
• 5. The Composition of the Pentateuch
• 6. The Coming to Be of the Torah
• 7. The Historicity of the Pentateuch
• Part C
• 8. The Pentateuch in Judaism and Christianity
• 9. The Modern Reader and the Pentateuch
• 10. The Theology of the Pentateuch
• Bibliography