Gordon J. Wenham - Exploring the Old Testament: A Guide to the Pentateuch

Exploring the
Old Testament

A Guide to the Pentateuch

I should like to thank Ruth McCurry, Gordon McConville and Alan Millard for their advice and encouragement and my son Christopher for the maps and graphics.

The first five books of the Bible, often called the Pentateuch, are fundamental to the faith of both Christians and Jews. These books contain the familiar stories of creation, the fall and the flood. They tell of the origins of the human race and of the Jewish people. They include laws as basic as the Ten Commandments and as complex as the regulations for food and sacrifices. These books relate the call of Israel to be Gods chosen people, yet hold out the prospect of universal salvation for all mankind. So profound has been the influence of these books on Western culture that their ideas are embedded in our language and ideology at point after point.

Yet anyone picking up a Bible and starting to read Genesis for the first time will soon be surprised, puzzled and sometimes shocked, for despite the Pentateuchs foundational role in our culture, its ideas often seem utterly alien to the modern reader. Its approach to chronology, history, ethics and God challenge the modern world view at so many points that readers may be tempted to stop reading very quickly. But this would be a great mistake. The Pentateuch is a fascinating world, which deserves to be explored carefully and sympathetically. And this is what this volume tries to do.

Exploring the Old Testament is the general title of this series, and this first volume will try to guide you through the Pentateuch so that you can appreciate what it was trying to say to its first readers and why it should still be of interest to people living in the twenty-first century. I shall introduce you to the social world of the Bible, to its marriage customs, national festivals, welfare systems and legal ideals. I shall endeavour to illuminate the relationship between Israel and the surrounding cultures, the subtle mix of dependence and originality that characterizes the Pentateuchs use of ancient Near Eastern ideas. We shall look at some of the literary techniques used in the Pentateuch, its love of symmetrical patterns and its rhetorical devices. But pre-eminently the Pentateuch speaks of God and his relationship to Israel mediated by Moses, so in exploring the book we shall try to come to terms with its theology, its ideas about God, its religious practices, its concepts of faith, obedience and loyalty.

But a guide to the Pentateuch needs to be more than a description of what is there: it needs to explain something of the history of the study of the Pentateuch, of how scholars have come to understand it in the way they now do. It therefore contains, at various points, summaries of current scholarly debates, e.g. on patriarchal religion, or notes on recent archaeological discoveries. The later chapters of the book contain a more extended discussion of the composition of the Pentateuch, an issue that has been more fully debated by biblical scholars than any other topic. My treatment does not pretend to be comprehensive, just to give the first-time reader some bearings in a most complicated discussion.