Why God gave the Law to Israel

I’ve been peeking ahead in Sailhamer, and came across his proposal for the purpose of the Mosaic Law:

It was to keep them from straying from God until he sent the Messiah.

He mentions Galatians 3:19 (one of his core texts for understanding the composition of the Pentateuch), and says:

When they sinned, he added laws to keep them from sinning further. The laws were not added to keep them from sinning; the laws were added to keep them from disappearing into the world of sin around them…. As the transgressions increased, more laws were added.

Ultimately:

By means of the Mosaic law Israel was preserved until the days of the new covenant.

These statements rest quite heavily upon his theory about the composition of the Law sections and narrative (see the fourth bullet here), but they are still good food for thought.

Have Evangelicals Misunderstood Historical Interpretation?

I just finished Sailhamer‘s Chapter 2 and started into chapter 3 (cf. the previous post).  Chapter 2 was a tough row to hoe, and it ends rather abruptly. But then the reader is rewarded in the opening pages of chapter 3 (ahh, the point…).

Dr. Sailhamer is essentially suggesting that while evangelicals pride themselves on historical-grammatical interpretation, they’ve actually drifted in an unhealthy direction. Here’s a brief summary of the point, with a couple insertions of my own:

1. He knows that you must take into account the historical context. As I emphasized at GBC this past Sunday, you can’t just quote isolated phrases of the Bible without even noticing whether it was written by Moses, Jeremiah, or Paul. Historical context matters.
2. He recognizes that we should “use tools such as archaeology and ancient history to show, apologetically, the historical trustworthiness of the biblical narratives, since they are about real events.” He is not claiming that the Bible doesn’t represent real history.
3. However, he is concerned that too many evangelicals seem to think that extra-biblical historical information is the key to unlocking the meaning of the biblical text. They are “viewing the events of the biblical narratives through the eyes of historians rather than of the authors of the biblical narratives themselves.” Some commentaries are packed full of historical and archaeological data while spending precious little time examining the composition and message the author was communicating in the book.
4. So he is calling for “a literary and linguistic understanding of the biblical text and its composition,” focused more upon “reading the biblical text” than “extensive studies in archaeology and ancient history.” Instead of focusing on using outside data to reconstruct the historical details of every event mentioned in the Bible, we should look “to the biblical text itself for an understanding of divine revelation and God’s acts in history.”

He’s right! This has very practical application for my current sermon series in the Mosaic Covenant. Our natural curiosity may wish to reconstruct every detail of Israel’s covenant obligations. Now careful study of the details of the Law is healthy, but we often want to know far more details than God chose to reveal. In the process, we can lose sight of the goal: understanding the revelation of God in the Pentateuch. It is not first and foremost a history text to make us expert historians of Mosaic Covenant living!

The Meaning of the Pentateuch

I finally finished reading (and rereading) the introduction to John H. Sailhamer’s The Meaning of the Pentateuch. He is proposing or defending a “compositional view” of the Pentateuch, which seems to have a handful of primary themes or assertions:

• The Pentateuch is not the same thing as the Mosaic Covenant, and it was not written to teach readers how to follow the Mosaic Covenant. It does, of course, contain the Mosaic Covenant.
• The core message of the Pentateuch is faith, pointing also to a Messianic hope. It is ”a narrative admonition to be like Abraham.” Viewing Israel’s failures, it “makes it clear that something must be done about the human heart.”
• The Pentateuch was composed very intentionally, with narrative and laws situated appropriately in relation to each other to communicate the God-inspired message.
• In terms of compositional strategy, JHS makes a bold claim that the Mosaic covenant begain with a simple covenant code in Exodus 20-24. But “the incident of the golden calf has caused a fundamental change,” and thus the more complex and restrictive Priestly Code is added (Ex 35-Lev 16). Then again the goat idols incident in Leviticus 17 leads to the addition of even more in the personal Holiness Code (Lev 17-26). He proposes that we should see “an ever-increasing cycle of disobedience and the addition of more laws.”  Biblical support is found in Gal. 3:19 and Moses’ mention of two covenants in Deut. 29:1.
• Deuteronomy 34:10 is a critical text, suggesting that someone much later in Israel’s history was involved in the final composition of the Pentateuch. JHS makes it very clear that he does not mean that ”the Pentateuch was the product of a long and complicated process of literary growth.” Instead he asserts that “the Mosaic Pentateuch is identical with the canonical Pentateuch with only a few exceptions.” But he does honestly face those exceptions (such as Deut 34:5, 10, and the record of the kings of Edom in Genesis 36:31f.), concluding that “the present canonical Pentateuch is thus an updated version of the Mosaic Pentateuch produced, perhaps, by the ‘author’ of the [canonical] OT as a whole (Tanak).” Ultimately he suggests that this could be a fourth century Israelite prophet, someone “who knows Israel’s history from its beginning to its end,” and is able to conclude that the promise of a prophet like Moses has never yet found its fulfillment.  

Whether or not I end up agreeing with some or most of Sailhamer’s assertions, this will certainly be a very profitable read. He is making me think hard and examine the Pentateuch carefully. He is not throwing out new ideas for the sake of drawing a crowd to his book table. He has interacted with the Pentateuch far, far more deeply than I have, paying extremely careful attention to the text. His conclusions are based not upon a publishing deadline, but a passion to understand God’s revelation for us in these inspired writings.

The Threads That Run Through Scripture

Just suppose that I decided that the Bible was just a regular human literary creation. A great piece of literature, but nothing more than that. How would I explain these incredible threads that run throughout Scripture? They are found nearly everywhere in the Bible, leaving few places where you can say: “Now this is a completely unique theme, not reflected anywhere else in the Scriptures.”

My current study is on the thread of redemption. Ga’al (+go’el), padah, some uses of copher (+caphar), lytron (lytroo, lytrosis, etc.), agorazo, and more. You follow the thread through the foreshadows in Exodus, the principles of the Law, the illustration in Ruth, the pleas and praises of the Psalmists, the prophecies of Isaiah, the teachings of Jesus, the explanations of the apostles, all the way to the praises of heaven in Revelation. Even if we could build a case that each successive author had full access to all of the previous authors, this thread itself would be a phenomenal example of literary craftsmanship.

There are hundreds of these threads. Either these authors were the greatest authors ever (in which case it seems we should listen to them), or else there is an Author whom we must hear and believe.

Wrestling with truth/faithfulness/loyalty/love

I’m preparing to preach on the seventh commandment: you shall not commit adultery. We’ll begin this week with a study on the faithful love that God demonstrates toward His people. I did not realize the massive amount of material that I would encounter: there is this cluster of Hebrew words (‘emet, ‘amen, ‘amunah, etc.) that are difficult to translate into English. They overlap some with the Greek pistis and pistos, which can also be challenging to translate. It’s hard for a native English speaker to understand how the same noun can mean “faith” or “faithfulness,” depending on the context. Then all of this overlaps with the longstanding debate about the connotations of chesed. Most of these words are used many times in Scripture, so there is a pretty large mountain of data to be mined here.

These are not obscure issues. They help to explain some of the remarkable translation differences in some well-known passages, like the end of Psalm 37:3:

• KJV “verily thou shalt be fed”
• ESV “befriend faithfulness”
• NASB “cultivate faithfulness”
• NIV “enjoy safe pasture”

For the reader of the English Bible, the translators’ decisions on these questions can dramatically change the apparent meaning of a passage. For example:

• Matthew 23:23 Are the weightier provisions of the law “justice, mercy, and faith” or “justice, mercy, and faithfulness”?
• Galatians 5:22 is the fruit of the Spirit faith or faithfulness?
• Micah 6:8 love mercy? love kindness?

Then there are passages that are difficult for the English reader to understand because of our unfamiliarity with the Hebrew usage:

• Joshua 24:14 Fear the Lord and serve Him in sincerity and truth.
• I Samuel 12:24 Fear the Lord and serve Him in truth with all your heart.
• Genesis 24:27 God has not forsaken … His truth toward my master.
• I Kings 2:4 Walk before me in truth.

As it stands, the English in those passages doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. We wouldn’t say: “Joe, don’t forsake your truth toward your wife.” I suspect that most English readers think that I Samuel 12:24 means to truly/really serve God; or they think it means to serve him in the truth. Both concepts are true, but with that preposition the most likely meaning for ‘emet there is “faithfully.”

So I’m learning a lot, and I’d better get back to it! Sunday is coming soon.