Telling the Old Testament Story: God's Mission and God's People - eBook

While honoring the historical context and literary diversity of the Old Testament, Telling the Old Testament Story is a thematic reading that construes the OT as a complex but coherent narrative. Unlike standard, introductory textbooks that only cover basic background

and interpretive issues for each Old Testament book, this introduction

combines a thematic approach with careful exegetical attention to

representative biblical texts, ultimately telling the macro-level story,

while drawing out the multiple nuances present within different texts

and traditions.

The book works from the Protestant canonical arrangement of the Old

Testament, which understands the story of the Old Testament as the story

of God and God’s relationship with all creation in love and

redemption—a story that joins the New Testament to the Old. Within this

broader story, the Old Testament presents the specific story of God and

God’s relationship with Israel as the people called, created, and formed

to be God’s covenant partner and instrument within creation.

The Old Testament begins by introducing God’s mission in Genesis. The

story opens with the portrait of God’s good, intended creation of

right-relationships (Gen 1—2) and the subsequent distortion of that good

creation as a result of humanity’s rebellion (Gen 3—11). Genesis 12 and

following introduce God’s commitment to restore creation back to the

right-relationships and divine intentions with which it began. Coming

out of God’s new covenant engagement with creation in Gen 9, this divine

purpose begins with the calling of a people (who turn out to be the

manifold descendants of Abraham and Sarah) to be God’s instrument of

blessing for all creation and thus to reverse the curse brought on by

sin. The diverse traditions that comprise the remainder of the

Pentateuch then combine to portray the creation and formation of Israel

as a people prepared to be God’s instrument of restoration and blessing.

As the subsequent Old Testament books portray Israel’s life in the land

and journey into and out of exile, the reader encounters complex

perspectives on Israel’s attempts to understand who God is, who they are

as God’s people, and how, therefore, they ought to live out their

identity as God’s people within God’s mission in the world. The final

prophetic books that conclude the Protestant Old Testament ultimately

give the story of God’s mission and people an open-ended quality,

suggesting that God’s mission for God’s people continues and leading

Christian readers to consider the New Testament’s story of the Church as

an extension and expansion of the broader story of God introduced in

the Old Testament.

The main methodological perspective that informs the book includes work

on the phenomenological function of narrative (especially story’s

function to shape the identity and practice of the reader), as well as

more recent so-called “missional” approaches to reading Christian

scripture. Canonical criticism provides the primary means for relating

the distinctive voices within the Old Testament texts that still honor

the particularity and diversity of the discrete compositions.

Accessibly written, this book invites readers to enter imaginatively

into the biblical story and find the Old Testament's lively and

enduring implications.