Starting the Old Testament Books

Having finished my commentaries on the New Testament, the obvious next step was preparing my Old Testament material for publication. Granted, I haven’t yet written commentaries for all of it, yet. I’ve done the Major Prophets and am nearing the completion of the Minor Prophets via our weekly home worship and study.
I had begun working through Isaiah again as the next book, but something wasn’t right. I always pursue those uncomfortable feelings, because it typically reveals something God has to say. In this case, it now comes to me that I need to rewrite my earliest materials, begun shortly after leaving the military in 1993. My first home computer was used primarily to write a Bible History study.
I revised and taught this material when serving at Grace Baptist Church, rural Madison County, TX. That was ten years ago.
It would seem the logic is this: In order to make sense of the Old Testament books, I need to establish first for my readers a rough chronology, something the Hebrew people would have taken for granted. They didn’t know it as we know such things, but they were fully aware of a lot of background we can scarcely recover these days. Too much of what floats around these days purporting to be a record of that background is untrustworthy. The purpose behind the modern collection is not necessarily the same as that for the Old Testament itself.
It leaves us with trying to bridge the gap between the ancient Hebrew cultural and literary context and the modern assumptions about reality. Here is the rewritten introduction to my Summary of Old Testament History —
The primary purpose for the Old Testament as it now exists is revealing why we have Christ. There is no pretense of answering all the questions of any particular age, much less ours today. Rather, we are required to examine the claims on their own terms. This requires we enter another realm; indeed, the Bible assumes the reader has already been drawn into that world and needs to understand what is required to live there. Only by accident does the Bible offer any sort of apologetic to those outside that realm. It isn’t supposed to make much sense unless you are driven to obey what you find before you find it. It is already difficult enough to understand for those so driven. This study offers no grand scholarly defense of anything, but pretends to open doors for those who struggle to make sense of something they already know they need.
The Bible must be read from its own context, which is the ancient Hebrew culture of the Nation of Israel, while under the Covenant of Moses. In Hebrew literature, context is everything. The writers of each portion assume a certain amount of common knowledge among the readers. From where we stand today, we find ourselves too often at a loss to understand the importance of what is written because we lack that context. Reconstructions are often a matter of on going debate. We would be fools to demand and expect all details be resolved to our Western cultural standards. Instead, we walk in faith, trusting God for two things in particular. First, that God has preserved the text with sufficient fidelity to the originals that we can bow the knee to what the Bible demands of us as if it were God’s own words. Second, we trust He has preserved sufficient knowledge of how to read that text so we can obey Him according to His satisfaction.
The study aims to provide a rough outline of Old Testament chronology. While dates are offered in the typical Western notation, no one should assume these dates are certain. We should acknowledge there is plenty of sincere debate, that part of it rests on the very questionable assumptions of dating the history of other nations, Egypt in particular. Modern Western dating of Egyptian chronology is frankly a house of cards, so the best we have is a working estimate of dates. What matters far more is the apparent order of events and less the numerical dates. This study builds on certain assumptions merely for the sake of convenience. If the Hebrew authors didn’t bother to nail it down so precisely, it must not have been too important.
The starting point is a desire to know what God demands of us. He preserved a portion of writings from the people He called to bring His revelation to the world. It is utterly impossible to extract from the Scripture narrative all the details that would satisfy our curiosity. The is the story of redemption, not the story of humanity from any presumed objective point of view. Beware the tendency to think we have the whole story. What we have is what matters for the sake of our obedience to God. A primary difference between our context today and that of the ancient Hebrew people is the very fundamental assumptions about reality itself, the intellectual frame of reference regarding what matters in the first place. We seek in this study to bridge the gap between those two contexts.