Teaching notes by John Stevenson

These class notes are for Old Testament Survey at Boca Seminary / Praxis Institute.

The basis of all of the teaching of Jesus, Paul and all of the other apostles was the Old Testament Scriptures.

The reason that a great deal of the church is immature today in its development is because of a weak understanding of the Old Testament. By ignoring the Old Testament, people have sought to build their theology on an inadequate foundation.

If the truth be known, most of us are much better acquainted with the New Testament than we are with the Old Testament. For one thing, the New Testament is a lot smaller than the Old Testament. If you open your Bible to Matthew 1 and look to see what is left (not counting any index or maps), then you will quickly see that the majority of the Bible is within the Old Testament.

But is it necessary? Couldn't we get along quite nicely if we all merely hold to the New Testament? I want to suggest several reasons why a study of the Old Testament is important:

1. The Old Testament is Foundational.

Want to know where it all started? You have to go to the Old Testament. Doctrines such as sin and salvation, man and his mandates, the kingdom and the Christ all find their foundational teachings in the Old Testament.

The writers of the New Testament constantly assumed that their readers were familiar with the Old Testament. So often a person begins to read the Bible for himself and where does he begin? The book of Revelation! He is immediately set upon with images and symbols of all sorts of things. Lions and lambs and witnesses and seals and trumpets and altars and beasts abound. Every single one of these images finds its origin in the Old Testament. It is assumed that the reader has this key to unlock the meaning of these symbols. Without that key, the book of Revelation isn't a revelation at all.

2. The Old Testament is Practical.

• God has not changed. He is still the same God yesterday and today and forever (Hebrews 13:8).
• People have not changed. We go through the same sorts of struggles and temptations and doubts and fears that they faced in the Old Testament.
• Truth has not changed. The things that applied in that day still apply today.

1. The Old Testament Presents Christ.

• Not some of the prophets.
• Not a couple of verses here or there.
• ALL of the prophets.

1. The Old Testament was Written for Us.

• The God who creates light and darkness is the same God who brought darkness over Egypt during the plagues.
• The God who separates the waters from the waters on the second day of creation is the same God who separated the waters from the Red Sea to deliver the Israelites from Pharaoh.
• The God who created the sun and the moon and the stars is the Creator of those things that were worshiped back in Egypt.
• While back in Egypt the various gods were worshiped in the form of all sorts of beasts and birds and creeping things, it is the God of Creation who first brought all of these into being.
• It is not only the Pharaoh of Egypt, but all men who are made in the image of God and this extends to both male and female.

The Greek architects had an instrument that they used to measure various distances as they were designing and constructing a building. It was a straight rod with marks set into its side, much like our modern rulers.

• It had to be unbendable.
• It had to be dependable as to its straightness.

This same word came to be used by Christians to describe those books which set the rule and standard of faith.

When we talk about canonizing someone, we speak of recognizing their authority. The Roman Church uses this term to confer sainthood. When the church speaks of "canon law" it refers to the infallible criteria by how things are to be measured.

When we speak of the Canon of Scripture, we are speaking of that collection of writings which constitute the authoritative and final norm or standard of faith and practice.

This means that we think of the Word of God as the measuring stick for our beliefs and for our lives. We use it to check our doctrine and our daily lifestyle.

Canonicity is the process by which the books of the Bible were gathered and collected so that they came to be regarded as the standard and norm for Christians. This means that canonicity refers to the church's recognition of the authority of the inspired writings.

Don't miss this! Canonicity does not MAKE a book into the word of God. Rather, canonicity is the process of RECOGNIZING that a book is the word of God.

The Old Testament which we have is made up of 39 books. The Hebrews numbered these as only 22 books -- they counted all of the Minor Prophets as a single book and, where we have 1^st Samuel and 2^nd Samuel and others like this, they counted each of these as a single book. These 22 books were divided in the Hebrew Bible into three groups:

Jesus made reference to this same threefold division of the Old Testament in Luke 24:44 when he said, "Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms." Because the Psalms were the first book of the Writings, they were used as a title for the entire collection.

We Christians hold to the same books that are found within the Hebrew Bible, but we have traditionally placed them into a different order.

1. The Pentateuch (same as the Hebrew Torah).
2. The Historical Books: Joshua - Esther.
3. The Poetical Books: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon.
4. The Prophetic Book (Major and Minor Prophets).

It should be noted that there is a similarity of this arrangement to the New Testament:

After all of the books which make up our Old Testament had been written, a second collection of books began to emerge. It became known as the "Apocrypha," meaning "hidden away." The books of the Apocrypha were never accepted by the Jews as having been a part of their Scriptures.

Josephus, the Jewish general-turned scholar, wrote a rebuttal to anti-Jewish propaganda in the latter part of the first century. In this writing, Josephus describes the Hebrew canon of scripture that was recognized by the Jews.

The same 39 books that we have in our Bible were condensed into the 22 books of the Hebrew Bible. For example, they had a single book of Samuel and of Kings and of Chronicles. The Minor Prophets were grouped together into a single book called the Twelve.

Notice that even in that day Josephus recognized that the various books of the Bible did not contradict each other. He goes on to group the books of the Scriptures into the three common divisions which we have described.

Josephus puts the number of books in the Hebrew Bible at 22 and divides them into the following categories:

(a) Moses (Torah).

(b) The Prophets (Nevi'im).

(c) Hymns & Precepts (Ketuvim).

The words of Josephus are important because they give us a point of view that is unbiased by Christianity. Specifically, he says that the Apocrypha did not have the same recognized authority because "there has not been an exact succession of prophets" since the time that the writing of the Scriptures ended.

According to Josephus, the test of authority for the Scriptures was that they were written by one who was recognized as a prophet. Who did the recognizing? The previous prophets!

But then, a day came when the last of the prophets had spoken. It was the prophet Malachi. He foretold that the Lord would come and that just prior to His coming He would be announced by Elijah. But that is not all. Notice what he has to say about the Apocrypha.

Josephus tells us that the Jews rejected the Apocrypha because it had not been penned by a prophet and because there had been no line of prophets who spoke and who wrote the words of God.

Since inspiration, by its very definition, extends only to the original manuscripts of the Bible, and since none of the original manuscripts are in existence today, how can we rely on the accuracy of our modern Hebrew Old Testament? The answer to this question is found in the science of Textual Criticism.

Textual criticism is scholarly work with available manuscripts aimed at the recovery within the limits of possibility of the original text. We do not have the original papyri that Moses used to write the Torah. All we have are copies of copies of copies, etc. Textual criticism involves carefully examining those copies to find out what is the original text.

This has been a very difficult study with regards to the Old Testament. The areas of study fall into four major categories:

1. The Masoretic Texts.

(1) The Eastern Masoretes were located in Mesopotamia.

(2) The Western Masoretes began in Tiberias.

2. The Septuagint Family.

3. The Samaritan Pentateuch.

4. Dead Sea Scrolls.

From the very beginning the Christian church has believed the Scriptures to be true. Both Protestants and the Roman Catholic Church were unified in holding to this position. It was not until the Enlightenment - the modern rationalistic movement beginning in the 1780's that this began to change.

1. Jean Astruc.

2. Geddes (1800).

3. Heinrich Ewald (1830).

4. Karl H. Graf.

5. Julius Wellhausen (1878).

• The earliest parts of the Pentateuch came from the J Document (850 B.C.) and the E Document (750 B.C.).
• Deuteronomy was written in Josiah's day and incorporated into the J Document.
• The priestly legislation in the E Document was the work of Ezra and is referred to as the P Document.
• A later editor brought together all of the conglomeration of documents by about 200 B.C. to form the Pentateuch which we have today.

6. Variation of Divine Names.

7. The Question of Writing.

8. Reasons for rejecting the JEDP Documentary Hypothesis.

1. The New Testament attributes the various portions of the Pentateuch to Moses without regard to the various names that are used.
2. The actual books of the Pentateuch often contain large paralleled outlines and chiasms that only fit if they are a unified whole rather than a conglomeration of isolated parts. For example, the entire life of Abraham is presented in a chiastic format showing that it is a unified whole.
3. Parallelism and repetition were a regular part of the writing style of the culture of the middle east.
4. There is a complete lack of any objective evidence for the existence of any of the supposed source documents.

 The world of the Old Testament is the world of the Fertile Crescent. This area of relative fertility extends in a giant arc from the Persian Gulf to the Nile River. Joining these two great river valleys is a narrow land bridge known alternately as Palestine, Israel or Canaan. This land bridge effectively joins three continents together. It is not without reason that the Israelites considered the land of Israel to be at the center of the world.

Two of the world's earliest centers of civilization grew up on either side of this land bridge.

• Mesopotamia: The name comes from the later Greek and means "land between the two rivers." It was known to the Jews as Aram Nahara'im -- "Aram of the two rivers."

• Egypt

Very early in the history of Mesopotamia we see the construction of ziggurats -- large temple towers that are built at the center of each metropolis. These were places of worship and usually contained various sorts of astrological symbols.

By contrast, Egypt was known for its pyramids. Although the shape of the ziggurat and the pyramid are somewhat similar, they represent two greatly diverse ideas.

The origin of the ziggurat is commonly thought to be reflected in the account of the Tower of Babel where men determined to build a tower to the heavens.

The land of Canaan acts as a narrow land-bridge between Mesopotamia and the continent of Africa. This is a relatively small area of land, no larger in area than Lake Erie or the state of Maryland. The name Palestine takes its name from the ancient name Peleset, meaning "land of the Philistines."

1. The Topography of Canaan.

2. Valleys and Rivers of Canaan.

• The Jezreel Valley is the one major break in the Central Mountain Range as it moves from Lebanon to the Negev, the desert in the south. This wide valley provides some of the richest farming lands in all of Canaan.

• The Yarmuk River is the northernmost of these rivers. It serves today as the boundary between the modern countries of Syria and Jordan. In Old Testament times it was the boundary between Bashan to the north and Gilead to the south.
• The Jabbok River

• The Arnon River

3. The Climate of Canaan.

4. Major Routes of Travel.

• The King's Highway came south from Damascus and ran along the eastern bank of the Jordan River and made its way south all the way to the Gulf of Aqaba. Because of the difficulty of traversing some of the deeper river canyons, it followed a path about 25 miles to the east of the Jordan River.
• The Way of the Sea (also known as the Way of the Philistines) cut through Galilee, passing by the ancient city of Megiddo and then along the Mediterranean as it made its way to Egypt. This pass became renown for the many battles that have been fought here and gives rise to the symbolism of the book of Revelation that speaks of the final conflict between good and evil.
• There was also a route that forded the Jordan River near Jericho and which ran across the central mountain range to link up to the Way of the Philistines. This would be the route that the Israelites would take to enter the land in the days of Joshua.

• The Southern Kingdom of Judah
• The Northern Kingdom of Israel (also known as Ephraim)

1. Assyria and the Fall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel.

The Northern Kingdom of Israel fell to the Assyrians in 721 B.C. Most of the inhabitants of the land were taken away into captivity and resettled east of Mesopotamia. Other conquered peoples were resettled in the land that had been vacated and these peoples intermarried with the surviving Israelites of the land. It is from these descendants that we have the Samaritans of New Testament times.

2. Judah and Babylon.

The Southern Kingdom of Judah fell to the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar. He brought about three successive deportations, at the end of which Jerusalem was destroyed and the Temple was burned to the ground in 586 B.C.

3. The Babylonian Captivity.

While Jeremiah and Ezekiel relate the successive deportations and the events that were taking place in Judah, the book of Daniel tells us of events that took place in Babylon during the captivity.

4. Post Exilic Israel.