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the end of the Late Bronze Age, by which time the Israelites would have left Egypt, coincides with the date of inscriptional evidence—a stele erected by Pharaoh Merneptah in ca. 1209 bce—for a people called “Israel” in the land of Canaan, the first mention of Israel outside the Bible.
Exodus is arguably the most important book in the Hebrew Bible. It contains an explanation of God’s name YHWH and also fundamental biblical ideas about God, especially that God responds to and saves people who are suffering or oppressed.
For both Jews and Christians, identification with the suffering in Egypt contributes to the moral imperative to alleviate the suffering of others.
2I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; 3you shall have no other gods beforea me. 4You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 5You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, 6but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generationb of those who love me and keep
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Leviticus is situated at the center of the Torah (Pentateuch). It derives its English name from the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, where the book is titled “Leviticus” because its main concern is worship practices officiated by the high priest Aaron and his descendants, who belong to the tribe of Levi. Because Levites not belonging to Aaron’s line are mentioned only briefly in Leviticus (25.32–33), the early rabbinic title, “The Priests’ Instruction” (Heb torat kohanim), is perhaps more fitting. The book’s Hebrew name, wayyiqra˒ (“And he [the Lord] summoned”),
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Though its content is primarily religious ritual and law, Leviticus is part of the larger Priestly story in the Pentateuch. This story rationalizes the deity’s creation of the world and subsequent decision to live among the Israelites rather than in heaven.
Set at Mount Sinai, Leviticus begins exactly one year after the Israelites’ departure from Egypt, immediately following Moses’s construction of the tent of meeting and its indwelling by the deity at the end of the book of Exodus (Ex 40.17–35), which serve as a prerequisite for the book.
Leviticus is difficult to understand and appreciate because it is highly technical and regularly assumes knowledge of its ritual system. Its sparse narrative structure is also easily obscured due to the large blocks of laws that comprise the book. In addition, its authors’ approaches to the issues they treat and their assumptions about them are often far removed from modern Western views.
The laws of Leviticus became a major source for early Jewish halakhah (law) and remain the basis for many modern Jewish religious practices, such as dietary rules, purity rules, and holidays. The laws of Leviticus also inform many New Testament and other early Christian texts.
All fat is the Lord’s.
“Numbers,” derives from the Vulgate (Numeri) and the Septuagint (Arithmoi); the title “In the wilderness” (Heb Bemidbar) comes from the Masoretic Text, where pentateuchal books are named after a significant initial word.
“Numbers” accentuates the two accounts of the census of the Israelite people, which divide the book between the first (chs 1–25) and second (chs 26–36) generation of Israelites to leave Egypt.
“In the wilderness” focuses on the theme of the journey from Mount Sinai to the Promised Land, which yields a three‐part structure to the book: Chapters 1.1–10.10 contain descriptions of the wilderness camp; chs 10.11–21.35 tell of the tragic wilderness journey of the first generation; and chs 22.1–36.13 describe the second generati...
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the introduction (1.1) of Numbers and its conclusion (36.13) link the Priestly legislation in Leviticus with the laws in Deuteronomy, helping to bring together the two law collections into a single Torah, even though each book contains distinct and even conflicting legislation on the sanctuary, the priesthood, and religious practice.
The central themes of the book of Numbers include the divine promises of nationhood and land; the holiness of God and its influence in ritual practice; the formation of covenant community along with its leadership and ethical requirements; and the wilderness journey as the intergenerational story of rebellion and hope in reaching the promised land.
Salt Sea refers to the Dead Sea; Great Sea is the Mediterranean Sea; Sea of Chinnereth is the Sea of Galilee
The standard English name of the book comes from the ancient Greek Septuagint (from deuteronomion, yielding Latin Deuteronomium), and means “Second Law.” That approach to naming the book represents the Greek translation of the Hebrew phrase Mishneh Torah found in Deuteronomy’s Law of the King, where it more properly means “a copy of the law” (see 17.18n.); indeed, the title Mishneh Torah is sometimes used for the book in rabbinic literature.
The name Deuteronomy reflects the early Jewish perspective that the book is Moses’s rehearsal of the Torah; according to Deuteronomy, Moses, shortly before he dies, revisits the earlier laws and narratives of the Tetrateuch (the first four books of the Bible) and teaches Israel about them.
The main Hebrew name of the book is Debarim (“words”), from the book’s opening, “These are the words” (1.1), following an ancient Near Eastern convention ...
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Deuteronomy directly addresses the problem of the distance between past and present, between tradition and the needs of the contemporary generation, between revelation and interpretation. In that way, it is a remarkably modern text that instructs its audience in how to become more thoughtful readers of scripture.
Deuteronomy presents itself as both an explication of the prior covenant (1.1–5) and as a supplement to it (29.1). Deuteronomy justifies itself in these two ways, yet neither description acknowledges the extent to which Deuteronomy actually challenges and revises earlier law in support of its new religious vision.
The laws deal with worship; the festival calendar; the major institutions of public life (justice, kingship, priesthood, prophecy); criminal, family, and civil law; and ethics. These laws are presented as the requirements of a covenant between God and the nation, which the people take an oath to uphold, upon penalty of sanctions, while maintaining unconditional loyalty to their God.
“Pseudepigraphy,” the convention of ascribing a text to an ancient personage, is particularly well known in the later literature of the Second Temple period; examples include Jubilees, 4 Ezra, the Testament of Abraham, and (among the Dead Sea Scrolls) the Temple Scroll.
Deuteronomistic History (the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings)
Deuteronomy challenges its readers actively to confront the problem of the relation between revelation and interpretation, and breaks down conventional boundaries between scripture and tradition.
The Christian bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, in the fourth century ce, first used the term “histories” for this section of the Bible, which comprises the books of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther. It is a misleading title, since these books include many genres and often are not historical in modern senses of the word; they recount a past, but do not necessarily recount the past accurately. Furthermore, the Bible contains several books that are similar to some of these “historical books,” yet they are found in different sections of the Bible.
In the traditional Jewish arrangement of the books of the Bible, the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings are called the Former Prophets, thus beginning the second major division of the Hebrew Bible, the Prophets, which follows the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. (This designation suggests that these books should be viewed as prophecy, and not as history.)
The books of Ruth, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, however, are found in the third, final, major division, the Writings.
The idea that historical writing should capture the events “as they really were,” that historians should attempt to write an objective account of the events of the past, is a notion that developed in European universities in modern times. Before that, history was typically didactic in nature, teaching readers how to be good citizens or how to lead proper religious lives.
The use of historical material in Psalms is even more instructive, since in them traditions about the past are typically found in a context that explicitly highlights their theological significance or purpose.
we must remember that the division of some biblical writings into separate books is just as arbitrary as the designation of a particular set of books as a single canonical unit, such as Historical Books.
The division of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles into two separate books each is not original and was first done in the Greek Bible (the Septuagint [LXX]) so that the books would be of more reasonable length.
In the formation of the canon, the books of Ezra and Nehemiah were originally considered a single work, and it is possible that the books of Joshua and Judges, which blend together well (see especially the overlapping Josh 24.29–31 and Judg 2.8–10), were also treated as a single work at an earlier period. Even the divisions between these larger works are not always certain; the first two chapters of Kings, for exam...
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it has been proposed that since the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, along with the preceding book of Deuteronomy, fit so well together, these five books were edited together as a single work. This work is typically called the Deuteronomistic History, meaning the history written under the influence of ideas found in the book of Deuteronomy.
Scholars have also found many similarities between Chronicles and Ezra‐Nehemiah and have posited that these works belong to a single large history that parallels the Deuteronomistic History. The author of these books is often called “the Chronicler.” A closer look at Chronicles and Ezra‐Nehemiah, however, shows that they differ from each other in outlook and vocabulary, and that the general similarities between them are best attributed not to common authorship but to the shared era in which they were written, most likely the fourth century bce.
retribution theory (a theory concerning divine punishment and reward),
The book of Ezra differs from these other Historical Books in its use of extensive quotations of official Persian documents (e.g., 7.12–26), which some scholars consider authentic. The book of Nehemiah lacks these documents but is unusual in its own way: It narrates history extensively from a first‐person perspective, as a type of memoir,
(Sections of Ezra 7–9 sometimes take the perspective of Ezra in the first person and are considered to be part of an “Ezra Memoir,” parallel to the “Nehemiah Memoir” noted earlier.)
In Num 13.16, Moses renames Hoshea (Heb hoshe˓a, “salvation”) Joshua (Heb yehoshu˓a, “the Lord is salvation/help”), adding the divine name Yahweh to his name.
The book of Joshua is the sixth book in both the Jewish and Christian canons, the first book of the Former Prophets or the first book of the so‐called Historical Books, respectively
The historiographic materials used in the book of Joshua correspond to those found in the ancient Near East as a whole.
Connections between the book of Joshua and the preceding books led many scholars, through the midtwentieth century, to posit a “Hexateuch” (six books), with the book of Joshua completing the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch—the Hexateuch having as its main theme the promise of the land and its eventual conquest. These scholars generally understood Joshua to be comprised of Pentateuchal sources: a prophetic historical narrative (JE) constituting most of (1–12); a priestly version (P), recounting the conquest and division of the land (13–22); and a group of Deuteronomistic additions
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From the period following the World War II, many scholars viewed Joshua as part of a large historical work, the Deuteronomistic History, extending from Deuteronomy through 2 Kings; this work is viewed as separate from the first four books (Genesis through Numbers), which were called the Tetrateuch (four books). This view downplayed connections with the Pentateuchal sources and stressed the book’s connections in vocabulary and theology with Deuteronomy and the following books of the Former Prophets.
More recently, a few scholars have treated Joshua as a middle book in a still larger composition from Genesis through 2 Kings (an Enneateuch, nine books). At the beginning of the twenty‐first century, an erosion of the Deuteronomistic History hypothesis has led some scholars to propose that Joshua was an independent book written during the postexilic period. While the final edition m...
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The book of Joshua describes a conquest of Canaan and its allotment to the Israelite tribes. Through well‐known traditional stories (e.g., Rahab and the scouts, the crossing of the Jordan River, the capture of Jericho) as well as nonnarrative lists and ritual texts, the book portrays the fulfillment of God’s covenantal promise to Israel’s ancestors that their descendants would possess the land. Moreover, these stories challenge the book’s readers to live in obedience to the Deuteronomic covenant so that they also will receive God’s blessings in the land.
A subset of these ritual concerns is the concept of the ḥerem, which plays a significant role in the book (see 5.13–6.27; 7.6–26; 8.1–29; 10.28–39). This noun is usually translated “devoted thing” (7.1) and the related verb “utterly destroy” (10.28). The term is used primarily in contexts of warfare and destruction where the “ḥerem” stories are connected with the notion of obedience or disobedience to the Lord (cf. Deut 7; 20). Its purpose was to “drive out” or “dispossess” the Canaanites in order to carry out divine judgment on them, to protect the Israelites from Canaanite religious
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This kind of warfare is part of the political ideology that Israel shared with other nations in the ancient Near East, in which wars were dedicated to the glorification of the deity and the extension of the deity’s land and reign. In fact, the word ḥerem occurs in other Semitic languages and cultures.
Understanding the ḥerem has posed a significant problem throughout the history of interpretation.
the book of Joshua plays an important role not only in the story of the early history of Israel in the land but also in the development of the theology of the Hebrew Bible. It serves as the prologue for the remainder of the Deuteronomistic Historians’ account, which focuses on Israel’s life in the land.
13I gave you a land on which you had not labored, and towns that you had not built, and you live in them; you eat the fruit of vineyards and oliveyards that you did not plant.
