Status Updates From The Old Testament and God (...

Book is excellent so far. Bartholomew deals with many questions works on the OT often do not deal with.

It is constitutive of human sinfulness to turn the witness to God through the scriptures into a manageable object and thus fail to reckon with rev elation as a means of encountering the living God on his own terms. (Brevard Childs)

YHWH not only acts in history but simultaneously explains his acts and his character. He reveals himself and thus offers himself to his people...in both deed and word. (476)

In Scripture God is truly rendered to us narratively and creedally: in the narratives of his actions and in the creed-like summaries of those actions. (405)

The patriarchs encountered God as living, and certainly the confrontation with Pharaoh, the exodus and the Sinai event, as well as the fact that God dwelt among his people in the tabernacle, would all have left the Israelites in no doubt whatsoever that YHWH is the living God. (400)

Spinoza moved away from a world view grounded in the Mosaic distinction to one comparable to those of the ANE nations...in which the divine and the world are all part of the same thing. If nothing else, this should alert us to the fact that the emergence of historical criticism cannot be seen simply as the triumph of neutral objective science. (372)

Just as the early Church had to draw on its surrounding culture and intellectual developments in order to craft its world view, so too Israel drew on her environment as she crafted hers. (367)

Bartholomew's survey of the Egyptian and Sumerian "world view" is incredible. Now onto the Hittite world view.

YHWH's election of Israel was neither because of her merits—"This explains why Israel is portrayed in the Bible in such stupendously unflattering ways" (Spina, 2005:5)—nor for her only; the OT is clear that Israel's election is God's mechanism for including all nations as part of his people. (206)

In Israel...kingship is awash with suspicion, and (uniquely in the ANE) YHWH, and not the king, is the lawgiver par excellence. (202)

We need to reinject the OT into our doctrine of God, and we need models of God and divine action to inform our reading of the OT. (195)

It is important to note that rarely does the OT offer us truth in a propositional form; instead, it tells stories and provides us with other genres of literature. (181)

As the reader engages with an OT text/s, a world is opened up in front of the text which the reader is invited to indwell and to explore. It is this world that is potentially transformative and it is this world which needs to be analysed in terms of the historical ways in which the text refers to the world. (145)