Old Testament Theology Quotes

“The other approach, probably more widely appealing in contemporary Western culture, is so to fix on the painful circumstances of life that one gives up on faith. The harsh realities of life show that Christian (or other) faith in God is no longer tenable. It might have been once, when one was a child, perhaps in Sunday school. But when one grows up and acquires scientific understanding of how the world works, together with an awareness of increasingly uncertain general prospects—global warming, continuing wars, terrorism, famines, growing disparities between rich and poor, transience of romantic relationships, familial instabilities, social anomie, disillusionment with grand claims about the world, or just existential moments of “Why?” when confronted by needless and innocent suffering—then it becomes clear that “Our God reigns” is empty language that trivializes the realities of the world.”
― R.W.L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“How should this psalm be understood? My thesis is that the parts make sense in relation to the whole: so unless the whole is kept in view, the parts will be misunderstood. The psalm differs from regular laments in that it is explicitly designed not only to pose a problem that is both theological and existential but also to leave it without resolution.”
― R.W.L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“Nonetheless, Augustine and Pusey are surely clear examples of fighting one’s battle on the wrong ground. They assume that if unbelievers mock and question God’s ability to do the marvelous, then the appropriate response must be to affirm God’s ability to do the marvelous and encourage a stance of reverence. Both elements of the response are indeed appropriate to believers—but this is surely not the place to invoke them. To put it in other terms, one must first consider the genre of Jonah and the literary conventions that it utilizes, and then consider how best to promote a right appreciation and understanding of the book,7 rather than meet flatfooted mockery with equally flatfooted piety.”
― R.W.L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“Love for God enables, and indeed is expressed in, love for others. The classic understanding of love for God is that it is something that will purify all other loves and order them aright, so that they can be what they should be, and be less likely to become unhealthy or”
― R.W.L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“If the paradox is to be pondered, as part of growing in understanding the nature of the life of faith, then there are surely implications for the kind of qualities, communal and individual, that believers should over time acquire: such qualities as to dig deeper in trust, be less glib in speech and prayer, to look beyond the immediate to the long term, and to offer more support to those currently in pain and perplexity. For when the psalms are contextualized in prayer and worship, their language is not only expressive but also transformative, able to make a difference to those who use these ancient and enduring words.”
― R.W.L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“The problem is not the conflict of opposites in itself, but rather a probing of surprising and difficult dimensions of what is entailed by trust in God. The paradox is also apparent when the psalms are recontextualized within Jewish and Christian faiths, where there is a deeper understanding of the role of persecution, perplexity, and suffering within the mysterious purposes of God—purposes that are focused for the Christian in the person of Jesus at Gethsemane, Calvary, and the Easter tomb.”
― R.W.L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“What has preceded in verses 1–37 is designed not to mitigate the harsh circumstances of verses 38–45 but to be a foil to them. In other words, neither commentator allows that the inconsistency with what has preceded may be precisely the point. The hermeneutical move of downplaying verse 39 is akin to the move of downplaying the protestation of faithfulness in Psalm 44:17–22: it has the same effect of deflecting the real concern of the psalms—that the expectations of faith go one way, but experiences in life may go the opposite way.”
― R.W.L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“Finally, the book of Jonah shows how theological understanding is exemplified in a person’s attitudes and actions: what Jonah does flows from his understanding of YHWH. The more deficient the understanding, the more questionable the actions. So when the task of educating Jonah is extended to educating believers today, it is important not to intellectualize the problems of understanding in an abstract way. As Colin Gunton puts it: “Theology is a practical, not a merely theoretical discipline: it aims at wisdom, in the broad sense of light for the human path. Our theological enterprises must therefore be judged at least in part by their fruit.”60 Good pedagogy sees learning and life as belonging together.”
― R.W.L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“If the reader’s imagination is concerned with what happened next to Jonah rather than with the nature of the divine compassion, then the reader has failed to get the point.”
― R.W.L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“Similarly, those who have been weaned off the self-aggrandizing attractions of political power are those who can then best be entrusted with it.”
― R.W.L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“In summary, the passages considered depict an understanding of exaltation as a characteristic of the one God, which may also become a characteristic of humans who are open to God through humility of spirit and who embrace the way of YHWH through living with integrity (practicing “justice and righteousness” [33:5–6]). But the humans who try to exalt themselves on their own terms (money, power, oppression of others) thereby encounter the opposition of YHWH and will, sooner or later, be abased by him.”
― R.W.L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“The depiction of terrible overthrow may well be, at least in part, a figure for Assyrian and/or Babylonian depredations on Israel and/or Judah, understood as divine judgment, in a proximate historical context; but there is nothing in the imagery to indicate that it should be read primarily with reference to any one historical event. The whole vision of YHWH’s day and its consequences appears to be eschatological in the same way as the vision of exalted Mount Zion—an ultimate reality that should bear upon vision and action in the present, to realign priorities and allegiance.”
― R.W.L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“There is also a context constituted by the formation of the literature into a larger whole, a context that is literary and/or canonical: “The problem is that by making historical context sovereign and regulative, historical criticism destroys the literary context that is the Bible (either Jewish or Christian) as a whole and often even the smaller literary context that is the book, the chapter, or whatever.”
― R.W.L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“On the other hand, there is apocalyptic literature, which appears to be continuous with classical prophecy yet to be a particular outgrowth of it. One of the ways in which apocalyptic literature is most often distinguished from prophecy is in the more fixed and less contingent vision of the future that it envisages. Within apocalyptic literature there are sometimes distinctive portrayals of the future, whose purpose appears to be to show how a particular momentous situation, that of which the prediction speaks, fits within a larger providential scheme of God’s dealings with His people. The key point is that the life-context of the apocalyptic writer is apparently the time and context of the momentous situation envisaged in the prediction and not the situation some time in the past (from the writer’s perspective) in which the making of the prediction is set. In other words, the prediction looks to be a literary trope, an imaginative means of depicting divine sovereignty.”
― R.W.L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“Prophetic speech is predictive, but it is predictive in relation to the near future, to the circumstances that impinge on the lives of the prophet’s contemporaries. On such an understanding, the notion that Isaiah should be predicting events to do with Jesus, events that lie centuries in the future, becomes difficult—not that it is inconceivable, but that it is out of place.”
― R.W.L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“The potential difficulty posed by Jeremiah 18:7–10 arises, I suggest, for two reasons. On the one hand, the text is making a point about divine responsiveness in a way that, characteristic of Hebrew idiom, is generalizing—and a generalization may permit exceptions and qualifications. It is only if the generalization is read as a universal claim that a problem arises. On the other hand, the Hebrew language is notoriously short of modal forms in its verbs: may, might, should, would, and so forth. One always has to infer the correct nuance from the context (and the context may not always enable one to be precise).35 It would not be strained to render the verb depicting God’s response in 18:8, 10 as “I may relent/retract.”
― R.W.L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“In this chapter I want to consider a concept, or rather two closely related concepts, where greater-than-usual puzzlement has often been the response of many readers of Israel’s scriptures. I will argue, via some extensive discussion of how best to read the primary passages in which the concepts appear, that what is at stake is the intrinsically difficult matter of articulating the nature and logic of love.”
― R.W.L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“Any particular term—myth, legend, saga, folktale, and so forth—tends to be used in so many differing ways by different people that without careful definition it will probably mislead as much as illuminate.”
― R.W.L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“they play no further role in the story; indeed, any further provision of quails would diminish the importance and significance attached to the bread.11 Within the story, therefore, the quails are presumably to be imagined as a one-off gift,12 unlike the recurrent daily bread. It”
― R.W.L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“So despite Humphreys’s rhetoric about scholarly misinterpretation and the “inspirational” potential of his interpretation, I think it is in fact hard to improve upon the century-old sobriety of S. R. Driver: “It is evident that the Biblical manna, while on the one hand (like the Plagues) it has definite points of contact with a natural phaenomenon or product of the country, differs from the natural manna [meaning the juice exuded from a particular species of tamarisk] in the many praeternatural or miraculous features attributed to it.”
― R. W. L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“On the one hand, we have seen that the particularizing logic of election is an expression of the particularizing logic of love. When there is a dynamic that elicits a wondering sense of “Why us/me?” we can see more clearly the relational nature of call and response that characterizes Israel’s election.”
― R. W. L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“If the (apparently) ancient practice of ḥērem is promoted when it is not feasible in military terms, then this is a good reason for supposing that it should be feasible in other terms.”
― R. W. L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“My positive interpretive thesis is thus straightforward. In response to the puzzle as to why Deuteronomy should promote and prioritize ḥērem if it “was never in effect,” I am arguing that to speak of its being “never in effect” misrepresents the issue. It is not that Deuteronomic ḥērem was not envisaged as an actual practice, but rather that the nature of the practice the text envisages is no longer military: ḥērem could be practiced, yet in ways other than on the battlefield.”
― R. W. L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“There is also one obvious contextual issue for the translation of the verbal form of ḥērem. If the seven nations are to be “destroyed” (v. 2), why should intermarriage need to be prohibited (vv. 3–4)? Since, to put it bluntly, corpses present no temptation to intermarriage, the text surely envisages the continuance of living non-Israelites in close proximity to Israel.61 In the light of this, I propose a reading of Deuteronomy 7:1–5 in which the text is construed as a definitional exposition of ḥērem as an enduring practice for Israel. The basic idea that something that is designated ḥērem is thereby absolutely removed from all use is here given a specific focus. Thus when Israel comes into contact with the seven nations in the promised land and YHWH enables Israel to overcome them, then the requirement is that Israel should practice ḥērem with regard to them (7:1–2a). This means refusing normal practices of treaty making or being moved to pity for the vanquished (7:2b).”
― R. W. L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“such a translation may beg the interpretive question. Deuteronomy has two other verbs to express a straightforward sense of “destroy.”57 Moreover, the conceptuality of ḥērem is on any reckoning more complex than “destroy,” even if in certain contexts destruction might be entailed. It appears that the prime sense is a matter of making something the exclusive possession of YHWH and thereby removing it from the sphere of regular human use. Even though this could entail destruction, it is important to realize that “‘destruction’ is a secondary implication of ḥērem and not its primary meaning.”58 There is thus a case for translating the verbal form with “put under the ban,” or simply “ban,” not least because such a translation has the merit of being somewhat opaque and thus prevents the contemporary reader from too readily assuming that the meaning of the word is understood.”
― R. W. L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“In any case, whatever the pedigree, the concern has become widespread that a classic biblically-rooted belief in a single deity who chooses particular people is problematic because it entails attitudes of exclusiveness and/or practices of violence toward those identified as “other.”
― R. W. L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“What, now, of those not elected? Those not elected cannot be expected not to be hurt by not being of the seed of Abraham, whom God loves above all others. The Bible clearly depicts the suffering of Esau. . . . And yet, in recounting the blessing of Jacob and the exclusion of Esau, no careful reader can fail to notice that the sympathy shown Esau is greater than that for Jacob. God shows Esau compassion even if Jacob does not. The consolation of the gentiles is the knowledge that God also stands in relationship with them in the recognition and affirmation of their uniqueness. . . . The mystery of Israel’s election thus turns out to be the guarantee of the fatherhood of God toward all peoples, elect and nonelect, Jew and gentile.34”
― R. W. L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“Clearly, there is real force in this kind of objection to divine election. If there are the chosen, then there are also, in some sense, the unchosen. And if one ceases to assume, or at least hopefully expect, that one is among the chosen, but rather adopts, even if only in imagination, the position of the unchosen,29 then the possible objections to divine election can be numerous.”
― R. W. L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

“The recognition that idolatry really consists in making gods for ourselves and putting our trust in them is the great breakthrough in Israel’s thinking about the matter, and I have suggested that it may be to Isaiah that we owe it. From Isaiah onwards the conviction grew that there simply were no other powers in the universe to rival Yahweh, the God of Israel, and that . . . however much worshippers might bow down to the idol and acknowledge it as a great power, it was really themselves they were worshipping all the time.73”
― R. W. L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture