The Old Testament and the Hebrew
language have survived for over three thousand years. Scholars have changed
their approach to both the Bible and the Hebrew language during that time. Old
Jewish and Christian scholars saw the Bible in the same terms as Paul the
apostle; ‘
All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof,
for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be
perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.’[i] This
was holy language and came from God therefore it was indisputable. They
believed that this was the first language and was first given by God to Adam.
When all the people spoke in one language they spoke in Biblical Hebrew. This
fact was based on the claim that Gen 2: 23 only made sense in Hebrew and not
any other language. The word for man is ‘ish’ and the word for woman is ‘ishah’.
This means that the world must have been created in Hebrew and the record of
this came from God[ii].
‘In the age of rationalism, Hebrew was able to free itself
from the reverential epithets it had accrued over centuries and was viewed
instead as simply another of the languages or dialects spoken in the extreme
southeast of Asia, known from the eighteenth century onwards as the “Semitic”
languages…’[iii].
This rationalism also applied to the study of the Old
Testament. It was now seen as just another piece of ancient literature to be
studied as one would study any other ancient literature. The reason for this
was found in the deistic movement that began in the Age of Enlightenment when
the absolute authority of the Catholic Church was challenged. ‘Deism is a
knowledge of God based on the application of our reason on the designs/laws
found throughout nature. The designs presuppose a Designer. Deism is therefore
a natural religion and is not a “revealed religion”’[iv].
After the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment scholars
began to look at the Bible in different ways. They no longer accepted the words
as they were written as pure history and various forms of Higher Criticism
began. Higher criticism differs from lower criticism in that lower criticism
seeks to discover what the text says while higher criticism applies the
interrogatives (How? Why? Where? What? When?) to the ideas behind the Bible
text and seeks to answer these questions before we move on to lower
criticism. Biblical criticism is a term
that covers all the ways in which the liberal Christian denominations to study
the meaning of Biblical passages. This assumes that the literature should be
considered using general historical principles that are based on reason rather
than a belief in the sacred revelation. These types of criticism are divided
into various categories. Form criticism looks at the documents according to the
form of the literature, that is, history, poetry, prophecy, etc. The main aim
is to find out the original oral traditions on which the written documents were
based. The simple meaning of the written words is no longer acceptable but
there is evidence behind these words to determine what the real history was.
Tradition criticism looks at the religious traditions that have found their way
into the bible and then seeks to find out the original stories that led to
these written traditions.[v]
The next type of criticism was
called redaction criticism. This is based on the theory that the Bible was
copied and recopied many times over many years. From time to time various
commentators added their own words to the original words in order to explain
them more clearly. Because the earlier copyists and commentators were not
deistic, they were inclined to add to the original text to make it look more
like truly inspired, miraculous literature that had originally come from God.
At first this type of criticism was restricted to the gospels but later it was
applied to the rest of the Bible. According to this theory the Old Testament
redactors modified the prophecies so that later generations would be more
likely to believe in an Almighty God, for if there were no miracles then there
would be nothing worth believing. Hermann Reimarus first developed this kind of
criticism, a professor of Oriental languages in Hamburg in the early 1700s; he
wrote extensively against Christianity.
[vi]
Another kind of criticism is called
literary criticism. Literary criticism looks at the layers of literature in a
document and then attempts to disentangle these layers and find out the authors
purpose when he set out to write the literature. We assume that the last author
was the last in a line of redactors who each had various motives for adapting
the text. If a story occurs twice then there must be reasons for the double
occurrence. Often the redactors place comments within the text to explain what
is happening. From time to time the style of the text appears to change and
this must be explained. By looking at all these kinds of clues the critic can
discover the truth behind what we find written in the Biblical text as we find
it today.
[vii]
During much of the twentieth
century, thinking was governed by the concept of modernity. This grew out of
the Age of Enlightenment and basically states that the present is discontinuous
with the past. This is a worldview that conflicts with the ideas that tradition
is important in our lives and we can use experience in the past to base our
plans for approaching the future
[viii].
During the twentieth century the pace of change became extreme and it was
difficult to face these changes with traditional methods. Not only this, the
alternatives we face have multiplied at a fast rate, so much so, that it is
often too hard to consider all the alternatives in the traditional ways. This
means that the world is becoming increasingly abstract as former social
groupings have become obsolete with the changing conditions of the modern world,
for example, increasing urbanisation. This approach has impacted seriously on
Biblical studies. ‘Simply put the Bible of earlier centuries is no longer
accessible. Our understanding of the natural world, historical time and the
human psyche precludes the possibility of finding meaning in scripture’s
“simple sense”. The rise of modern anthropology and its investigation of the
literary and oral canons of non-Western cultures and traditions have further
demolished the potential for “The Bible” to be, as its etymology would have it.
The Book. The Bible is, in short, no longer “scripture” on object of veneration
regarded as foundational to religious tradition and human life.
‘The loss of the Bible’s scriptural
status is not merely a by-product of modernization. The project of modernity
depends on discrediting, or at least dislodging, scriptural authority. Clerical
or political authority in pre-modern Europe was based on the claim to exclusive
power of interpreting scripture in such a way as to legitimize the authority of
its interpreters.’
[ix]
Thus modernity has impacted Biblical interpretation in a profound way. No
longer does the Bible belong to the realm of the ‘expert’ but anyone can
approach it with his or her own motives.
However modernism has been replaced
by postmodernism Post modernism has been defined as follows: ‘
In
a general sense, postmodernism is to be regarded as a rejection of many, if not
most, of the cultural certainties on which life in the West has been structured
over the past couple of centuries. It has called into question our commitment
to cultural “progress” (that national economies must continue to grow, that the
quality of life must keep improving indefinitely, etc.), as well as the
political systems that have underpinned this belief.’[x]
This definition would have us believe that there is no difference between
modernity and postmodernism. However postmodernists are far more sceptical than
modernists. Nothing is sacred for the postmodernist and everything is seen in
terms of how what my opinion is on any topic. This approach is vigorously
applied to any form of Biblical interpretation. The postmodernist says that no
one actually knows what the Bible means so it is up to me to interpret the
Bible in my own way to suit my own context.
The following
exchange was taken from an interview between Christopher Hitchens, an atheist,
and Marilyn Sewell, a self described liberal Christian and retired pastor of
the First Unitarian Church of Portland
‘Marilyn Sewell: The religion you cite in your book is generally the fundamentalist
faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the
stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of
atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example). Do you make and
distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?
‘Hitchens: I would say that if you don’t believe
that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from
the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful
sense a Christian.
…
‘Marilyn Sewell: Times change and, you know, people’s beliefs change. I don’t
believe that you have to be fundamentalist and literalist to be a Christian.
You do: You’re something of a fundamentalist, actually
‘Hitchens: Well, I’m sorry, fundamentalist simply
means those who think that the Bible is a serious book and should be taken
seriously.
‘Marilyn Sewell: I take it very seriously. I have my grandmother’s Bible and I still
read it, but I don’t take it as literal truth. I take it as metaphorical truth.
The stories, the narrative, are what’s important.[xi]’
The Danish historian Christian
Jürgensen Thomsen, in 1836, first proposed that European prehistory could be
divided into various periods. This, along with the developments in geology,
which showed that the earth was billions of years old, is believed to the
beginning of modern archaeology. After this archaeologists began to study
ancient Mediterranean civilization and Mayan civilization in Central America.
In the 1880 Flinders Petrie travelled to Egypt to study civilization there.[xii]
Sir Austen Henry Layard
discovered the remains of ancient Nineveh in 1845[xiii].
Darius the Great placed an inscription on a cliff about 100 m above the ground
near a village called Behistun, on a road joining Babylon to Ecbatana, the
capital of Media, to let the world know all about his great military exploits.
This inscription was written in three different cuneiform scripts, Old Persian,
Elamite and Babylonian[xiv].
Because Babylonian is a Semitic language the other languages could be
deciphered. Between 1833 and 1839 Henry Rawlinson was stationed in Persia and
he translated the Behistun inscription and hence was able to decipher ancient
cuneiform scripts[xv].
The Rosetta Stone was found in 1799 and was also written in three scripts. This
stone had hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek scripts and was the basis for
interpreting ancient Egyptian writing but the task was not completed till 1822[xvi].
However, as we saw earlier,
higher Biblical criticism was developed in the early 1700s. This means that
there was no empirical evidence to support the theories of earlier documents
because there were no other documents available and no way of interpreting
them.
The form critics were
correct when they said that there were various forms of literature in the Old
Testament, included among these are prophetic, historical, poetical, wisdom,
apocalyptic. There is no evidence from the actual historical writing that the
writers believed that they were writing anything other than the truth of their
own experiences[xvii].
If we examine the text of the historical sections and compare this text with
Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Greek and Arab texts we can see that there is
strong evidence to suggest that there is very little evidence to suggest that
there were at least seventeen authors or redactors and that the documents were
not written over many hundreds of years[xviii].
Within the Old Testament
itself there is reference to ‘books’; the first appearance of the word is in
Genesis 5: 1. This shows us that a book contains a list of people and the
things that happened to them. Moses was told to write a book of his experiences
with the Amalekites[xix].
A simple reading of these
texts would have one believe that they were writing the simple facts of their
experiences at the time that they happened. So we can assume that the Old
Testament gives ample evidence to suggest that its attitude to its own writing
is that this writing is the truth[xx].
This leads us back to the
first method of studying the Old Testament. We can accept the historical
narratives as true narratives of eyewitnesses. In some cases the original
documents were kept in archives and collected at a later date by a recognisable
person writing at a date that can be discovered in order to give the story of
Divine redemption rather than by an unknown person writing at an unknown date
for reasons that can only be surmised.
In the final analysis, a
person has to choose what approach they will take to the study of the Old
Testament. However, this approach will be predicated on that person’s
understanding of the first three commandments:
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven
image, or any likeness of any
thing that is in
heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in
the water under the earth:
Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them,
nor serve them: for I the LORD
thy God am a jealous God, visiting
the iniquity of the fathers upon the
children unto the third and fourth generation
of them that hate me;
And shewing mercy unto thousands of them
that love me, and keep my
commandments.
Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD
thy God in vain; for the LORD
will
not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.[xxi]
These commandments combine
to tell Israel that there is only room for one God in their cosmogony. They are
also told not to make images of their God for they would soon begin to imagine
that the image is a true representation of their God and they would reduce the
Lord of all creation into something that He had created. Thirdly they were not
to use the name of the Lord for false purposes. This is well illustrated in the
interview between Christopher Hitchens and Marilyn
Sewell and is a direct consequence of deism where human reason is elevated to
the status of God. However if a person wants to be a Christian there are
certain basic truths that they must believe and all these truths are found in
the Bible. If we want to reject part of the Bible then we should reject the
whole of the Bible and find some other means of salvation.
While it is true that the
postmodern Biblical critic doesn’t accept the words of the Bible as being true,
it is important that students of the Old Testament have some foundation for
their studies. We will take the words of the Bible and accept them as history
and work from that basis as we study the Old Testament. However before we begin
to study the Old Testament it is a good idea to put it into a broader context.
We make the assumption that there is a purpose and a plan in the Old Testament
and we will look at the broad plan and context before we consider the more
immediate context of any section of the Old Testament.
‘The
Bible is not a science book, yet it is scientifically accurate. We are not
aware of any scientific evidence that contradicts the Bible. We have
listed statements on this page that are consistent with known scientific facts.
Many of them were listed in the Bible hundreds or even thousands of years
before being recorded elsewhere.’[xxii]
Similarly, the Bible is not an historical textbook in the modern sense of the
word but, as far as can be proved, it is not historically inaccurate although
there is still some question about certain historical ‘facts’ that conflict
with other sources of history[xxiii].
For example, Ptolemy’s canon lists the ancient rulers of the Fertile Crescent
region but these dates disagree with Bible dates. However, Ptolemy of
Alexandria was also a famous astronomer whose work was accepted as accurate
until the advent of Copernicus in the sixteenth century when it was accepted
that the solar system is heliocentric rather than geocentric[xxiv].
If the Bible is neither a scientific nor historical textbook then what is it?
‘…The Old Testament half is
divided into the history of the Old Testament literature; into the history of
the contents of revelation as laid down in the Old Testament Scriptures, with
its presuppositions; and into the history of the preparation for redemption up
to the point where, after the foundation for redemption had been essentially
laid, the old dispensation separates from the new…’[xxv]
The Old Testament is, essentially, the history of redemption for God’s people.
This includes the church, which began on the day of Pentecost long after the
Old Testament canon was completed.
If the Old Testament is the
history of redemption it is important to define redemption. In order to do this
we will look at the word ‘redeem’. The first time this work occurs in the Bible
is in Genesis 48: 16; Jacob (Israel) was blessing Joseph’s sons and he talked
about the angel that redeemed him from all evil. What was the evil that the
angel delivered Jacob from? A quick look at Jacob’s life will answer this
question. The written record of Jacob’s story began in Genesis 25 and was
completed in Genesis 50 and can be verified by reading those passages. Jacob
was the younger of twins but longed for the prestige and power that came with
being the older. His major desire was to inherit the blessings that God had
given to his grandfather Abraham so his desires were good but his methodology
was bad. He tricked his brother into giving him the birthright and then, with
his mother’s connivance, he tricked his father into giving him the blessing
that rightfully belonged to his brother. After this his brother sought to kill
him and he had to run away to save his life. He had lived for many years using
his highly honed skills of deceit but when he ran away from his brother he
became the victim of betrayal, as he had been a betrayer. He worked for his
mother’s brother and was deceived into marrying two sisters and then cheated by
his father in law on many occasions. Eventually he returned to his homeland and
was tricked by his sons. Finally, after many years of grief, Jacob was reunited
with his favourite son. This was the time when he told Joseph that the angel
had redeemed him from evil. Jacob had made choices and he experienced the
consequences of those choices. He had been tricked and betrayed because he had
tricked and betrayed. When he said that the angel had redeemed him from all
evil, he was saying that redemption had saved him from the consequences of his
own choices. He should, rightfully, have died a lonely old man without any
friends but he died a happy old man enjoying the company of his grandchildren.
The Old Testament is the story of redemption, that is, it is the story of being
saved from the consequences of our own choices.
But who was saved from the
consequences of what choice? The first time we find a choice being offered in
the Bible was when God commanded the man not to eat the fruit of the tree of
good and evil[xxvi].
Our first response to a command is to think that it is something that we must
or must not do, however, this is not true. A command is an offer of choice; we
can choose to keep the recommendations of the command or ignore them.
Why would God give people
choice when He is almighty? God knows that if we choose something and we get
what we choose then we enjoy that much more than if we are forced to accept
what He offers. But, God has perfect integrity and He will give us what we
choose even if we choose to reject His commandment. If we choose to obey God’s
commandments we choose to live in an ordered world where everything is supplied
but if we choose to reject God’s commandments we choose to live in a world that
is random and arbitrary where we have to work hard just to survive. The moment
that we embark on any kind of activity we choose the consequences of that
activity, even if we don’t think about them when we make the choice. Adam and
Eve were not the only ones to choose to reject God by choosing to disobey His
commandment; every person born since that time, apart from the Lord Jesus
Christ, has also made the same choice[xxvii].
The story of redemption
therefore becomes the story of people who are sinners by choice being saved
from the consequences of that choice. While Genesis 3 recounts the history of
the first time that choice was made, Gen 1 and 2 answer the interrogatives that
come from that event. We are told who the people are, how they came to be in
that position, where they were when the event happened, when the event
happened, why the event happened and what happened in that event. It also lets
people who read the Bible begin to answer the same questions for themselves. ‘Who
am I?’ ‘How did I arrive in my current situation?’ ‘Where is the answer to my
problems?’ ‘When did all these happen to me?’ ‘What is going on right now?’
Genesis continues the story
of redemption in so far as it tells us how God prepared the conditions for the
final redemption of sinners that is found in the Lord Jesus Christ. The
redemption story gives us the history of the ultimate redeemer.
A clue as to the context of
the Old Testament from the time that Israel settled into the Promised Land can
be found in Jeremiah 1: 11, 12. The Lord told that prophet that He was ready to
perform His word. The first question we have to ask is, ‘What word?’ This
refers back to Deuteronomy 28-30. When Israel first came out of slavery in
Egypt they went to Sinai and were given the Law then twelve spies were sent to
obtain intelligence about the Promised Land. These twelve spies sent forty days
in the Promised Land and then they returned to report to the people. They
reported that it was a good and fertile land but giants inhabited the Land. The
people were scared and they refused to go into the Land. After this God gave
them what they had chosen and the spent 40 years wandering in the wilderness
until everyone who was over twenty years of age died, except Joshua and Caleb,
the two spies who were not afraid of the giants[xxviii].
At the end of those forty
years the Israelis were on the eastern side of the River Jordan and Moses
recited the Law to them. This recitation of the Law is known as the Book of
Deuteronomy. It is not, strictly speaking, the second book of the Law but
rather the second making of the contract between God and Israel. Moses recited
the Law to the people who were to young to make the contract when it was first
made forty years ago.
At the end of this
recitation Moses commanded the people to recite the blessings and curses[xxix].
Then in Deuteronomy 28 and 29 the Lord gave them a list of the consequences
that they could expect when they chose how to related to God’s goodness while
they were in the Land. If they chose to disobey the commandments the Lord would
slowly express[xxx]
His anger towards His people until such time as they were exiled from the Land
and scattered all over the earth.
After the people went into
the Land they went to Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal, as God had commanded, and
they made the contract with God for themselves. This meant that throughout
their history Israel and Judah were bound to keep the contract that they made
with the Lord God or experience the punitive clauses that were included in the
contract.
The rest of the Old
Testament historical and prophetic sections relate to how God enforced this
contract that Israel had freely chosen to make with Him when they entered into
the Land. It is important to remember that when God gives a command, He offers
a choice: we can either obey that command and choose the consequences of
obedience or we can reject that command and choose the consequences of
rejecting God’s goodness and love. At that stage they had the choice of
accepting the conditions and going in or rejecting the conditions and staying
out.
But why would God give His
chosen people a list of commandments when they went into the Land and what has
this to do with the story of redemption? Israel’s story, in the Old Testament,
is the same as the story of redemption. When God first called Abram (later
Abraham), He promised him blessings but also promised that all the families of
the earth would be blessed through Abram[xxxi].
But what does it mean to bless? The first time that we hear about blessing in
the Bible is in Gen 1: 22 where blessing is associated with being fruitful and
multiplying, in the third instance[xxxii]
blessing is associated with being sanctified, or set apart for rest. After the
first people sinned God cursed them and associated multiplying with sorrow,
fruitfulness and rest were replaced by labour and death. So, when God promised
to bless all the families of the earth, He was promising to undo the
consequences of choosing to reject God’s love. The serpent was responsible for
lying to Eve and he was cursed to warfare with the individual super spiritual
descendant of Eve Who would bruise his head as this deadly battle raged
throughout time. The blessing that God promised was also associated with the
successful termination of this deadly battle as well[xxxiii].
The Lord Jesus Christ was Eve’s super spiritual descendant as well as Abram’s
descendant who was able to bruise the serpent’s head and offer blessing to all
the families of the earth by redeeming them from the consequences of choosing
to reject God.
In the Old Testament the
choice of choosing to do what God commands rather than choosing not to do what
God commands can be seen in New Testament terms as well. The Lord Jesus Christ
expressed this as follows, ‘If any man will come after me let him deny himself’[xxxiv].
By contrast when Cain was planning to kill his brother Abel, the Lord told him ‘and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule
over him’[xxxv].
God gave Cain a choice to accept that God had the authority to tell him what to
do or that he would indulge his own selfish desires and kill his brother. This
leads us to the conclusion that the two choices are self-denial or self-indulgence.
As time went by
self-indulgence began to rule the world that God had created and soon the earth
became so debased that God destroyed everything that He had made. In spite of
this, God allowed the family of one man who did what God commanded him to be
saved along with all that was necessary to restore a fully functioning world
ecosystem as well. For how could this man and his family survive without the
means of living as God had commanded him to live?
God promised the serpent
that he would face an ongoing spiritual battle and eventual defeat so He would
not compromise His integrity but destroying all the people that He had created
before this final defeat took place.
After this great
destruction, God promised that He would never destroy every living thing again
in that way and He promised that as long as the earth remained seedtime and
harvest, cold and heat summer and winter would not cease[xxxvi].
The battle between
self-indulgence and self-denial continued after the Flood and the earth began
to be debased again but the excesses of human indulgence. God, however, had two
promises to keep: He would not destroy every living thing again and He would
eventually bring about final victory in the spiritual battle between the
serpent and the seed of the woman.
In order to do this God chose
Abram with the full intention of producing the promised, super spiritual see who
would bruise the serpent’s head.
In order to do this, God
promised the chosen race that He would give them a Land of their own so that
they could be the source of blessing for all the families of the earth.
However, these people could never be this source of blessing for the whole
earth if they lived in self-indulgence and polluted the Land that God had given
them. People can only be drawn to God through the agency of other people who do
everything that God commands them to do[xxxvii].
God gave the Law to His people so that they could live up to the high standards
that He required and then they could be the source of blessing to all the
families of the earth. After Israel agreed to the contract that God offered
them they were bound to live up to God’s high standards of self-denial rather
than live down to the low standards of self-indulgence. Israel’s history from
this point on is a combination of the battle between self-indulgence and
self-denial, in God’s context of being a source of blessing to all the families
of the earth. This is combined with the fact that God is gracious and slow to
anger, that is, slow to giving His people the immediate and complete
consequences of their choice not to do everything that He commanded them.
The period of the Judges
and king Saul are a good example of God giving His people what they chose with
the express purpose of bringing them to their knees and submitting to Him again
and, periodically, they did submit and were given the place of blessing again.
When David became king he
was a man who wholeheartedly followed the Lord[xxxviii]
and God promised him that his descendants would have an everlasting throne[xxxix].
The Lord Jesus Christ was one of David’s descendants[xl]
and He will reign as King for eternity[xli].
While Israel and Judah
struggled with their self-indulgence, God kept a record of all that happened to
them so that the history of redemption would be available to all who chose to
read it. God sent prophets to warn His people about the contract that they had
made and the fact that He would invoke the penalty clauses if they refused to
keep their part of the contract and be a source of blessing to all the families
of the earth by doing all that God had commanded them to do
The prophets were not
primarily sent to give God’s people a picture of the future they were sent to
give the people God’s message, as we saw earlier when we considered God’s call
of Jeremiah. However, the message always contained the promise that God would
invoke the penalty clauses of the original contract He made with them when they
took possession of the Land.
Deuteronomy 28 and 29 are
followed by Deuteronomy 30 and there God made it quite clear what His plan was
in the who story of His dealing with His people, ‘And it
shall come to pass, when all these things are come upon thee, the blessing and
the curse, which I have set before thee, and thou shalt call them to mind among all the nations,
whither the LORD thy God hath driven thee, And shalt return unto the LORD thy
God, and shalt obey his voice according to all that I command thee this day,
thou and thy children, with all thine heart, and with all thy soul; That then
the LORD thy God will turn thy captivity, and have compassion upon thee, and
will return and gather thee from all the nations, whither the LORD thy God hath
scattered thee. If any of thine be
driven out unto the outmost parts of
heaven, from thence will the LORD thy God gather thee, and from thence will he
fetch thee: And the LORD thy God will bring thee into the land which thy
fathers possessed, and thou shalt possess it; and he will do thee good, and
multiply thee above thy fathers.’[xlii]
God’s plan was always to bring His
people to their knees so that they would submit to Him again and be the source
of blessing to all the families of the earth. Finally the Lord Jesus Christ
kept all the commandments and became the ultimate source of blessing to all the
families of the earth.
The prophets always promised that
God would invoke Deuteronomy 30 after He had invoked Deuteronomy 28 and 29.
When the Babylonians came to Jerusalem and completely destroyed the city a new
type of prophecy developed, called apocalyptic prophecy. This prophecy looked
forward to the day when God would come and punish the enemies of God’s people
and God’s people would be restored to their condition as the first among all
the nations. The Post-exilic prophets lived in the time when Judah had returned
from exile and were rebuilding the city of Jerusalem and the Temple. However
the contract they had made with God had not been invalidated so they were still
committed to keeping their side of the contract. These prophets were giving the
same messages as the earlier prophets in that they were reminding the returnees
that they needed to do everything that God had commanded them so that they
could live up to God’s high standards, the standards that were required of
anyone who was going to be a source of blessing to all the families of the
earth
[ii] Sáenz-Badillos, Angel (Translated by Elwolde,
John)
‘
A
History of the Hebrew Language’
,
CUP, Cambridge 1993, pp 1,2
http://www.deism.com/deism_defined.htm
[v]
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_hcri.htm
[vi]
http://www.carm.org/redaction-criticism
[vii]
http://www.theology.edu/b725b.htm
[viii]
http://wsu.edu/~dee/GLOSSARY/MODERN.HTM
[ix]
Benjamin, Mara H
‘Rosenzweig’s
Bible, Reinventing Scripture for Jewish Modernity’, CUP, New York, 2009, page
1, 2
[x]
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/03/postmodernism_and_the_bible_in.html
quoting Routledges companion to Postmodernism
[xi]
http://countercultureconservative.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/atheist-debates-liberal-christian-wins-handily/
(this is not
the whole interview, just some excerpts; italics, and emphasis included in
report; extra comments have been removed)
[xii]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeology#History_of_archaeology
[xiii]
http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/klmno/layard_austen_henry.html
[xiv]
http://www.livius.org/be-bm/behistun/behistun01.html
[xv]
http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/pqrst/rawlinson_henry.html
[xvi]
http://www.ancientegypt.co.uk/writing/rosetta.html
[xvii]
Young, E J
‘In the Beginning’, The
Banner of Truth Trust, Edinburgh, 1976, pp18, 19, 33-35.
[xviii]
Wilson, Robert Dick
‘A Scientific
Investigation of the Old Testament’, The Sunday School Times Company,
Philadelphia, no date, pp101, 102
[xx]
McNaught, Doug
‘Reclaiming the
Bible from the “Enlightened”’, Bekasume Books, Sydney, 2007, p 26
[xxii]
http://www.clarifyingchristianity.com/science.shtml
[xxiii]
http://patmccullough.com/2010/04/30/the-bible-is-not-a-history-textbook/
[xxiv]
http://www.livius.org/ps-pz/ptolemies/ptolemy_of_alexandria.html
[xxv]
Delitzsch, Franz
‘Old Testament,
History of Redemption’ T & T Clark, Edinburgh, 1881 p 1; quoted from
http://www.archive.org/stream/historyofredemp00deliuoft#page/n0/mode/2up
[xxvii]
Rom 3: 23 (this simply means that every person is a sinner by choice)
[xxix]
This command is given in Deut 27: 3-26
[xxxii]
The second occurrence in Gen 1: 28 we have the same association; while the
third instance occurs in 2:3.
[xxxiii]
Keil C F and Delitzsch F
Commentary
on the Old Testament in Ten Volumes, Volume 1, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids,
reprinted 1980, pp 101, 102
[xxxviii]
Compare Psa 9: 1 and 138: 1 with Psa 119: 2, 10, 34, 58, 69.
