Summary of the Books of Genesis to Joshua
Genesis follows the stories of The Creation, the Garden of Eden, Cain, and Abel, Noah’s Ark, and the Babel Tower. Exodus focuses on the freedom of Israel’s people from Egyptian enslavement due to Moses’ leadership. Throughout the book of Leviticus, Israel is encamped at Mount Sinai, and God appears to Moses in the Tent of Meeting, giving him instructions on Jewish ceremonial regulations. The regulations are incredibly thorough, laying out every detail of how and when religious gifts should be sent to God.
The book of Numbers is essentially the holy narrative of the Israelites while they wandered in the desert after leaving Sinai and before settling in Canaan, the Promised Land. It details their sufferings as well as their countless grievances against God. Deuteronomy emphasizes God’s singularity, the necessity for radical centralization of worship, and compassion for the poor and disadvantaged. Its various themes revolve around three poles: Israel, Yahweh, and the covenant that links them all together. The book of Joshua tells the story of Israel’s arrival in the promised land and serves as a reminder of God’s faithfulness and covenant stipulations.
Literary Structure of the Old Testament
The literary structure of the Old Testament, as analyzed by Dorsey, offers interesting ways in which it is utilized to deliver a message. An example of such would be the implementation of the symmetric scheme in the treaty of Sinai. According to Dorsey, this is the central point in the entire Book of Law, and the symmetrical framework galvanizes the event of Yahweh taking residence among the Israeli people as the central truth from which their history will be derived from now on.
The first five chapters of Dorsey’s book provide a good overview of structural analysis and its relationship to meaning. He provides really simple descriptions and examples, and they don’t require any technical expertise to understand 4. He looks at beginning markers, end markers, and other approaches for generating internal cohesiveness to show how to identify the component sections of an Old Testament book 4. He next goes over how the units may be put together. Various linear and symmetric designs, as well as the methods in which the units might be joined, are discussed and shown.
Pentateuch and the Old Testament World of Composition and Communication
The article on the “Pentateuch” and the beginning sections in The Lost World of Scripture address the message in the Old Testament and how it was described to achieve a certain effect on the reader. One particular issue with the texts involves the room for interpretation in the Old Testament, especially in regard to various atrocities committed either by God or in the name of God. The ongoing debate on interpretations, as Walton and Sandy pointed out, is whether these atrocities are to be taken literally or interpretively to describe a moral lesson. The Pentateuch answers these issues by stating that while the original scripture, infused with divine knowledge, left no doubts in the mind of those who read it, the need for copies placed a human factor in the texts, depriving them of clarity and allowing personal interpretations to affect the scripture. It makes one wonder how different the original events as described are different from what actually happened.
Bibliography
Stine, Philip C. “Review: The Literary Structure of the Old Testament: A Commentary on Genesis-Malachi.” The Bible Translator 51, no. 3 (2000): 352–54.
Dorsey, David A. The Literary Structure of the Old Testament: A Commentary on Genesis-Malachi. Michigan, Grand Rapids: 1999.
Maps, Bible, et al. “International Standard Bible Encyclopedia.”
Walton, John H., and Brent Sandy. The Lost World of Scripture: Ancient Literary Culture and Biblical Authority. New York: InterVarsity Press, 2013.