Chapter 7 - Faith of Israel

Chapter Seven

THE FAITH OF ISRAEL

In order to pursue our immediate goal and establish what the historical-critical method can say about Jesus of Nazareth, it is essential to look in this chapter at what is now called 'Second Temple Judaism.' That title distinguishes the Judaism of the time of Jesus from the faith of Old Testament times. The historical-critical method also studies that earlier period, the period of the settlement in Canaan, of the Judges and of the monarchy, coming to an end with the fall of Jerusalem to the forces of Nebuchadnezzar in 587 AD, but that is not our concern here. In order to understand Jesus historically, our concern at this point is with the religion that is now called 'Judaism'. This was the faith of the people of Judah after the exile and also of the Jewish people of the Dispersion, those who did not return to live in Judah but remained in Babylon or spread to other lands.

(A) SECOND TEMPLE JUDAISM

The formative influences in Second Temple Judaism were Ezra and Nehemiah, and the new form of faith, although it saw itself in continuity with the faith and religion of Judah and Israel before the exile, had some new features. The continuity was to be seen in the rebuilding of the temple from 520 to 515 BC and the re-institution of the priesthood and the sacrifices. Three major festivals, the Passover, Pentecost and the Feast of Tabernacles, also pointed to continuity. But discontinuity was seen in that there was no longer a monarchy, a king of the house of David, and there were new festivals, the feast of Purim which celebrated the deliverance of the Jews in the Persian empire by the intervention of Esther, and later the feast of Hannukah. There was also the new institution of the local synagogue, developed during the exile, which was essentially a place for the reading of Scripture and for praise and prayer and teaching, but not of course for sacrifices.

The period after the exile was also very different in that Judah was no longer an independent state, but part of the empire first of the Persians, then of the Ptolemaic empire centred in Egypt, and then of the Seleucid empire centred in Syria. The last two Greek empires emerged out of the conquests of Alexander the Great. The infiltration of Jewish life by Hellenistic ideas and customs was a constant concern to those who were passionately committed to the exclusivism introduced by Ezra, symbolized and safeguarded by the institutions of circumcision, the dietary laws and the sabbath, and the refusal of Jews to eat or intermarry with 'gentiles' (a word which simply means ‘the nations’). The desecration of the temple in 167 (or 168) BC by the Seleucid emperor, Antiochus Epiphanes, and his attempt to suppress Judaism, led to the revolt of Judas Maccabaeus of the Hasmonean family. The new feast of Hannukah celebrated the temple's re-consecration in 164 (or 165) BC. The Hasmonean rule of a more-or-less independent state lasted until the Roman general, Pompey, conquered Jerusalem in 63 BC. 'Second Temple Judaism' is therefore the term given to the faith of the Jews from the building of the second temple around 520 to 515 BC (and particularly as it is thought to have been established by Ezra around 398 BC) up to the destruction of the second temple in AD 70 by Titus, the son of the Roman emperor, Vespasian. Thereafter, Rabbinic Judaism emerged, once again showing both continuity and discontinuity.

Our understanding of Second Temple Judaism advanced considerably in the late twentieth century. Martin Hengel for example greatly added to our knowledge of the relationship between Judaism and the surrounding ocean of Hellenistic language and culture. He demolished the idea (sometimes assumed by New Testament scholars) that Judaism and Hellenism were so divided and distinct that one could assuredly trace the development of the New Testament doctrine through the separate communities. E.P. Sanders demolished the assumption among many Christian theologians that Judaism was a legalistic religion, arguing that they were viewing Paul's debate with the Judaizers (who were within the Christian church) through the lens of Augustine's debate with Pelagius and Luther's debate with some late medieval theologians.

The Hebrew Scriptures

To understand Second Temple Judaism, the Jewish faith at the time of Jesus, we need to take into account not only the religious institutions and customs of the period, but also the Hebrew Scriptures. Of course the Hebrew Scriptures provide the historian with resources for a historical study of the faith of Israel in the earlier period before the exile. However, since many of these books are thought to have reached their final form after the exile, and since the 'canon', the list of books to be regarded as Scripture, began to emerge very gradually well after the exile in what Christians call the 'intertestamental' period and later, it is clear that these books are also the primary resource for understanding the faith of Second Temple Judaism. As Walter Brueggemann comments, 'It is now increasingly agreed that the Old Testament in its final form is a product of and a response to the Babylonian exile.' The Torah, or Law, (known as the five books of Moses), was regarded as authoritative by 400 BC and possibly became so under Ezra. The Former Prophets (Joshua to II Kings but not including Ruth) and the Latter Prophets (from Isaiah to Malachi, but not including Lamentations and Daniel) were included in the canon recognized by most Jews by around 200 BC (though not by the Sadducees), and some of the Kethubim (Writings) by the early part of the first century AD (i.e. during the life of Jesus).

The received view has been that final acceptance of the Writings as part of the canon took place by 95AD, when, following the fall of Jerusalem, Rabbinic Judaism (the name given to Judaism after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD) was thought to have finalized the canon formally at the council of Jamnia. Although it is no longer clear that such a council played a formal role, it was certainly around that time that the threefold canon of the Hebrew Scriptures was defined. Torah (Law, or more accurately 'Instruction'), Nebi'im (Prophets) and Kethubim (Writings), a different order from that later adopted by the Christian Church, were the three main sections. And although the Kethubim were not fully and definitively accepted as part of the authoritative canon until after Second Temple Judaism had given way to Rabbinic Judaism, nevertheless the Psalms, for example, clearly shaped the faith of the Jewish people. Understanding of Second Temple Judaism therefore begins with these thirty-nine books, although it must also take into account other writings of the period as well as our knowledge of the history and customs. What then was the faith of Second Temple Judaism as understood from its authoritative Scriptures?

We must begin by rejecting the idea that Second Temple Judaism had a 'Systematic Theology,' a system of abstract doctrines. No such system may be found in the Hebrew Scriptures themselves, nor did the teachers and experts of the law from Ezra onwards produce such a system. The very idea of an abstract system of ideas objectively describing God and the world is a product of Hellenistic thinking. Judaism was a faith rather than a metaphysic or a philosophy in the modern sense of the word. That is to say that it was a halakah, a 'way of life,' informed by the narratives of the Hebrew Scriptures together with the prophesies and poetry. The focus was on the concrete, particularly the narrative beginning with creation and tracing the story of the interaction of the people of Israel with the God who had chosen them and entered into covenant with them. Equally concrete were the prophecies and poetry. Israel was not interested in metaphysics. However what emerges out of the narrative of the Torah and the Former and Latter Prophets, and also out of the Writings, is a very strongly etched picture of the character of the God of Israel. The aim of this chapter is to glimpse that picture so that we may better understand the faith in which Yeshua of Nazareth was nurtured.

In order to grasp something of the dynamic mystery of this God, the Living God, as presented in the Hebrew scriptures, we have to turn to that field of scholarship mainly pursued by Christians and therefore known as 'Old Testament' Theology. We shall therefore in the next section trace briefly the development of Old Testament Theology over the last two hundred years. This may seem to be something of a digression, but it is necessary in order to draw critically on its findings not only in this chapter, but also in the rest of this three-volume Systematics. In the final section of this chapter we shall draw on two recent scholars, Walter Brueggemann and John Goldingay, in order to grasp what these thirty-nine books, considered as the Hebrew Scriptures, tell us of the God in whom the Jews of Second Temple Judaism believed.

(B) 'OLD TESTAMENT' THEOLOGY

The development of 'Old Testament' Theology begins with the sixteenth-century Reformation, which saw the first revolt of biblical scholars against a Systematic Theology allied with a non-Christian philosophy. That philosophy was an amalgam of Platonism and Aristotle, and it was Luther, a professor of Biblical Studies, who cast it off as a distorting influence and tried to develop a new theology from Scripture, primarily from the apostle Paul. Calvin's Institutes was not intended so much as a 'Systematic Theology' (if that is held to imply a philosophical or metaphysical approach) as a systematic presentation of the teaching of the Bible, organized according to the structure of the creed. It was among Protestants therefore that there was a second revolt against 'system' in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (this time the revised Aristotelianism of so-called Protestant 'orthodoxy') in order to recover a more biblical understanding of God and of Christian teaching. Pietism opposed this dry Protestant scholasticism with a desire for a 'biblical theology' closely related to the life of faith. But the decisive moment is generally identified as the inaugural address of Johann Philipp Gabler (1753-1826) as a professor at the University of Altdorf on 30th March, 1787. Gabler's address did not arise out of a Pietist desire to live the life of faith, but out of the Enlightenment. The proper study of the Bible must shake off the categories of Church doctrine imposed on the biblical text. The Bible could still help us to universal normative principles of theology and ethics, but only as it became the servant of objective reason.

Biblical Theology in the Nineteenth Century

As we have already seen, it was as a child of the Enlightenment that the historical-critical method arose, and from the time of Gabler, it dominated the development of the new academic disciplines of 'Biblical Theology,' which soon divided into Old Testament Theology and New Testament Theology. Although there was a school of nineteenth-century German scholars who attempted to develop Old Testament Theology, some in the form of 'salvation history,' it was eventually eclipsed by the Religionsgeschichtliche (history of religion) approach. This turned away from any idea of the Old Testament as authoritative canon and was dominated completely by the approach of Historicism. The aim of the exercise was purely to trace historically, that is (they claimed) 'objectively', the development of the religion of ancient Israel from these ancient documents. The dominant figure was Julius Wellhausen who proposed the thesis that the Pentateuch was composed of four documents, J, E, D and P, and who concluded that monotheism was a late development of the prophets of the eighth century B.C. and could not possibly have developed as early as the time of Moses. Hermann Gunkel introduced the method of Form Criticism as a way of tracing the original Sitz im Leben (life-context) of the Psalms in the worship of the temple. The historical-critical approach of this school of thought then was interested in the history 'behind' these ancient texts, and it did not consider that they always gave reliable evidence. According to these scholars, the true story of 'what really happened' was quite different. Walter Brueggemann comments that, while this nineteenth-century 'developmentalism' (or Historicism) can be seen as very different from eighteenth-century rationalism and empiricism,

it is in continuity with them in practising an epistemology of the human knower as an unencumbered objective interpreter who was understood to be a nonpartisan, uninvolved reader of the data.

Biblical Theology did not re-emerge from the shadow of the Religionsgeschichtliche school until the early twentieth century. Brueggemann attributes this re-emergence to the influence of Barth.

Barth's programmatic importance is difficult to overstate. Negatively, he interrupted the assumptions of modernity that had emptied the biblical text of any serious theological claim. Positively, he asserted that biblical faith had its own distinctive voice.

Otto Eissfeldt argued that the disciplines could exist side by side, the historical and objective study of the religion of Israel and Old Testament Theology, which was 'a nonhistorical discipline, determined by the faith stance of the theologian, and was thus subjective.' But he was opposed by Walther Eichrodt, who was to be a colleague of Barth in Basel, and who challenged the idea that there was such a thing as a history of Israel which was 'objective' in the sense that it was free from all presuppositions.

Eichrodt and von Rad

Although one may easily list twenty major works of Old Testament Theology published between 1930 and 1970 (mostly in Germany, but also in Britain and America, the Netherlands and France) the two dominating figures were Walther Eichrodt and Gerhard von Rad. Accompanying this revival of Old Testament Theology, however, was a less sceptical view of Old Testament history arising out of the work of Albrecht Alt and Martin Noth in Germany from the 1930s to the 1950s, and of William Foxwell Albright, G. Ernest Wright and others in America over the same period. Alt noted the apodictic form of law in ancient Israel (that is, not merely casuistic or case law as the in the rest of the ancient Near East), based on the absolute sovereignty of Yahweh, the God of Israel. He also took note of the picture of the God of the ancestors in Genesis as 'a dynamic agent who is mobile and on the move with intentionality,' From these two features he argued that, contrary to Wellhausen, Israel from its early days worshipped this one God. Noth argued that the twelve tribes entered into a confederation, a solemn covenantal agreement with YHWH, understood as a warrior God who would fight for them. Albright, a strong proponent of Biblical Archaeology, argued for the historical distinctiveness of Israel's faith. This was taken up by his student, G. Ernest Wright, who presented evidence for the strong contrast between the faith of Israel, characterized by their God's action in history, and the nature religion of the Canaanites. Israel's faith stood out in contrast to all polytheism as monotheistic from the earliest times. George Mendenhall argued in effect for the historicity of the Mosaic covenant by comparing its structure in the Pentateuch with the form of Hittite treaties or covenants of the fourteenth century BC.

It was against the background of those developments that we are to see Eichrodt's Theology of the Old Testament, published in German in 1933, but published much later in English in two volumes in 1961 and 1967. As we have noted, Eichrodt maintained that absolute objectivity was a fiction of rationalistic individualism: every science, including History, had a subjective component in the perspective adopted by the researcher. But that did not mean that one could not aim for and achieve a degree of objectivity, and in that, Old Testament Theology, as a historical discipline, was no less scientific that any other historical research. While rejecting the 'tyranny of Historicism,' he accepted that Old Testament Theology was a historical and descriptive science. But although he was fully conscious of the historical development of the Old Testament, he nevertheless maintained that it was possible to follow what Gerhard Hasel calls a 'cross-section' method by identifying a key concept which, as die Mitte (the centre) of Old Testament Theology, could give it a coherence and unity. He identified that as the concept of the covenant. All of Old Testament Theology was to be subsumed under that one category.

Eichrodt's approach has been criticized as intellectual, cognitive and too conceptual, even as reductionist. And so much of the literature of the Old Testament, particularly the Wisdom literature, cannot be fitted into the straightjacket of 'covenant.' In his defence, Brueggemann argues that we ought to interpret his unifying concept more broadly as 'covenant relatedness.'

While Eichrodt's articulation of his central notion now seems highly conceptual, he had nonetheless seen and expressed what is most characteristic of Israel's vision of reality: namely, that all of reality - God, Israel, human persons, the world - partakes of relatedness.

Brueggemann quotes Eichrodt's assertion that the covenantal relation is 'bilateral...two-sided,' and points to the implications of this (going beyond Eichrodt) in the perception that the relation is not a one-sided enterprise from God to humanity, but fully bilateral, pointing eventually to Moltmann's insight that God's relating to humankind entails risk and even vulnerability. Eichrodt's focus on covenant was fully appropriate in 'a world that was coming to view reality in terms of interactionism.' That was also to be seen in the contemporary thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar, in Emil Brunner's notion of 'encounter,' and in Martin Buber's 'I-Thou' thinking, a Jewish line of thought articulated today in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Brueggemann notes that Eichrodt even extends the notion of interrelatedness in his theology to cosmology and creation, and he applauds this extraordinary insight, his decisive break with rationalistic developmentalism, and the new ground he broke in historical criticism.

Gerhard von Rad first presented an alternative approach to Old Testament Theology in a programmatic essay published in German in 1938 (though not in English till 1966), 'The Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch.' Like Albrecht Alt (his teacher) and Martin Noth, he regarded the tribal period of the Judges as formative for Israel, and his form-critical analysis led him to focus on three passages which he thought were the earliest and most characteristic liturgical recitals of Israel's faith. The first was Deuteronomy 26:5-9, which the Israelite had to recite when presenting a basket of the firstfruits of the harvest to the Lord:

A wandering Aramean was my father; and he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number; and there he became a nation, great, mighty and populous. And the Egyptians treated us harshly, and afflicted us, and laid upon us hard bondage. Then we cried to Yahweh, the God of our fathers, and Yahweh heard our voice, and saw our affliction, our toil and our oppression; and Yahweh brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror, and signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.'

This, together with the similar recital in Deuteronomy 6:20-24 and the more detailed recital in Joshua 24:1-13, was the narrative basis of the faith of Israel, consisting of three episodes: the ancestors, the liberation from Egypt, and the entry into the promised land. Von Rad noted that these recitals occurred in the context of worship, and argued that over time they were supplemented with the addition of the story of creation, more details of the ancestral period and the inclusion of the story of Sinai. This was the genesis then of the 'story line' for what von Rad called the 'Hexateuch', the six books from Genesis to Joshua, and for von Rad, the focus of Israel's faith was their history. This made their faith utterly distinctive from the nature religions of Canaan focussing on fertility, so that even creation was somewhat peripheral for Israel's faith, and there was certainly no room (as Barth had argued) for any kind of natural theology.

Volume I of von Rad's Old Testament Theology, entitled The Theology of Israel's Historical Traditions, developed the perspective that Israel's theology was not ideational or conceptual, but a historical narrative telling of God's 'mighty acts.' He rejected Eichrodt's approach as too doctrinal, thematic and synchronic, lacking the diachronic character, the developmental, historical, narrative character of Israel's faith. Old Testament theology had no 'centre' (Mitte).

If von Rad was following in the footsteps of Alt in Germany, G. Ernest Wright, the student of Albright, was sounding very similar notes in America. In 1952 he published God Who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital a decade before von Rad's work was translated into English. This also emphasized the 'mighty acts' as the heart of Israel's faith and was the primary expression of what became known in America as 'the Biblical Theology movement,' strongly allied to 'Biblical Archaeology.' But the approach of von Rad and Wright soon ran into problems, for while it appeared to unite the methodologies of History and Theology, it actually papered over the division between them. The problem was how the secular historical-critical method could recognize and define an 'act of God.' Israel's faith recital might claim that the deliverance at the Red Sea was an 'act of God,' but what precisely did the Israelites observe other than natural phenomena? What was the hard evidence which provided incontrovertible historical proof that this was indeed an 'act of God'? Was the historical-critical method, an essentially secular method developed out of the rationalism of the Enlightenment, capable of observing God?

Von Rad's second volume, The Theology of Israel's Prophetic Tradition, appeared in English in 1965, but it soon became apparent that the two-volume work did not take the Writings into account sufficiently to be a fully rounded Old Testament Theology. In 1970, just before he died, he published Wisdom in Israel, a remarkably new perspective which dropped the opposition to natural theology. By that time it was widely accepted that the American 'Biblical Theology movement' of Wright and others was in difficulty.

Eichrodt and von Rad thus represent two contrasting ways of doing Old Testament Theology. Eichrodt attempted to identify a unifying centre (Mitte) and so to characterize a coherent 'synchronic' theology with a 'constant tendency and character' in the midst of all the diversity of the Old Testament books and all the historical development of Israel's religion. Von Rad by contrast had rejected any attempt to move towards a coherent system of belief and had argued for a historical, developmental, 'diachronic' view of Israel's theology as recital of its 'salvation history.' Given the diversity and even pluralism of the texts, no one unifying centre, never mind a complete system of ideas, could be found or should be expected to exist.

Old Testament Theology Since 1970

By 1970 it was clear that underlying methodological problems had undermined the approach of von Rad and the so-called 'Biblical Theology movement.' Krister Stendahl had proposed that Biblical Theology was concerned to examine the text of Scripture to determine 'what it meant' as distinct from the concern of Systematic Theology to establish 'what it means.' But it appeared that von Rad and the 'Biblical Theology movement' had presented a superficial amalgam of the two which had collapsed under fire. Apart from anything else, the Alt-von Rad school and the Albright-Wright school could not agree on what the 'facts' of Old Testament history were. Two major critics, James Barr of Edinburgh and Brevard Childs of Yale, attacked the whole enterprise from two sides.

Barr did not want to lose the gains won by the historical-critical method and had already attacked 'Biblical Theology' for trying to derive theological conclusions from an illegitimate use of semantics. This was evident both in the use of 'word studies' and the drawing of facile conclusions about the differences between Hebrew and Greek thinking from the grammar of the two languages. But Barr also observed that in the biblical text, God does not so much act as speak, and he also proposed that the recital of the acts of God was not 'history' in the modern sense of the term but was 'story' or 'history-like.' This insight was to be taken up by Hans Frei of Yale in The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (1974) in which he pointed out that whereas the total Biblical story had provided the context for understanding European Christian identity up to the seventeenth century, since then the Biblical story had been dethroned and slotted into the self-understanding provided by the story of the world told by secular history. Brevard Childs' Biblical Theology in Crisis took the view in contrast to Barr that a true Biblical Theology should not begin with historical criticism, but should be genuinely theological. Following the lead of Barth (with whom he studied in Basel), he was to develop the perspective that Biblical Theology should be an explicitly Christian enterprise, not beginning with the history 'behind' the text, as re-constructed by the historical-critical method, but beginning with the final text of the Bible as defined by the Christian canon.

Despite what was called the 'crisis' or 'collapse' in the 'Biblical Theology movement,' it should not be thought that Biblical Theology or Old Testament Theology ceased to operate around 1970. Quite the contrary, as Ben C. Ollenberger points out, without attempting to be 'exhaustive or definitive after the manner of Eichrodt or von Rad,' ten works of Old Testament Theology were published between 1971 and 1981. In Germany, Walther Zimmerli saw the 'dynamic centre' as the confession of the God of Israel by the name of Yahweh, whereas Claus Westermann, following in the tradition of von Rad, acknowledged the historical, verbal character of Old Testament theology and focussed on God's gifts and 'blessings,' beginning with creation, but centred on God's acts of deliverance for Israel. Like Zimmerli, Ronald Clements of King's College, London, saw the God of Israel as the Old Testament's centre, as did the American Catholic scholar, John L. McKenzie. Even more so, Samuel L. Terrien focussed on God's 'elusive presence' as the God who was sometimes present and sometimes absent. Walter C. Kaiser made ‘promise’ the unifying centre.

During the 1980s and 1990s, there was an increasing diversity in Old Testament theology, but Ben C. Ollenberger sees the approach of Brevard Childs as particularly important (despite provoking much opposition) and ranks him with Eichrodt and von Rad. His Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments (1992) developed his earlier proposal that the final form of the text within the canon must be the starting point, and not the reconstructed history 'behind' the text. Rolf Rendtorff and Paul House similarly focused on the canon, Horst Dietrich Preuss and a number of others focused on God, Israel and the relation between them. Otto Kaiser saw the unity of the Old Testament in the First Commandment, Bernhard Anderson in the three covenants, Abrahamic, Mosaic and Davidic. Rolf Knierim criticized all of these as insufficiently systematic, while Erhard Gerstenberger on the other hand argued (according to Ollenberger) for the 'irreducible plurality of "conflicting" Old Testament theologies.'

The same decades also saw the welcome development of contributions to the study of the same Scriptures by Jewish writers. These books are not of course for them the 'Old Testament', but the canonical Hebrew Scriptures known as the Tanakh (תַּנַ"ךְ), an acronym from Torah (Law), Nebi'im (Prophets) and Ketuvim (Writings). M.H. Goshen-Gottstein proposed in 1987 that the time had come for Jewish scholars to develop Tanakh theology, and Jon D. Levinson made the first major contribution to that in a trilogy of Jewish biblical theology.

Brueggemann and Goldingay

Finally in this brief review of Old Testament Theology, we come to the two scholars, Walter Brueggemann and John Goldingay, on whose work we will chiefly draw to characterize the faith of Israel, and specifically the God in whom Israel put her trust. Brevard Child's approach will be of major importance once we begin to do Christian Theology. There we shall consider both Old and New Testaments as authoritative Christian Scripture. But here we are still dealing with historical prolegomena, and using the books of the Hebrew canon as historical evidence for the faith of Second Temple Judaism, the faith in which Jesus was nurtured. Since this is therefore still an exercise in History, and not Theology, our concern is accordingly not really with 'Old Testament Theology' (since that is a Christian term for these thirty-nine books), but with the God who is characterized in these books, reading them as the Hebrew Scriptures. And while both Brueggemann and Goldingay write as Christians, they are both concerned to let the distinctive voices of what Goldingay calls 'the First Testament' be heard.

Brueggemann identified himself with the 'postliberal' approach 'variously articulated by Hans Frei, George Lindbeck, and Stanley Hauerwas.' He endorsed the sociological emphasis of Norman Gottwald that the faith of Israel was not 'a disembodied set of ideas' but was deeply enmeshed in economic life and the realities of political power. He also endorsed Leo Perdue's view of 'the collapse of history': the historical-critical method was a child of the European Enlightenment and its naive trust in its own rational objectivity and in the myth of development and progress were now discredited. The hidden agenda in its theory of development was that everything could be explained and that nothing need be left hidden or inscrutable. But it therefore tended to dismiss Judaism as a legalistic, degenerate form of religion, and while it was capable of a great deal of criticism, it was 'characteristically weak and unsure about interpretation. But Brueggemann also wanted to distance himself (like Barr) from Church Theology. A 'fixed system of doctrinal theology tends towards reductionism about the variety and diversity' since 'conventional Systematic Theology cannot tolerate the unsettled, polyphonic character of the text.' This character of the text is directly connected with the Jewishness of these books.

Even more influential in his thinking therefore is the development of rhetorical criticism. Gunkel's initiation of form criticism lay behind James Muilenberg's development of 'close reading,' noticing every detail of every text, and the work of his student, Phyllis Trible, drew attention to the density and complexity of the texts and the prevalence of metaphor. Brueggemann (who was also a student of Muilenberg) accordingly reminds us that these characteristically Jewish texts are saturated with metaphor, rich with hyperbole, and characteristically ambiguous and open. Irony, incongruity and contradiction are part of their very stuff, an openness, playfulness and oddness which 'contrast sharply with Christian modes of theology which are characteristically settling and closing' with a 'bent towards the rational, the philosophical, the ontological.' While Brueggemann writes as a Christian then, he does not wish to be 'narrowly Christian,' and indeed it is his judgment that 'theologically what Jews and Christians share is much more extensive, much more important, much more definitional than what divides us.' In the context of postmodernism then, Brueggemann wants to be very alert to the struggle for justice and the hidden issues of power that lie behind interpretation of the text, and particularly the way in which Christian supersessionism has led to a long history of anti-Semitism which must be taken account in this era following the Holocaust.

Setting aside therefore what Paul Ricoeur called 'the world behind the text' which the historical-critical method attempted to uncover, and concentrating on 'the world in the text,' that is, the alternative vision of reality which the text gives, Brueggemann seeks to see the implications for 'the world in front of the text,' that is, the way in which the text creates new perspectives and new possibilities for us today. This approach is very helpful to us here in this chapter then, for as already made clear, we are not concerned here to trace the history of Israel before the exile, the history 'behind the text.' For our purposes, we are simply concerned with the theology of Second Temple Judaism as it is found in the books of the Hebrew Scriptures which they considered authoritative and canonical.

Where Brueggemann identified himself as 'postliberal,' Goldingay identifies himself with the evangelical tradition, 'those Christians who affirm the entire trustworthiness and authority of Scripture.' Here the evangelical and postliberal perspectives sound a similar note, that we begin with the text. 'Yet I want to try to write on the Old Testament,' Goldingay explains, 'without looking at it through Christian lenses or even New Testament lenses. By "Old Testament theology" I mean a statement of what we might believe about God and us if we simply use the Old Testament...' He also expresses it this way:

We could see it as a statement of Old Testament faith as this might have been expressed by someone who studied the Old Testament in, say, 10 B.C., if we may imagine the Old Testament existing as a defined collection of Scriptures at that point.

This fits our purpose here exactly: to understand what we Christians call the Old Testament as being first the Scriptures of Second Temple Judaism, the Scriptures which gave the Jewish people of the time of Jesus their understanding of their God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This will help us to understand the faith in which the Jewish boy, Yeshua, was nurtured in his home and in the synagogue in Nazareth.

(C) THE GOD OF ISRAEL

With that necessary background, summarizing the development of Old Testament Theology, we return to the task of employing this field of scholarship in order to gain an understanding of the faith of Second Temple Judaism and particularly the character of the God in whom they believed. This is of course an enormous field of study and so we obviously cannot present even a comprehensive summary here in this section. In any case, we shall have to examine what these thirty-nine books have to say about many aspects of faith when we examine them as Christian Scripture once we have begun to articulate Christian Theology. But here at this point what is most pertinent to our purpose is at least to sketch a preliminary understanding of how these books, considered as the Hebrew Scriptures, characterized the God of Israel.

The God of the Hebrew Scriptures

Indeed, a number of scholars have suggested that it is the character of the God of Israel, which gives unity to the Hebrew Scriptures rather than any symbolic or conceptual centre such as 'covenant' or 'promise.' Walter Zimmerli made his 'point of departure that focal point where the faith of the Old Testament specifically confesses the God of Israel under the name Yahweh.' Ollenberger comments, 'Ronald Clements agreed with Zimmerli that God must be the Old Testament's centre, or the basis of its unity, as did John L. MacKenzie.' Similarly, Samuel L. Terrien focused on God's 'elusive presence' incorporating other proposed centres such as covenant into that.

Both Brueggemann and Goldingay can be understood as similarly focusing primarily on the God of Israel. Brueggemann does not want to make any ontological claims (although he cannot help referring from time to time to the 'reality' of God!) and, following his postliberal strategy of concentrating on rhetoric, structures his Theology of the Old Testament around testimony. He envisages testimony as in a trial in a court of law where divergent testimonies are brought and the court must determine which to recognize as 'reality' or 'truth.' He goes so far as to claim that for the faith of Israel, 'the utterance is everything,' so that testimony actually 'constitutes' reality. This strategy allows him to hold the divergent testimonies together without ever reaching a verdict! The major testimonies he considers are 'Israel's Core Testimony' (Part I), 'Israel's Countertestimony' (Part II), Israel's 'Unsolicited Testimony' (Part III), and Israel's Embodied Testimony' (Part IV). But of course, when we ask, 'testimonies to what?' the answer has to be, 'testimonies to Yahweh.' The idea of 'testimony' makes no sense unless it is testimony about or to something or someone. These are in fact somewhat divergent character witnesses to the God of Israel. In his later work, Old Testament Theology: An Introduction (2008), Brueggemann focuses first and foremost on 'God as Primal Character and Agent'.

Goldingay's Old Testament Theology consists of three volumes, each as thick as Brueggemann's one volume. Volume One, Israel's Gospel, takes a narrative approach, so in a sense it can be seen as following in the tradition of von Rad, but leaving aside historical-critical questions. It pays particular attention to the long narrative from Genesis to II Kings which dominates what he prefers to call 'The First Testament,' also reflecting on the theological questions it poses. Volume Two, Israel's Faith, 'reverses this approach.' It pays more attention to the reflections of the Wisdom books, the exhortations of the Prophets and the praise and prayer of the Psalms. This material is not characteristically in narrative form, but is more discursive, closer to the analytic, critical and constructive exercise which Christians call Theology, especially in such writings as Isaiah 40-55, Job and Ecclesiastes. In this volume, Goldingay can be seen to be standing in the tradition of Eichrodt, but like Brueggemann, he recognizes that the Old Testament has 'a plurality of faith commitments.' Unlike Brueggemann however, he thinks that it is possible to fashion out of these a coherent statement of theological substance or themes. Volume Three, Israel's Life, takes a third complementary approach by focusing on lifestyle, worship, ethics, spirituality and community life. This is not Israel's life as the historical-critical method reconstructs it, but the life envisaged for Israel in its scriptures, the life it should or could have lived as a community. But central to all three volumes is the God of Israel.

Both Brueggemann and Goldingay begin with the verbs, or better, the verbal sentences, which indicate God's actions in the dominant narrative. This provides the chapter structure for Goldingay's first volume which summarizes Israel's history in this way: God began (Creation), God started over (from Eden to Babel), God promised (Israel's ancestors), God delivered (the exodus), God sealed (Sinai), God gave (the land), God accommodated (from Joshua to Solomon), God wrestled (from Solomon to the exile), and God preserved (exile and restoration). Brueggemann takes a similar approach, after three introductory chapters, summarizing the narrative by structuring his fourth chapter under the verbal headings that Yahweh is the God who creates, makes promises, delivers, commands and leads. In the two succeeding chapters, Brueggemann turns to adjectives and nouns, although he is just a little wary that this carries the danger of moving from the particular and concrete to more generalizing statements about Yahweh. Typical adjectives such as 'merciful,' and 'gracious' (Exod. 34:6) are positive and relational unlike the more metaphysical adjectives typical of scholastic Christian theology, such as 'omnipotent', 'omniscient', and 'omnipresent'. Nouns are even more generalizing, but Brueggemann points out that these are all metaphors, a necessity as a guard against idolatry and reductionist theological closure. There are 'metaphors of governance', Yahweh as judge, king, warrior, and father; but there are also 'metaphors of sustenance,' Yahweh as artist, healer, gardener-vinedresser, mother, and shepherd. Goldingay's equivalent to this comes in a chapter entitled, 'God,' the first major chapter after the introduction in Volume Two.

As we draw on these two scholars to sketch some understanding of the character of Israel's God in the Hebrew Scriptures, we must follow their lead and get away from the idea that Second Temple Judaism had an abstract, exclusively transcendental doctrine of God. Israel's theology or doctrine of God was implicit or embodied in the halakah or way of life of the people and was inseparable from politics and economics. We shall therefore take our starting point from their praxis, particularly the great festivals of the Jewish year, and try to understand from that perspective the character of the God whom they encountered as they celebrated the history recounted in their holy Scriptures.

According to Exodus 23:14, Israel was to keep three feasts each year, the feast of Unleavened Bread in the first month, Nisan (approximately April), a feast at the harvest of the first-fruits seven weeks later in the third month, Sivan (May/June), and a third feast at the end of the harvest in the seventh month, Tishri (approximately October). In Leviticus 23, the first of these is further elaborated as 'Yahweh's Passover' on the fourteenth day of the first month, and the feast of Unleavened Bread beginning on the fifteenth. Seven weeks later came the second, the celebration of the first-fruits with two loaves being waved before Yahweh and animal sacrifices. The third feast in the seventh month is then elaborated into a day of rest on the first day of the month, the Day of Atonement on the tenth day, and the Feast of Tabernacles beginning on the fifteenth day. Deuteronomy 16 reflects the simpler picture of three feasts per year as in Exodus, and names these as the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Feast of Weeks, and the Feast of Tabernacles (Booths). We shall follow the more elaborate picture of Leviticus, distinguishing the three days in the seventh month, thus giving us five celebrations, each of which is a reflection on some aspect of the character of Israel's God as revealed in the dominant narrative of their Scriptures.

Pesach (Passover): The God of Redemption

Since the destruction of the temple by the Romans in 70 A.D., the feast of פֶּסַח (pesach) or Passover has been celebrated only in Jewish homes. But in Second Temple Judaism there was also a great convocation in Jerusalem for the Passover on 14th Nisan and מַצּוֹת (massot) or Unleavened Bread, beginning on the 15th and lasting seven days. E.P Sanders reckoned that there may have been between 250,000 and 400,000 Palestinian Jews plus tens of thousands from the Diaspora in Jerusalem for the Passover. He estimated that the extended courts of Herod's temple could hold up to 400,000. Luke's Gospel recounts the visit of Yeshua and his parents to Jerusalem when he was twelve years old for the Passover in addition to the final Passover meal which he celebrated in Jerusalem with his disciples. The festival had at its heart a re-enactment of their ancestors' meal before the exodus, the unleavened bread recalling the bread baked for the flight from Egypt (Exod. 12:14-20, 34, 39).

The festival thus drew attention to the dominant and definitive episode of Jewish history and religion, the exodus from Egypt under Moses. We have to take note of the fact that all of these festivals (leaving aside the later additions of Purim and Hannukah) celebrated God's redemptive activity through Moses. David may have established Jerusalem as the capital of ancient Israel, Solomon may have built the temple, but neither of these major figures, nor Joshua, Samuel, Elijah or any of the prophets, lay at the heart of the festivals of Israel. All the major festivals dating from Old Testament times celebrated God's actions through Moses. Further, the greatest bulk of the Hebrew Scriptures concerned Moses. The 'books of Moses', constituting the Torah (what we call the Pentateuch), were the most authoritative books, the only ones accepted as holy scripture by all parties in Judaism. No other figure of Israelite history or religion had four books of the Hebrew Scriptures devoted to God's action through him. Moses dominates the Hebrew Scriptures and he dominated the feasts of Israel. It was the redemption of the exodus which was the formative and paradigmatic event for the scriptures and the religion of Second Temple Judaism. Brueggemann comments: 'Israel characteristically retold all of its experience through the powerful, definitional lens of the Exodus memory.' The God of Israel was first and foremost the God of Redemption.

Brueggemann draws attention to the verbs used. Yahweh 'brings out' (yatsa'), 'delivers' (nasal), 'redeems' (ga'al), 'saves' (ys'), 'redeems' (padah), and 'brings up' ('lh). Goldingay prefers to translate ga'al as 'restore.' He points out that while the God who redeems is also the God who created the world, it is possible for Israel in Deuteronomy 26:5-9 ('A wandering Aramean was my father') to summarize its story without referring to creation.

Similarly, in the encounter with Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 3, the narrative makes no link with the story of creation, but with God's promise to bless the patriarchs. Here, in one of the high points of the narrative, there is person to person encounter in which God reveals himself to Moses and Moses comes to know God in a way which would otherwise be impossible. The God who now reveals his name as Yahweh says that he has 'remembered' his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob and has 'heard' the groaning of his people (Exod. 2:24). There is in fact then an emphasis on God's faithfulness to his covenant promise. There is also an indication of his compassion for the enslaved Israelites. But although this is powerfully interpreted as demonstrating the love of God in Hosea 11 ('When Israel was a child, I loved him'), the narrative of Exodus does not emphasize that. Rather, taken as a whole, it emphasizes Yahweh's mighty power.

In Second Temple Judaism of course the divine name was no longer pronounced. Where the tetragrammaton, YHWH, appeared in the Scriptures, the reader in the synagogue would say instead, 'the Lord', 'Adonai' (or 'Kyrios' where the Greek translation was being read). Yet the name had no doubt been pronounced with reverence during the earliest period of Israel's long history, and in Exodus 3 it is said to be derived from the Hebrew verb meaning 'to be' or 'to become,' hayah. Goldingay comments that God responded to Moses' request for a name by giving not a label but a theology. Since the tenses of Hebrew verbs are different from European and other language groups, Yahweh can be interpreted as either 'I am' or 'I will be' but we must be careful not to read Hellenistic ontological concepts into that. 'I am that I am' or 'I will be who will be' rather asserts the complete sovereignty of this God, even over his own being so that he is not even limited by some kind of static 'essence.' We might say with Eberhard Jüngel that 'God's being is in becoming.' Since the tetragrammaton still appeared in the Hebrew Scriptures, the meaning of the personal divine name was not lost, but the more formal title 'Adonai' (the Lord) magnified the sovereignty and transcendence of Israel's God. Since this was the custom of Second Temple Judaism, which is our concern here in this chapter, we shall also generally refer to 'the Lord' rather than 'Yahweh.'

It is important to note that this revelation of God in the divine name was not a merely abstract revelation of merely interesting information. This God is revealed in joint speech-and-action which is only informative because it is performative. The word-in-action (dabar) of this God makes things happen. Yahweh is not merely an observer but an active agent. Brueggemann follows the suggestion of Hans von Balthasar that the story of the Hebrew Scriptures should therefore be seen as a 'theo-drama' in which, throughout the whole plot and the many sub-plots, Yahweh is the key character.

The active sovereignty of the Lord, expressed in speech at the burning bush, becomes increasingly clear throughout the narrative of divine speech and action throughout Exodus. Brueggemann comments: 'The exodus recital...becomes paradigmatic for Israel's testimony about Yahweh,' and continues:

Israel's God, in all parts of this material, is said to be filled with sovereign power to override all settled structures of power in the world and in tune enough with slavery, helplessness and suffering to respond to the social needs of the powerless.

The story of the exodus was picked out by Liberation Theology as the paradigm episode in Scripture, and interpreted, using the prism of Marx, as a basis for the revolution of the poor and marginalized. But of course before the nineteenth century, while people were conscious of their 'rank' in society, no one used Marx's category of 'social class' as it has been understood since the emergence of the distinction between capitalists and labour in the industrial revolution. This is another case of seeing one's own face at the bottom of the well. The Jewish scholar, Jon Levenson, similarly criticizes this tendency to obscure the particularity of the exodus by making it paradigmatic for modern notions of liberation and self-determinism. But while the exodus was the liberation of a people and not of a social class, nonetheless it was the liberation of a people downtrodden beneath a king who was a ruthless dictator. 'Pharaoh' (as Brueggemann reminds us) represents a system in which the state is all-powerful, owning all the land and all the means of production, and is a mythological as well as a real figure. The redemption of the down-trodden slaves, the people of Israel, is brought about by the defeat of the gods of Egypt in the ten plagues. As often in the ancient world (and much more subtly in the modern world) the gods are actually the mythological projection of the state. In the narrative, 'Pharaoh,' never given a personal name, stands for an impersonal, inhuman system of government. But this 'liberation' was not into some modern secular state of democracy, equality and human rights, but into the service of a new sovereign.

It is in this context that we can best understand what Brueggemann calls the 'metaphors of governance,' the Lord as judge, king, warrior and father. The metaphor of judge is not significant in the exodus narrative, but it is clear that the Lord is acting because he has heard the 'groaning' of the people (Exodus 2:24), so his action is in response to injustice. This fits with the Hebrew concept of 'judge', which is not of an impartial arbitrator, but of an active pursuer of the wrongdoer in order to right wrongs. And the psalms certainly celebrate this: 'He will judge the world with righteousness and the people with his truth' (Ps 96:13). The metaphor of 'father' is the least pervasive of the four in Exodus, according to Brueggemann, and it not only speaks of governance, but also of nurture. But Moses is to tell Pharaoh 'Israel is my first-born son' (Exod. 2:24), and this is elaborated in the Song of Moses at the end of Deuteronomy (Deut.32:1-43). God, 'The Rock,' is said to 'beget' (yld) Israel and also to 'give birth' (hll) to Israel, thus uniting the metaphors of 'fathering' and 'mothering' (Deut. 43: 18). The metaphor is also picked up by Hosea ('When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son,' 11:1, cf. also 8f.), and Jeremiah ('I thought you would call me, "My father"...' 3:19f.), in addition to the psalmist ('As a father has compassion on his children,' 103:13) and in Isaiah 63:16 ('For you are our father...').

Much more prominent in the Exodus narrative however are the metaphors of king and warrior. The Song of Moses in Exodus, 'I will sing to Yahweh, for he has triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider he has cast into the sea,' (Exodus 15:1-18) makes both explicit. 'Yahweh is a man of war: Yahweh is his name,' (verse 3) uses the actual phrase for 'warrior' (īsh milchamah), and while the noun, 'king' (melek), does not appear, the cognate verb 'reign' (mālak) is in the final triumphant shout: 'Yahweh will reign for ever and ever.' These metaphors for God do not appear in Genesis (although his ultimate power and authority are clear), but they appear in Exodus, apparently in opposition to the false and dictatorial kingship of Pharaoh. Brueggemann comments that the rule of Yahweh as king in the rhetoric of Israel has two functions. First, it is 'a critical principle to de-absolutize or even to de-legitimate all other governances that imagine they are unfettered and absolute' all the way from Pharaoh to Nebuchadnezzar. This claim, he suggests, is 'the seed of revolutionary civil disobedience.' Secondly, 'in the end, that awesome rule of Yahweh comes down to concrete generosity and restorative compassion for those in need.'

But over against the dictatorial conduct of Pharaoh, Goldingay argues in discussing the hardening of Pharaoh's heart, that since 'neither Israel nor Moses always takes the attitude that God looks for, ...evidently God does not manipulate them.'' Yahweh does have the capacity to manoeuvre Pharaoh into acting stupidly, but this is not to be taken as a guide to the way God normally operates. Goldingay suggests that God may be compared to a CEO or senior pastor who may set the general policies but who does not micromanage or determine in detail what all his staff say and do. God is the sovereign king, but he is not a dictator. Similarly (we need to add), God's sovereign power is seen in his 'mighty acts' against Pharaoh by 'signs and wonders' in the ten plagues, but this must not be taken as an indication of the way in which God normally acts. The people of biblical times no more expected miracles than those of modern times. Miracles are extremely rare in the narratives of the Hebrew Scriptures and are clustered mainly around the exodus.

The metaphor of warrior is inseparable in the Song of Moses from the metaphor of king and it is taken up in the title given to God, 'The Lord of Hosts,' or (as John Goldingay translates it) 'Yahweh Armies,' referring to his military legions. Brueggemann comments:

As in the case of judge or king, the notion of Yahweh as warrior serves as a critical principle, in order to assert that Yahweh will fight against and defeat all the illicit claimants to public power.

This is later taken up for example in Isaiah 52:10: 'Yahweh has bared his holy arm,' and liturgically in the great processional cry in Psalm 24:

Who is the king of glory? Yahweh, mighty in battle... Yahweh of hosts, he is the king of glory.

Brueggemann find this problematic, 'because it puts violence into the middle of Israel's speech about God, and it evidences that Israel celebrates God-sponsored, God-enacted violence.' However this way of putting it reflects a fairly recent change in the use of the word 'violence,' which has always been used to refer to the illegitimate use of physical force. There is no doubt from the narrative that the God of Redemption is fully prepared to use force to defeat illegitimate violence against the poor, the weak, the downtrodden, and the violated and abused. But it is a recent twisting of the word which also calls that 'violence.' Christian pacifists today may draw a different ethic from the New Testament, but Second Temple Judaism saw nothing in the Hebrew Scriptures to question the idea that their God would eventually triumph through the legitimate and forceful use of his mighty power. They had no doubt that the release of the captives may indeed require war-like measures.

However, in the midst of the whole story of the exodus there is one curious episode in which sudden and shocking force is used, and it is the turning point of the narrative. So significant is it apparently, that this is the episode that was to be forever remembered by the people of Israel. For the annual festival after all, was not the Feast of the Exodus, but the Feast of the Unleavened Bread and of the Passover. The tenth plague, the visitation of Yahweh's messenger of death to every home, would also have killed the first-born son in every Israelite home, had they not put the blood of the Passover lamb on the door-posts. Why was this picked out as the key episode to be remembered down through the generations, and what did it mean? This surely made it clear to Second Temple Judaism that the exodus was not then just the simple rescue of innocent, downtrodden Israelites out of the hand of wicked Egyptians. Somehow the Israelites were also in danger from the hand of Yahweh's avenging angel of death and needed to be redeemed from that as well as from the power of Pharaoh. According to Brueggemann, it was quite clear then from the Hebrew Scriptures that there was something very fierce and mysteriously alarming about the God of Redemption.

Shavu'ot (Pentecost): The God of Covenant and Torah

Seven weeks after the Feast of the Passover came the feast which Hellenistic Jews called 'Pentecost' since it was on the fiftieth day (pentecoste hemera). The Hebrew name was חַג הַשָׁבוּעוֹת (hag hashavu'ot), the Feast of Weeks. This festival celebrating the first fruits of the wheat harvest, and in Second Temple Judaism it had become a commemoration of the giving of the Law at Sinai. But in the scriptural narrative, the giving of the Torah came of course in the context of the covenant (ברית, berit). E.P. Sanders established that Judaism was not a legalistic religion, certainly not in the way it has often been caricatured by Christians. It was rather a covenantal nomism, a religion of Torah, translated as 'Law' (Gk: nomos), or better 'Instruction,' within the context of covenant. It is appropriate therefore to think about the way in which the Feast of Shavu'ot or Pentecost made the Jewish people of Jesus' day reflect on Israel's God as the God of Covenant and Torah.

As we have seen, although Eichrodt's attempt to see covenant as the key unifying concept of Old Testament Theology was widely rejected as too abstract and conceptual and even reductionist, nevertheless the broader concept of 'covenant relatedness' is defended by Brueggemann as a pervasive element in the narrative of the Hebrew scriptures. Five major covenants between God and human beings may be identified, the covenants with Noah, Abraham, Moses and David, and the 'new covenant' prophesied by Jeremiah. Of these, the one that bulks by far the largest in sheer weight of documentation is the Mosaic covenant. The narrative of Sinai takes up half of Exodus, and all of Numbers and Leviticus and it is rehearsed again with further reflection in Deuteronomy, the English title of the book being derived from 'second' (deuteros) and 'law' (nomos).

Again, our concern is: what did the celebration of this feast bring to the attention of the Jewish people of Second Temple Judaism about their God? We have to note first in the narrative of the book of Exodus the terrifying theophany at Sinai. This was not a covenant between equals, like that between the two chieftains, Laban and Jacob, for example (Genesis 31:44-54). Mendenhall argued that the structure of the covenant documents (seen particularly in Deuteronomy), was like those of the Hittite kings with their vassals, including preamble, historical prologue, stipulations, a clause on the deposition of the covenant documents, a list of witnesses, and finally the curses and blessings. But although that has been debated, what is beyond doubt is that this was a covenant between the all-powerful and God and his people.

The whole story of the exodus and the subsequent Mosaic covenant is clearly presented as a fulfilment of God's promise to, and covenant with, Abraham (Exod. 2:24), and that points us to the mystery of election. In his sovereignty, God chose Abraham, and yet not only for his own sake, but that through him all the nations of the earth should be blessed (Gen. 18:18; 26:4). The clearest expression of the close logical connection between election and the sheer grace or gift of God comes in Moses' great sermon in Deuteronomy:

Is was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love upon you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples: it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath he swore to your fathers... (Deut. 7:7f.)

It is notable that the covenant with Abraham is specifically said to be 'everlasting' (Gen. 17:7), and that may lie behind the fact that in Exodus 19-24, God is not said to 'cut' a covenant (to use the Hebrew idiom). Certainly Moses performs a ritual which appears to indicate the making of a covenant, although without any explicit instructions from the Lord. The theophany in Exodus 19 leads straight into the Ten Words or Commandments and some more detailed instructions (chapters 20-23). That is then followed by the ritual in which, on the following day, Moses builds an altar and sets up twelve pillars at the foot of the mountain, offering oxen as burnt offerings and peace offerings and sprinkling or splattering the blood on the altar and on the people. Goldingay comments that it is only on this unique occasion that blood is sprinkled on the people, perhaps indicating their installation as a nation of priests, and that the sprinkling of the blood on the altar, quite differently from the later regular sacrifices, indicated that the Lord was as solemnly bound to the covenant as the people. But God himself is not said to 'cut' a covenant till Exodus 34 (re-stated more fully in Leviticus 26:9-13) so that Goldingay concludes that Exodus 19-24 'is not an account of covenant making, but of the sealing or reconfirming or renegotiating of a covenant.' God does make the covenant in Exodus 34, but nevertheless we have to say that this Mosaic covenant cannot be thought of as replacing the covenant with Abraham. Rather it seems to be its continuation or re-institution under more specific conditions.

The theophany is certainly awe-inspiring, and Goldingay comments on a certain ambiguity in the text about God's accessibility. The Lord is both on the mountain and comes down on the mountain. The people may and may not go up the mountain, the priests and elders may and may not go up the mountain, and may not see God, yet are said to see him. Samuel L. Terrien discussed this feature throughout the Hebrew scriptures of the 'elusive presence.'

Brueggemann wants to press this feature of ambiguity even further. The high point of the revelation at Sinai comes in Exodus 34 where, after the incident of the golden calf, Moses ascends the mountain with two new tables of stone. The Lord descends in a cloud and passes before him proclaiming his name:

The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful (rahum) and gracious (hannun), slow to anger ('erek 'appaim) and abounding in steadfast love (hesed) and faithfulness (emeth), keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving (nose') iniquity ('awon) and transgression (pesa') and sin (hatah), but who will be no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and upon the children's children to the third and fourth generation (Exod 34:6-7).

Brueggemann describes this as 'a credo of adjectives' which speaks of complete trustworthiness and reliability and sees it as culminating in the rare and surprising word 'forgive' (nose'). This speaks of intense solidarity with, and commitment to, those with whom God is bound, a fundamental inalienable loyalty. The word hesed, translated 'mercy' in older English translations, carries the meaning of 'steadfast love' towards those who have not earned it. But the second half of the declaration therefore comes as a surprise. The Lord 'will not clear the guilty.' There appears to be something of a disjunction or even a contradiction here. How are the two parts of the statement to be reconciled? Brueggemann comments that this alerts Israel to 'something in Yahweh's sovereign rule - Yahweh's own self-seriousness - that is not compromised or conceded, even in the practice of solidarity.' And when he comes to sum up Israel's 'core testimony,' he takes this further, presenting this thesis:

Yahweh is a Character and Agent who is evidenced in the life of Israel as an Actor marked by unlimited sovereignty and risky solidarity, in whom this sovereignty and solidarity often converge, but for whom, on occasion, sovereignty and solidarity are shown to be in unsettled tension or in an acute imbalance. The substance of Israel's testimony concerning Yahweh, I propose, yields a character who has a profound disjunction at the core of the Subject's life.

He takes Exodus 34: 6-7 as 'a representative or perhaps even normative expression of Israel's characteristic stock of adjectives for speech about Yahweh,' but notes that 'the statement does an abrupt about-face.' He comments:

I can find no evident way in which the two parts of this formulation can be readily and fully harmonized. The faithful God who forgives (ns') iniquity is the same God who visits (pqd) the offenders for their iniquity.

He is startled by the close proximity of the two apparently contradictory assertions and examines the reappearance of the formulation in Number 14:1. There Moses quotes only the first positive half of the formula in his attempt to persuade the Lord to be merciful to Israel, but the Lord's reply intentionally repeats both sides. Brueggemann comments that these 'irreconcilable options 'give substance to the disjunction at the centre of Israel's life and in the centre of Yahweh's character.' This formula 'states what is most crucial about Yahweh': Yahweh's 'capacity for solidarity and for sovereignty is the primary reality', and it is certainly true that there is something rational in that 'Yahweh's potential enactment in rage is in response to and correlated with "iniquity",' but Israel knows that sometimes the 'visiting iniquity' goes well beyond the enactment of sanctions, and seems to indicate 'something potentially wild, unruly, and dangerous in Yahweh's life.'

All of this comment comes in Brueggemann's exposition of what he calls 'Israel's core testimony' in Part I of his book. But following his metaphor of testimony in a court of law, Brueggemann goes on in Part II to examine 'Israel's counter-testimony.' Even within the Hebrew Scriptures, the cross-examination of Israel's core testimony takes place through a counter-testimony which dwells on the hiddenness, the ambiguity or instability, and the negativity in Israel's experience of her God. Here the psalms of complaint and abandonment, the hiddenness of Israel's God in the Wisdom theology, and even the passages suggesting enticement and deception by the Lord and the apparent capacity for violence are examined. His conclusion is that 'the tension between the core testimony and the counter-testimony is acute and ongoing,' and 'belongs to the very character and substance of Old Testament faith, a tension that precludes and resists resolution.'

Christians may feel uncomfortable with this analysis of the portrayal of the character of God in the 'theo-drama' of the Hebrew Scriptures, and it is not softened in any way, even in Second Temple Judaism, when the personal name 'Yahweh' is replaced in the live reading of scripture with the more exalted title, 'the Lord.' But it is important not to avoid this, uncomfortable though it may be, and to admit that there have been those in the Church ever since Marcion who have found this a serious difficulty. There are episodes in the narrative of the Hebrew Scriptures, notably the 'ethnic cleansing' of Canaan, which continue to pose problems for Christian ethics.

Goldingay also sees 'two sides' to the person and activity of the Lord: 'power and love, mercy and anger, forgiveness and rejection, violence and sorrow.' But he proposes a fairly simple solution to Brueggemann’s disjunction in Exod 34: 6-7, namely that the guilty who are not forgiven are those who persist in their sin and refuse to repent. That may be the solution, but the deeper theological question we can note here in a preliminary way is whether it is true to say that the disjunction of 'two sides' is within the character of God, or whether it is an apparent disjunction which only obtains because of the sin of God’s creatures. That would mean that the problem is not within God, but in God’s relationship with sinful creatures whom he loves. Ultimately, once we plumb the depths of the Christian doctrine of the cross later towards the end of this volume, we will suggest that the disjunction or contradiction Brueggemann presents here is essentially the same problem Luther faced in his profound question: how can God be just and the justifier of the ungodly?

The revelation of the character of Israel's God at Sinai in the two theophanies of Exodus 19 and Exodus 34 is the context within which comes the Torah, the 'instruction' or 'law.' This begins with the requirement to observe the uniqueness of the Lord ('You shall have no other gods before me') and particularly the unique requirement in the ancient world that the Lord cannot be represented by any image. Whereas ancient worshippers could enter the temple of Dagon in Ashdod and see the god with the head of a man and the tail of a fish, or the shrines of Baal and see the god with his spear and club, if they had ever been able to enter the Holy of Holies in the temple of Yahweh and view the golden throne upon the ark overshadowed by the cherubim, they would have seen no image. The throne was apparently empty for no one could look on the God of Israel or imagine an image of Yahweh.

In Deuteronomy, this uniqueness is re-stated in the Shema:

Hear (shema), O Israel, the Lord your God the Lord one, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your might.

But the requirements for devotion to the one Lord God, elaborated in the sabbath command and the requirements for worship in the tabernacle, are inseparable from the requirements for upright and faithful behaviour towards family and neighbours, expressed in the Ten Words and elaborated in numerous specific requirements for daily life. In Deuteronomy, this leads on to the blessings and curses conditional upon faithful obedience (Deut. 30). Unlike the earlier covenant with Abraham (Genesis 15 and 17) and the later covenant with David (so very briefly presented in II Samuel 7:4-17 and 23:5), both of which are apparently unconditional, the Mosaic covenant, if not exactly conditional, at least spells out its obligations for Israel, and is never said to be everlasting.

The theology of Deuteronomy makes it particularly clear that blessing depends on keeping the obligations of the covenant and that curses will come on those who do not. The historical narrative which follows, sometimes called the 'deuteronomic history,' seems to be written to document that when kings and people obeyed the commandments, they prospered, and when they did not, they suffered. But against that orthodoxy, the Book of Job dismisses the idea that one can tell who the righteous are by their prosperity, and who the sinners are by their adversities. Second Temple Judaism is therefore not a legalistic religion, but one in which Torah ('Law' or Instruction) has its context within Berit (Covenant). For the faith of Israel rightly understood (as also for Christian faith), grace precedes law.

Rosh Hashana (New Year): The God of Creation

Rosh Hashana ('The Head of the Year'), the next major celebration, came four months later on the first day of Tishri (approximately October) and is generally known as the Jewish New Year. It appears however that the year may originally have been said to begin in Nisan (which is, after all, the 'first month'), and it is sometimes said that the ecclesiastical calendar began then in the spring but the civic calendar on the first day of Tishri. Whatever the explanation, the festival of Rosh Hashana is mentioned without being given this name in two passages in the Pentateuch, Leviticus 23: 24-25 and Number 29:1-6. From Leviticus comes its other name, the Day of Blowing (yom teru'ah), when the shofar or ram's horn was blown. As the first of the three feasts in Tishri, Rosh Hashana is closely connected with the Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) on the tenth day of the month in that the blowing of the ram's horn was to startle people into a time of repentance and reflection in the light of coming judgment.

But among its many associations with events in the story of the Hebrew Scriptures was one with the first day of creation. That may raise the question, should not our numeration of the feasts of Judaism have begun then with this New Year celebration since the creation of the world obviously came before Israel's redemption? In reaction to von Rad's marginalizing of creation in his account of Old Testament Theology, some scholars have argued that, since the biblical narrative begins with creation, belief in God as the universal Creator should be regarded as prior to belief in God as Israel's Redeemer and Covenant God. But it is indicative of just how minor the celebration of creation was in Judaism, that the association with creation is only one of the many associations of this more minor feast day. And although this day was regarded as New Year, at least from the time of the Babylonian exile, the 'ecclesiastical' or 'church' year in Judaism began with the Feast of the Passover, that is, with Redemption. Although God as Creator was an essential part of Israel's faith therefore, there are good reasons both in the structure of the Feasts of Israel and in the Hebrew Scriptures to say that Israel's faith centred on Redemption and Covenant, and that Creation was in the background. It was certainly essential background, but in the Hebrew Scriptures, although the narrative begins with the act of creation, and although there is much about our present experience of the beauties and glories of God's creation in the Writings, the main narrative is dominated by Israel's historic experience of Redemption. On the other hand however, it was an essential part of Israel's faith that the God who was the Redeemer and the Holy One of Israel (as Isaiah 40-55 proclaims) was also the one who created the heavens and the earth.

If the name Yahweh is God's personal name, revealed particularly to Israel, the redeemed people, the same God is also known as 'Elohim. While Yahweh refers uniquely and exclusively to the God of Israel and so is a proper name, 'el is the common noun 'god' and 'elohim the plural, 'gods'. But the form 'Elohim is also used to refer to the one and only God and when it is, it is given a singular verb. Although in Exodus 3 it is said that the ancestors of Israel did not know God as Yahweh, this proper name is used in the book of Genesis, possibly because the narrator inserts it into the narrative. What is clear however in Genesis is that Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, is identified with the 'High God,' El, who is regarded also by many outside the family of Abraham as the creator of the world. He is thus El Shaddai, which is often interpreted to mean 'God Almighty,' El Elyon, 'God Most High,' El Olam, 'the Everlasting God,' as well as more personally named by Jacob El Bethel, 'God of the house of God,' and by Hagar, El Roi, 'God who sees me.' Brueggemann comments:

In characterizing YHWH in this way as the Old Testament pervasively does, the Old Testament participates in the ‘common’ religious affirmation of ancient Near Eastern culture in which every state and tribe acknowledges and exalts in [sic] a high god who is credited with power and authority. He adds: The God featured in this common theology is the Creator god who maintains the world through edicts that enact sanctions or rewards and punishments, and who acts as is necessary to preserve the world and its just order '

The great narrative of the Hebrew scriptures begins of course with the stately rhythms of the liturgical 'hymn to creation' (as H. Orton Wiley called it), followed by the more human story of the creation of the Man (אָדָם, Adam) and his wife. Scholars have contrasted Genesis 1 particularly with the theogony of Enuma Elish ('When on high'), the Babylonian story of creation, recited in the annual festival to glorify Marduk, their chief god. The gods emerge in twos from the watery chaos, Tiamat, itself divine, till eventually Marduk, subdues chaos by battle and bloodshed, creates humanity, and establishes a cosmos of order centred in Babylon. By contrast, the God of Genesis 1 does not emerge from the primeval chaos, but is the sovereign God preceding all else and creating the order of the world by his majestic word of command. In the second section of the book of Isaiah, the Babylonian gods are mocked and contrasted with the transcendence of the Creator God (see especially Isaiah 44:9-20, 46:1-13), suggesting that it was the Babylonian exile which prompted Israel to develop from a practical 'mono-Yahwism' towards a more explicit monotheism. There is no doubt that throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, the Lord is 'absolutely unique in authority and sovereignty,' so that 'in a sense, then, the First Testament is monotheistic.' However Goldingay reminds us that it is not an abstract intellectual monotheism like the different versions of monotheism that emerged in the Greek philosophical tradition, more or less simultaneously with the Israel's exile. Indeed, monotheism may be (as David Tracy alleges) 'an Enlightenment invention.' The Hebrew Scriptures are 'not preoccupied with the arithmetical question,' but with the question, 'Who is God - Baal, Marduk or Yahweh?' As Goldingay puts it, they thus 'combine a theoretical polytheism with a practical monotheism, contrasting with the modern or postmodern world's theoretical monotheism but practical polytheism.'

In Second Temple Judaism it was of course the contrast with the gods of the Graeco-Roman world, rather than the gods of Babylon, which was relevant. The deliberate attempt of the Seleucid emperors to exterminate Judaism had led to the Maccabaean revolt, but the subtle and pervasive infiltration of Hellenistic culture and religion into Judea and Galilee continued to put Judaism under pressure. The crude polytheism of popular religion, the mystery cults, and all the immorality that went with those forms of religion, were clearly antagonistic to the faith of Israel. But the different monotheistic philosophical systems, Platonist, Aristotelian and Stoic, although seen as allies by such Jewish intellectuals as Philo, would have been seen as deeply alien by most of the Jewish people who were aware of them, particularly those in Judea and in the country areas of Galilee. Neither the demiurge of Plato, nor the 'unmoved mover' of Aristotle, nor the world Reason or Logos of the Stoics represented a god who was distinct from and transcendent over creation like the God of Israel.

While this may not then have been explicitly articulated within the Hebrew Scriptures themselves nor within Second Temple Judaism, the God of Israel was unique in a way that was different from those other more philosophical forms of monotheism. Platonists, Aristotelians, and Stoics each made a claim to unique universality for their concept of 'god', but each of these gods was thought to be necessarily connected with, or even embedded in, the cosmos. They represent different forms of an ontological monism which includes the divine within the ordered cosmos. Even the Hellenistic dualism between the kosmos aesthetos (the material world of the senses) and the kosmos noetos (the intellectual world) was a dualism within the ontological monism of the cosmos. What differentiated the God of Israel from all other forms of monotheism was that He alone (significantly a personal pronoun, but not neuter) was not an aspect or dimension of the cosmos nor necessarily linked to it. Certainly human beings only knew this Lord God as One related to the cosmos, and in that sense inconceivable without it. But the universal, transcendent, sovereign Lord, the Creator of heaven and earth, had brought the cosmos into existence. That was open to the implication that Israel's God was the One who was once without the cosmos, and in that sense, God was conceivable without the cosmos as the One who was before creation. As for the Epicureans, they tended still to refer to the traditional pagan gods, but polytheism and monotheism were both irrelevant to them, for the gods took no interest whatever in humanity. For Judaism, by contrast with all of the other forms of monotheism, the sovereign Lord was transcendent before and over the cosmos, and yet he was also constantly active in the cosmos. The radical transcendence of God did not cancel out his immanent activity.

Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement): The Holy God

On the evening of the ninth day after Rosh Hashanah came Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. This was not a feast but a fast and a day of rest, the most solemn day in the whole calendar. It was day of 'holy convocation' (Leviticus 23:27) for those in Jerusalem, but not a time when countless thousands came in pilgrimage from around Palestine or the Diaspora. More than any other day of the year, the theme of Atonement focussed the attention of the worshippers on the sinfulness of Israel in contrast to the holiness of God, a contrast that was physically embodied in the very architecture of the temple in Jerusalem.

The relevant portions of the Hebrew Scriptures were the instructions for the tabernacle and the priesthood in chapters 25 to 31 of Exodus, given to Moses on Mount Sinai while the people below were crafting and worshipping the golden calf. They are further elaborated in chapters 35 to 40 and the succeeding book of Leviticus. The very structure of the tabernacle (mishkan, dwelling place) with its outer courts, Holy Place, and Holy of Holies, spoke of gradations of holiness. As the elusive presence of God appeared on the mountain once in cloud and fire, so now the Lord will dwell in the Holy of Holies in cloud and fire, symbolized by incense. The elusive presence of the invisible God was symbolized by the empty throne, the kapporeth between the cherubim over the ark of the covenant. And as Moses met with God on the mountain, so now once each year the high priest alone will enter into the presence (shekinah) in the Holy of Holies.

Goldingay comments, 'While the whole world (heaven and earth) is God's home, the sanctuary represents God's home in microcosm.' Here is the beauty, coherence, colour, symmetry and order which (in Genesis 1) the priestly writer also saw in God's creation with its ordered separation between light and darkness, day and night, earth and sky, sea and land, plants and sea creatures, animals and humanity. Particularly now, in the tabernacle, there is to be a 'distinction between the holy and the common and between the defiling and the clean' (Lev. 10:10). And the set times of the daily sacrifices, offered on the altar in the large outer court, reflected the set times of day and night.

But the elusive presence of the Lord cannot be contained within the sanctuary any more that it can be tied to an image. The tent was also a 'meeting place' where the Lord descended in the cloud to meet with Moses and the people as happened at Sinai (see Numbers 9:15-23, 10:11-12, 33-34; 14:14; Deut 1:33). Goldingay suggest that 'perhaps the story is distinguishing between the fact of God's presence and the experience or sense of God's presence.'

Unlike the tabernacle, constructed in every detail at the Lord's own initiative and instruction, the temple in Jerusalem which eventually replaced it was build at the initiative of David and Solomon. The Lord was rather ambivalent about it, but came to accept it and filled it with his presence (II Sam. 7:5-7; I Kings 8; I Chron. 17:3-6, II Chron. 6 and 7). There had been a similar ambivalence over the establishing of the monarchy, which also had not been God's initiative, but was initiated by 'the elders of Israel' (I Sam. 8). Yet God chose David, ' a man after his own heart' (I Sam. 13:14), and established his dynasty with an everlasting covenant (II Sam. 7: 8-16; 23: 5). There is therefore a strong connection between Solomon's temple and the Davidic dynasty, demonstrated in the royal psalms, and the part they are presumed to have played in the temple liturgy. Whether or not Mowinckel was right about the annual enthronement ceremony (and recent work by J.J.M. Roberts suggests that he was), it seems more than likely that the kings of the house of David were enthroned at least at the beginning of each reign, presumably on the model of Solomon's enthronement in I Kings 1. And it is more than likely that Psalm 2 and Psalm 110 were oracles pronounced to the king as the words of God as part of the temple liturgy.

With no Davidic king after the exile and debate about the legitimacy of the Hasmonean dynasty which combined the roles of king (or ethnarch) and high priest in one, there were additional reasons for dubiety about the Second Temple. Further, the ark of the covenant with the kapporeth overshadowed by the cherubim disappeared during the exile and was not replaced, so that consequently the Holy of Holies remained empty. When the Hasmoneans were finally overthrown and Herod the Great was appointed king by the victorious Romans, the ambiguity was greater still. Some, particularly the Essenes, rejected the temple and its sacrifices as completely as corrupt. Nevertheless the vast majority of Jewish people in Second Temple Judaism continued to participate in the sacrifices and worship of the temple. Herod was unable to enlarge the Holy Place and Holy of Holies, but he adorned them and embarked on a building programme, enlarging the outer courts and the temple area as a whole with earthworks contained by massive walls forming an extensive platform around the temple. The Royal Portico, larger than most later European cathedrals, was built to the south within the precincts as part of the approach to the temple itself. The total area of Herod's temple complex dwarfed anything in Greece or Rome.

Despite the ambiguity about the buildings, the worship and sacrifices of Second Temple, Judaism adhered as closely as possible to the instructions in the Hebrew Scriptures. Sacrifice, as Sanders points out, was common religious practice across the Mediterranean world, and most men were quite familiar with the slaughter of their animals, not often but regularly, at least once a year. Not all the temple sacrifices had to do with atonement. To begin with there were the regular morning and evening sacrifices every day. These were 'burnt offerings' in which two male yearling lambs were offered to God and entirely burnt along with flour and oil, while wine was poured as a libation round the altar. The sacrifices were doubled on the sabbath and there were additional sacrifices at each new moon. The Scriptures did not specify exactly the purpose of these burnt offerings, but they were generally thought of as gifts to God and sometimes referred to as 'thank offerings.'

But in addition to these offerings of the community as a whole, paid for out of the temple tax, there were three kinds of sacrifices offered by individuals. According to E.P. Sanders, individual burnt offerings were not thought of as atoning (despite Lev. 1:4), but simply as honouring God. But secondly, there were sin offerings and guilt offerings, which were closely associated. Since 'sin offerings' were not always for sin (but, for example, to be offered after childbirth), they are probably better thought of as 'purification offerings.' The Hebrew term for 'sin' here is hatah, meaning 'missing the mark' or 'deviation from the norm.' Sanders regards Josephus as his most reliable witness to the sacrifices as practised in period of Herod's temple, and notes that Josephus distinguishes between sins committed in ignorance and those committed consciously. The 'sin offering' expiated inadvertent sin (as in Leviticus), while he regards the 'guilt offering' as offered for deliberate and intentional sin. Sanders notes that Philo also makes the same distinction between involuntary and voluntary sins. The third kind of sacrifice offered by an individual was the 'peace offering,' but the Hebrew word shelem (related to shalom) could be interpreted as meaning 'a sacrifice of well-being.'

So while not all offerings were for atonement, the sin and guilt offerings were. And in addition to those individual offerings, the corporate dimension of Israel's sin was recognized each year in the Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. As we have seen, the day came after ten days of self-examination and repentance. The high priest himself officiated, having bathed and changed from his golden festival garments worn for the morning sacrifice into white linen garments. Standing between two goats by the altar, he cast lots which designated one 'for the Lord' and the other 'for Azazel'. He began with his own personal confession: 'O God, I have committed iniquity, transgressed and sinned before thee, I and my house. O God, forgive the iniquities and transgressions and sins which I have committed.' He then slaughtered a bull. Next he took a censer of coals and incense into the Holy of Holies and put the incense in fire to produce smoke (originally so that he would not see the ark of the covenant and the kapporeth). He then returned with blood from the bull which he sprinkled (originally on the kapporeth), went out again and sacrificed the goat 'for the Lord' and returned to sprinkle some of its blood in the Holy of Holies. He then went out again and put blood from both animals on the horns of the altar to sanctify it. He then laid his hands on the goat 'for Azazel,' the scapegoat, and confessed 'all the sins of the people of Israel before it was taken, bearing the sins of Israel, to be turned loose in the wilderness.

It is important for us not only as historians, but as theologians, to dwell on the actual physical ceremonies of sacrifice in the temple and particularly the ritual for the Day of Atonement. Second Temple Judaism, the faith in which the boy Yeshua was nurtured in Nazareth, was a very physical faith. The design of the tabernacle, and so in continuity with that, the design of the temple, represented the physical creation. It embodied the idea of gradations of holiness, the outer courts for the people of Israel, the Holy Place for the priests, and the Holy of Holies once a year on the Day of Atonement for the High Priest alone as the representative of Israel. Burnt offerings and peace offerings were offered as physical thanksgiving to the God who had given everything - the land, the crops, the cattle - for Israel's good and enjoyment. Here was no Greek philosophical asceticism, equating spirituality with abstaining from physical life, nor any Platonist tendency to think that the intellectual and abstract was the true realm of truth. Quite to the contrary, this was a physical faith, acted out in physical drama. But at its heart was the mystery of atonement not only seen in the sacrifices in the Holy Place, but somehow embodied physically in the kapporeth, the Mercy Seat or Place of Atonement which was none other than the very throne of God in the Most Holy Place. It was uniquely on the Day of Atonement that the rationale for the physical gradations of holiness in the architecture of the temple was physically acted out. At no other festival or fast did the High Priest enter the Holy of Holies and sprinkle the blood of the sacrifice on the kapporeth.

The Hebrew verb translated as 'to atone', kipper or kaphar, from the which the noun kapporeth comes, literally means 'to cover,' and the simplest explanation is to say that the sacrifice was thought of as a 'covering' of the sin. This did not mean that it was 'covered up' or concealed, but that it was obliterated. And quite clearly, in the Torah, it was the Holy God himself who had appointed the means - the priesthood and the sacrifices - to wipe the slate clean. However that makes no sense unless there was something about God which demanded that the sin be dealt with. It is true that there was no thought here (as C.H. Dodd argued) that the penitent was persuading God to forgive him in the way that pagan worshippers placated or propitiated their angry gods. In contrast, it was God himself who had given the means of forgiveness out of his faithful love (hesed). Yet at the same time, there was something about God which insisted that the offence could not simply be ignored or forgotten. The sacrifice had to be costly, as David's dictum reminded Israel: 'Shall I offer to the Lord my God that which cost me nothing?' (II Sam. 24:24). And sacrifice was demanded by the holiness of God. Though not a pagan kind of propitiation, it is necessary to recognize that this was propitiation of a kind, a propitiation that proceeded from the very covenant love of God but which was a recognition of his holiness. Although there may have been exceptions (nothing is explicitly said about sacrifices in David's repentance, for example), the physical ritual of atonement conveyed to Israel the insistence of God in his holiness that sin could not be dealt with simply by abstract thought or even inward penitence. Sacrifice was of no use without penitence (as the prophets reminded Israel), but penitence was not real without the physical sacrifice. In this very physical religion, it took physical sacrifice as well as an appropriate mental attitude to make atonement for sin. In contrast to the Hellenistic dualism between the physical and 'spiritual', reflected in our assumptions in the era of modernity, the action of the body and the attitude of the heart were not to be separated.

The requirement for sacrifices of atonement therefore tells us something fundamental about the character of Israel's God: that there appears to be something of a tension between covenant love and his insistence in his holiness on the condemnation of sin. Our modern terminology tends to talk about a tension between God's love and God's 'justice' or 'righteousness,' but actually in the terminology of Israel, the idea of 'righteousness' (sedaqa) is not that of 'justice' in the modern sense, that is, of impartial weighing up of evidence and punishing those found to be guilty. Although it includes the idea of equity, the Hebrew word sedaq which we translate 'righteousness' is closer in meaning to our word 'faithfulness.' It is God's faithfulness to his covenant people, his constancy and consistency and reliability. In the poem of Hosea 2, where God is in deep anguish at the unfaithfulness of Israel, and in his deep grieving anger is about to cast her off, there is a sudden turn-around and God pledges to restore the defiled spouse:

I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you to me in righteousness (sedaq) and justice (mishpat), in steadfast love (hesed) and in compassion (rahamim). I will betroth you to me in faithfulness (emunah)...

Brueggemann points out that to the three key words from Exodus 34:6-7, steadfast love, compassion and faithfulness, two more are added here: righteousness and justice. The point for us to note is that the concepts of righteousness (sedaq) and justice (mispat) are parallel to compassion and faithfulness and steadfast love. Therefore that which is thought to stand in unshakeable opposition to our sin is not God's righteousness (sedaq), but his holiness (qados).

Goldingay takes up Brueggemann's thought about the 'disjunction' in God, but expresses it more perceptively as 'Yhwh's Dilemma.' He suggests that the Hebrew Scriptures take up the same kind of ethical dilemmas that we find in Greek tragedy. The tension in God

is overt when the First Testament refers to Yhwh having a change of mind... and when it explicitly talks of tension within Yhwh (see Hos. 11) or speaks of Yhwh's 'alien' work (Is 28:21) or describes Yhwh as acting 'not from the heart' (Lam 3:33).

He adds: 'Awareness of such inevitable tension within the one God helps us understand the apparent volatility and unpredictability that features within God's character in the First Testament story.' The story is that of the Holy God, 'of purer eyes than to look on iniquity' (Hab. 1:13), who loves his good and noble creatures who are yet guilty, defiled and disgusting. All through the story of Israel in the Hebrew Scriptures, Israel is again and again and again guilty, deceptive, violent, idolatrous and corrupt. And in being so, it is only representative of the corporate sin of the human race. How could a passionately loving and holy God be filled with anything other than wrathful grief and deeply grieving wrath? Hosea's prophecy supremely pictures this distraught, anguished husband, deeply wounded and hurt and angry at the persistent unfaithfulness of his spouse. On the Day of Atonement above all days, Israel was confronted with its own sin and with the burning purity of the holiness of their loving God.

Succoth (Tabernacles): The God of Pilgrimage

Finally in Tishri, five days after the Day of Atonement, Israel celebrated the Feast of Tabernacles or Booths. Temporary shelters made of 'branches of olive, wild olive, myrtle, palm and other leafy trees' (Neh. 8:15) were constructed outside each house (or, in compact Jerusalem, on the roof), and the family lived in them for seven days, culminating in an eighth festival day. Coming after harvest, this was a joyous festival with (according to Sanders) something of a carnival atmosphere. Huge crowds of pilgrims, second only to Passover, came to Jerusalem and enormous crowds of worshippers gathered in the courts of the temple waving lulavs, branches of palm, willow or myrtle each with a citrus fruit attached. Priests carrying willow branches marched round the altar and the Hallel (the Songs of Ascents, Pss 120-134) was sung. Sacrifices were offered every day, beginning with thirteen oxen, fourteen lambs, two rams and a kid (as a sin offering) on the first day. According to Neh. 8:17, Ezra read from the law on each day of this festival. According to John 7, the prophet Yeshua celebrated this festival in Jerusalem at least once.

In Leviticus, the connection with the wilderness wanderings is explicit:

You shall live in booths for seven days: all born in Israel shall dwell in booths, that you may know down through the generations that the people of Israel had to live in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt (23:43).

All of the three great festivals, Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles, were linked with the cycle of the agricultural year, but in addition to that cyclic dimension, they were all connected to Israel's history, the dimension of narrative which required a once-for-all beginning and end. The implied concept of time was linear rather than cyclic. The Feast of Tabernacles particularly reminded the Jewish people of the wilderness pilgrimage of their ancestors on their way to the promised land. By doing so, it pointed to a tension at the heart of the faith of Second Temple Judaism. They were back from the Babylonian captivity in the promised land, and the exile had at last achieved what had seemed so impossible through all the centuries of the judges and kings, namely that the Jewish people had at long last put away their idols and worshiped the Lord alone. But despite that, all the blessings of Deuteronomy and the promises of the prophets had not been fulfilled. There was a sense in which they were still in exile, still on pilgrimage, and had not yet arrived. The history of Israel had not yet reached a satisfying resolution. The pressure of the surrounding Hellenistic culture and the power of Rome meant that the age of the kingdom, the rule or reign of God, had not yet come. This then was the genesis of the eschatology of Second Temple Judaism, the hope of Israel for the coming of the kingdom or rule of God expressed in the appearance of apocalyptic writings.

Within the prophetic books which became canonical, the imagery and symbolism which characterizes apocalyptic is to be found in Isaiah 24-27, 33, and 34-35, Ezekiel, particularly 38-39, Joel 3:9-17, Zechariah, and pre-eminently, the book of Daniel. Among the non-canonical works dating from the intertestamental period are IV Enoch, Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and the Psalms of Solomon. It is sufficient for our purpose here simply to note that this literature testifies to the fact that Second Temple Judaism not only looked back to the exodus, but looked forward to the future kingdom or reign of God. Most Jewish people saw themselves as living within an unfinished narrative and were expecting the intervention of their God to end 'this present evil age' and bring in 'the age to come,' the age of the kingdom, the age of the Spirit. Although there was no clear, agreed and definite picture of a coming Messiah ('Anointed'), a son of David, nonetheless, Second Temple Judaism was (with some exceptions) broadly 'messianic.' We shall consider the hope of Israel further in the next chapter, but what is clear is that the final resolution of the story was always in the future.

What is also clear is that the personal faith of each Israelite had its context within the corporate faith of Israel as a whole. God's dealings with Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David and many more, testify to God's relationship with leading figures. Also, the psalms of personal prayer and praise testify to faith that was personal and not only corporate. But it was not individualistic. In the faith and hope of Israel, the corporate was prior to the personal and personal faith was in the context of the corporate. Second Temple Judaism was not focused on the individual immortal soul going to heaven after death and it was not characterized by that pagan Hellenistic divorce which saw the 'spiritual' as the non-material. Instead, their hope and expectation was the corporate resurrection of corporate Israel to enjoy God's blessings in the age to come when the Lord would raise up and renew the people by his Spirit and give Israel shalom in the land he had promised to their ancestors.

Conclusion

The two remaining festivals, Purim and Hannukah, had no connection with Moses and were post-exilic inventions. Purim celebrated the deliverance of the Jews in the Persian empire by the intervention of Esther, and Hanukkah celebrated the re-dedication of the second temple by the Maccabees after the desecration by Antiochus Epiphanes. But the five ancient festivals we have reviewed present a powerful interpretation of the character of the God of Second Temple Judaism as presented in their authoritative scriptures.

The Lord was their Redeemer, their Judge, King, Father, and pre-eminently, the Warrior of matchless might and power, who had redeemed them from slavery, exile, destruction and death. As the mighty God of battles, he was fierce and mysteriously alarming. He was not to be trifled with. Secondly, the Lord was the God of covenant hesed and of Torah instruction who insisted that Israel should reflect his character. The theophany at Sinai was awe-inspiring and again there were strong elements of ambiguity and mystery. Thirdly, the Lord was the Creator of the ends of the earth who did not grow weary, the God of inexhaustible energy and the transcendent mysterious source of all life and order. Fourthly, the Lord was the God of searing holiness, a consuming fire, who had set his name in Zion and devised atoning sacrifices through which his sinful people could live in his presence. Fifthly, the Lord was the God who had led his pilgrim people in the pillar of cloud and fire and who was at work behind the scenes to bring in his future rule in the world. The Lord was a God of faithful love and terrifying judgment, constant yet unpredictable, binding himself to his people, yet supremely free to be who he willed to be, the God of ultimate and sovereign mystery. This God was certainly not an abstraction, nor a cerebral explanation for the world thought up by an arm-chair philosopher to fit into some metaphysical scheme. He was an active Agent in the ongoing narrative of Israel's history, sometimes mysteriously silent or apparently absent, one whose elusive presence could not be commanded or controlled.

With all of this in mind, we must now return to the question of the 'historical' Jesus to see whether we can understand the claim that he was 'the Christ,' that is, the one in whom the faith and hope of Israel was fulfilled.

[18,252 words]

Collins, 'Early Judaism' (2010) Hengel (1974) Sanders (1977and 1992) See Ulrich (2010) Brueggemann (1997), 74 Among the many accounts of this history which go into much more detail than is possible here, see Hasel (1991), 10-27; Brueggemann (1997), 1-42; and Ollenburger (2004). See Chapter 5. Including Hengstenberg, Oehler, Menken, Beck, von Hofman and Ewald Brueggemann (1997), 13 (his italics). Brueggemann (1997), 18 Hasel (1991), 26 Including Sellin, Köhler, Vischer, Wheeler Robinson, the Moellers, Heinisch, Procksch, Baab, Vriezen, van Imschoot, Payne, Jacob, Rowley, Deissler, Fohrer, Zimmerli, McKenzie, and G.E. Wright not counting 'Biblical' theologies. See Hasel (1991), 26f., and Ollenberger (2004), 33-38 for details. Brueggemann (1997), 22 Hasel (1991), 47f. Brueggemann (1997), 28 Eichrodt, Old Testament Theology, 1:37 Brueggemann (1997), 29f. Krister Stendahl (1962) James Barr (1961) had particularly criticized the latter approach in Thorlief Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek (SCM, 1960) Brueggemann (1997), 45f., quoting Barr (1966) and (1976). Ben C. Ollenberger (2004), 117 Clements (1978) Terrien (1978) Kaiser (1978) Ollenberger (2004), 245-248): see these pages for an account of over thirty works of Old Testament Theology. Goshen-Gottstein (1987) Levinson (1985, 1988 and 1993) Brueggemann (1997), 86 Gottwald (1979) and Brueggemann (1991), 50 Perdue (1994) Brueggemann (1997), 104 Brueggemann (1997), 106 Muilenberg (1969) and Trible (1978 and 1984) Brueggemann (1997), 111 Brueggemann (1997), 108 Goldingay (2003), 19 Goldingay (2003), 20f., 16 To be fully consistent here, we would have to say not just 'the character' of God (which also is a conceptual construct), but the Living God himself who gives the unity to the Hebrew scriptures, but we shall stay with the construct of 'character' meantime since we are still doing History and not yet Theology. Zimmerli (1978), 14 Ollenberger (2004), referencing Clements (1978), 23-24 and 26. Terrien (1978). We have already referred to this group on page 17. Brueggemann (1997), 121f. Brueggemann (2008) Goldingay (2006), 16 Goldingay (2003), 17 Goldingay (2006), 17 He finishes with a New Testament chapter, 'God Sent' on the coming of Jesus, but that is beyond our area of concern here. See Sanders (1992), 125-145, and for authoritative works by a great Jewish scholar, Zevin (1981and 1982). Falk (2010) gives a recent a detailed summary. In the Pentateuch this is called 'Abib.' Tishri was earlier called Ethanim. Earlier Canaanite names were later replaced by Babylonian names. Sanders (1992), 127 Brueggemann (1997), 177 Goldingay (2003), 288 See Goldingay (2003), 332-342 for 'how God is revealed.' Goldingay (2003), 335. See also Goldingay (2006), 59-83 for a fuller exposition of Lordship and kingship. Jüngel (2001) In accordance with the usage of the Hebrew scriptures as well as the New Testament and two thousand years of Christian theology, we shall also use the masculine pronouns as well as this masculine noun, but (as we shall see) this is not to be taken as implying that God is male. God is beyond the 'division' into male and female which is the original Latin derivation of the English word, 'sex' (cp. ‘section’ and ‘sector’). Brueggemann (1997), 69. We do not have to follow Brueggemann however in laying aside any engagement with ontology (dismissed as 'essentialism'). Brueggemann (1997), 178 Levinson (1993), 145 Brueggemann (1997), 233-249 and page XX above. Brueggemann (1997), 244f. Brueggemann (1997), 239f. Goldingay (2003), 350. See 349-360 for his discussion of 'how God's resolve relates to human resolve.' Brueggemann (1997), 241 Brueggemann (1997), 243 E.P. Sanders (1992), 262-275 Goldingay (2003), 370 Goldingay (2003), 385-391 Samuel L, Terrien (1978) Brueggemann (1997), 213-218 Brueggemann (1997), 268 Brueggemann (1997), 270 Brueggemann (1997), 271 Brueggemann (1997), 400 Goldingay (2006), 156ff.on 'Two Sides to Yhwh's Person and Activity' Goldingay (2003), 338 The Lord is of course 'the God who commands' (see Mouw, 1990), yet the words for 'command' (both noun and verb) are missing from Exodus which refers instead to the 'Ten Word.' See Goldingay (2003), 378-381. See the case for this presented in Fretheim (2005) Brueggemann (2008), 75 H. Orton Wiley (1940), 449 See Brueggemann (1997), 149ff. Goldingay (2006), 39 Goldingay (2006), 40, including reference to David Tracy. Goldingay (2003), 396. See 392-401, 'Yhwh's Presence: In a Sanctuary.' Goldingay (2003), 401 See Goldingay (2003), 562-572, 'Temple.' Cf. Mowinckel (1954), 80ff. See also the reference to Roberts (2005) in Brueggemann (2008), 95. Sanders (1992), 57f. Despite Sanders claim, the total area surrounding the Parthenon in Athens is comparable. Sanders (1992), 103-118 Sanders (1992), 105f. This is abbreviated from Sanders (1992), 141f. Brueggemann (1997), 223 Goldingay (2003), 409 While much development has taken place since Oscar Cullmann's exposition of this in Christus und die Zeit, translated into English as Christ and Time (SCM, 1951), the basic contrast remains valid and highly significant. See Collins, 'Apocalypse' (2010) and Rowland, 'Apocalypticism' (2010)