While honoring the historical context and literary diversity of the Old Testament,
Telling the Old Testament Story is a thematic reading that construes the OT as a complex but coherent narrative. Unlike standard, introductory textbooks that only cover basic background
and interpretive issues for each Old Testament book, this introduction
combines a thematic approach with careful exegetical attention to
representative biblical texts, ultimately telling the macro-level story,
while drawing out the multiple nuances present within different texts
and traditions.
The book works from the Protestant canonical arrangement of the Old
Testament, which understands the story of the Old Testament as the story
of God and God’s relationship with all creation in love and
redemption—a story that joins the New Testament to the Old. Within this
broader story, the Old Testament presents the specific story of God and
God’s relationship with Israel as the people called, created, and formed
to be God’s covenant partner and instrument within creation.
The Old Testament begins by introducing God’s mission in Genesis. The
story opens with the portrait of God’s good, intended creation of
right-relationships (Gen 1—2) and the subsequent distortion of that good
creation as a result of humanity’s rebellion (Gen 3—11). Genesis 12 and
following introduce God’s commitment to restore creation back to the
right-relationships and divine intentions with which it began. Coming
out of God’s new covenant engagement with creation in Gen 9, this divine
purpose begins with the calling of a people (who turn out to be the
manifold descendants of Abraham and Sarah) to be God’s instrument of
blessing for all creation and thus to reverse the curse brought on by
sin. The diverse traditions that comprise the remainder of the
Pentateuch then combine to portray the creation and formation of Israel
as a people prepared to be God’s instrument of restoration and blessing.
As the subsequent Old Testament books portray Israel’s life in the land
and journey into and out of exile, the reader encounters complex
perspectives on Israel’s attempts to understand who God is, who they are
as God’s people, and how, therefore, they ought to live out their
identity as God’s people within God’s mission in the world. The final
prophetic books that conclude the Protestant Old Testament ultimately
give the story of God’s mission and people an open-ended quality,
suggesting that God’s mission for God’s people continues and leading
Christian readers to consider the New Testament’s story of the Church as
an extension and expansion of the broader story of God introduced in
the Old Testament.
The main methodological perspective that informs the book includes work
on the phenomenological function of narrative (especially story’s
function to shape the identity and practice of the reader), as well as
more recent so-called “missional” approaches to reading Christian
scripture. Canonical criticism provides the primary means for relating
the distinctive voices within the Old Testament texts that still honor
the particularity and diversity of the discrete compositions.
Accessibly written, this book invites readers to enter imaginatively
into the biblical story and find the Old Testament's lively and
enduring implications.
