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Walter Brueggemann (1933-2025), one of today's preeminent interpreters of Scripture, was William Marcellus McPheeters Professor Emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary. He authored numerous scholarly articles and over one hundred books, including his magnum opus Theology of the Old Testament, The Prophetic Imagination, and Message of the Psalms.

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A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament

Abingdon Press

Chapter One

The Old Testament can be read from many different perspectives, and each contributes to the richness of meaning recognized in these texts by generations of readers. The Old Testament is a collection of ancient literature. These texts reflect the history of a people called Israel. Behind and beneath the texts lies a wide variety of social contexts that gave rise to and shaped the text. Current biblical studies have benefited from decades of generative scholarship that has illumined the literary, historical, and sociological dimensions of our understanding of the Old Testament. This book has been deeply informed by such scholarship and will reflect it at many points. But this book will focus on the Old Testament as a theological witness to the experience of ancient Israel.

What does it mean to read and interpret the text of the Old Testament theologically? At its most fundamental level such reading and interpretation means taking seriously the claim of the text that it is speaking about encounter and relationship with God. Claims are made by and for these ancient texts that make them more than the literature, history, and sociology of an ancient people called Israel. These texts were written, collected, and passed on through generations as the witness of a community of faith shaped in relation to the character and actions of the God of Israel.

To read and interpret the Old Testament theologically is, however, a complex and multifaceted task. For us, such work means standing within several sets of creative, interpretive tensions that we will discuss in the remainder of this chapter. Our intention here is both to illumine what is meant by theological perspectives on the Old Testament and to clarify the perspectives at work in this volume.

Ancient Testimony, Enduring Scripture

The Old Testament is the collected faith testimony of ancient Israel. Yet, at the same time, this collection is regarded in Judaism and Christianity as scripture through which God's word becomes a reality and a resource to the modern synagogue and church.

1. Whose book is this anyway? On the one hand, we can answer that this is obviously Israel's book. The first community to which the text of the Old Testament is addressed is the community out of which the text arose. That community was ancient Israel. Voices from different periods and social contexts of Israel's life address the wider community of which they were a part. Since the experience of ancient Israel stretches over many centuries, the Old Testament is a library that includes faith testimony, moral admonition, liturgical remembrance, and religious story. The ancient communities decided that these texts were the authoritative witness to their experience of God and their life as the community of God's people. The texts of the Old Testament were initially words addressed to an audience in Israel, but they have been judged by the community as worthy of preservation and reading through subsequent generations.

2. Since ongoing communities of faith, Jewish and Christian, have claimed these texts as scripture, there is a sense in which the Old Testament is not just ancient Israel's book but belongs to the church and synagogue as well. To claim these texts as scripture is to acknowledge authority in these texts for the ongoing life of the religious community and its individual members.

To read the Old Testament theologically is to recognize that when we read as people of faith within a confessional community, we are interested in more than conveying information about an ancient community. The events of Israel's history and the witnesses to Israel's experience of God contained in the Old Testament are of interest because we read as a part of communities that still seek to stand in the presence of that same God. To read the Old Testament theologically is to seek in its texts wisdom on the ways of God that allows us to submit ourselves and our actions to that same God in the effort to be faithful communities in the world. The Old Testament as scripture gives us imaginative categories for discerning God's presence and will in the deeply troubling challenges of our own time.

Every reading of an Old Testament text involves at least two distinct audiences: the audience to whom the text was originally addressed and the audience supplied by the reader and the context that informs the reader. To read the Old Testament as scripture is to suggest that the ancient story intersects our contemporary stories in ways that inform and transform lives and communities. To read these texts as scripture is to expect such informing and transforming power. To read these texts as scripture is to bring the multiple voices and contexts of ancient Israel into dialogue with the complexities of our own reading communities and the world in which we read.

This book is written from the perspective of the Christian church and its reading of ancient Israel's testimony. We write as those engaged in teaching these biblical texts to those who will draw upon them as a scriptural resource for Christian ministry. We are deeply informed and grateful to the ongoing reading of these texts in the Jewish community, and we are aware of the shaping influence of Jewish tradition on the church, particularly its influence on Jesus and the earliest church. Nevertheless, we cannot escape the particularity of our exposition of the biblical text as Christian interpreters. We continue to use the term Old Testament, though we are aware of its problematic character in interfaith contexts. Alternative terms seem equally problematic in other ways and have achieved no wide use or recognition in the church. We reject the destructive implications of any form of supercessionism and affirm the ongoing debt and necessary interrelationship of the Christian church to Judaism, both ancient and modern. We have tried to be open to contemporary Jewish interpretive voices and readings in our encounter with these texts. We are convinced that commonalities between Christians and Jews in reading these texts are more important than differences. But Christians and Jews alike must allow for readings that reflect the particularities of distinct religious traditions and their communities. This is part of what it means to read these texts as scripture for church and synagogue. The concerns we bring to our dialogue with the Old Testament are the concerns that are provided by the Christian church and the challenges to its identity and mission in our world at the beginning of the twenty-first century. For us this means there is a continuity between the texts of ancient Israel, the person and work of Jesus, the formation of the early church, and the ongoing history of the Christian churches with their diversity of tradition. We reflect this trajectory in our discussions, but this is not the only trajectory of these texts; and our discussions are also influenced by an ongoing conversation with Judaism, its claim on these texts as scripture, and a trajectory in Judaism that moves from Tanak to Talmud.

Critical Understandings

The Old Testament as the literature of ancient Israel must be understood critically. Likewise, the claims of authority for the Old Testament as scripture in the church must be...