Religion 131
Review of Unit 1
Hebrew Beginnings

Dr. Fred Kellogg
Emory & Henry College

 

    This is a survey of the cultural backgrounds of the Old Testament and the foundational history of the Hebrew people.  This review relates especially to Michael D. Coogan, A Brief Introduction to the Old Testament (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2009).  In all my review programs, key names are red, key concepts are blue, key places and groups are green, and key dates and festivals are pink.  You can study for a test most effectively by going through the program a couple of times before the test.  The material is not new; it is already in your textbook and class notes.  I hope this summary is helpful for you!  

FOUNDATIONS

    The Torah was put together by a group of priests living in Babylon during the Exile.  A general scholarly consensus (not accepted by all biblical scholars today, but still a good starting point) is that the priests brought together four strands of tradition, which we call the Yahwist (J), Elohist (E), Priestly (P), and Deuteronomist (D) accounts.  In this class, we focus on the Yahwist and Priestly sources of the Torah.  One example of the way the priestly editors worked is their inclusion of two quite different stories of the world's creation.  The priests were not trying to produce a simple chronological scheme, as some people have argued.  Rather, they saw beautiful meanings in the creation story preserved by the Yahwist (Genesis 2), as well as the creation story preserved in their own traditions (Genesis 1).  So they didn't try to iron out the radical differences in the two stories but kept both stories intact.

    The Priestly creation story, placed at the very beginning of the Torah, leads up to the setting apart of one particular segment of time as holy.  By making it the conclusion of the story, the priests implied that God gives meaning to all of time.  The days of the week are not just a cycle which goes on and on, one day after another, with no rhythm or pattern.  The culminating event of God's creation, in the Priestly story, is the Sabbath.  On the seventh day, God "rested."  The Hebrew word Shabath means "rested," so the Sabbath is a day of rest.  For Jews and Seventh-day Adventist Christians, the Sabbath is celebrated on Saturday, the seventh day of the week, in commemoration of this event.  For other Christians, the Sabbath was moved to the first day of the week, to commemorate Christ's resurrection on Sunday.

    In class, I've helped you to compare the Yahwist and Priestly stories of creation; each one is very powerful in its own way, and each one helps us to understand God's purpose and our place in creation.  The Yahwist story is a microcosm, looking at all of reality through the image of a garden with one man and one woman.  The Priestly story is a macrocosm, showing the whole universe in all its grandeur while also including tiny details such as the Sabbath.  I've found both views to be portrayed vividly not only in these two accounts, but also in pictures -- click here if you would like to see the pictorial representation of all reality.  Our God is an awesome God!  [After you have viewed the universe all the way from macrocosm to microcosm in a few seconds, you may use the Back button on your Web browser to return to this review program.]

    Scholars are divided over the question of when the Yahwist put together some of the oral traditions which became one of the greatest accounts in the Old Testament.  I consider the work of that anonymous author and compiler to have been during the Golden Age of David and Solomon.  We call the author the Yahwist, abbreviated J [from the German way of pronouncing the sacred name], because he or she preferred the sacred name Yahweh for God.  A few years ago, a scholar named Harold Bloom proposed that J was a woman.  We really don't know who J was, but the Yahwist account is one of the richest in story and symbolism that we can find.  

    I've given you in class a thorough study of the Yahwist story of Creation and the Fall, because I consider it so crucial to our understanding of us as human beings and our relationship to God and the world.  In such familiar stories as those of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, and the Tower of Babel, the Yahwist helps us to look deep inside ourselves.  We can find the love of knowledge, the tension between good and evil, sibling rivalry, close personal relationships to God, and all the other kinds of things that make us who we are.  The Yahwist's traditions are at the very heart of the old epic which is foundational for the Hebrews.  

   The Yahwist helps us to understand our own world and our place in it.  We are Adam and Eve.  We are Cain and Abel.  We are Mr. & Mrs. Noah.  We are the builders of the Tower of Babel.  God has given us the greatest gift imaginable:  we are created in God's image, able to have full fellowship with God.  But again and again we are unsatisfied with our humanity, and we try to take God's place.  We want to experience evil, because we think that it will give us knowledge that God must be withholding from us.  We are willing to destroy our fellow human beings in order to attain a superior level of acceptance.  We'll try to punch a hole in the sky, if that will give us power. 

    According to the Yahwist, God creates us with free will; yet in our use of it, we sacrifice the closeness of a personal relationship with God.  Does God then give up on us?  No!  He forgives us and gives us a new chance.  We have to deal with the consequences of our flawed decisions, but God helps us even with those.  God is not some far-off Deity looking down from the sky; nor is he concerned only about great world events.  God is involved in our everyday lives, sharing with us his love, compassion and guidance.  In a brief review like this, I can't begin to touch on the subtleties of the J account, but I hope that by now you've read the Yahwist stories -- especially those in Genesis 2-11 -- and struggled with their meanings for your own understanding. 

 

PATRIARCHS AND MATRIARCHS

    The story of the people whom we call Hebrews or Israelites begins with several groups of people living in the Fertile Crescent, which curves around from Canaan to Babylonia.  Many migrations were taking place in the Middle East during the second millennium B.C.  In fact, the whole 4-H Club seemed to be migrating:  Hebrews, Hurrians, Hyksos, and Hittites! 

    The earliest Hebrews that we can specifically identify are Abraham & Sarah.  They brought to Canaan an understanding of God based partly on their experiences in the culture of the Euphrates River Valley.  In this earliest Hebrew period, several names were used for God.  Do you know any of those names?  Just in case your Hebrew is a little rusty, here are some of the most significant ones:

    Abraham didn't grow up in the area that we know as Canaan, Israel, or Palestine.  Instead, he grew up in the city of Ur, at the southern tip of the Euphrates River Valley.  His family moved way up to the northern end of the Euphrates, to the city of Haran, and they lived there a number of years.  When Abraham was seventy-five years old -- an age that most of us might think about retiring! -- God called him to leave his beautiful river valley and go way out in the middle of nowhere, to the land of Canaan.  In a beautiful act of faith in God, Abraham & Sarah packed up everything and left for Canaan, which had no great river and no big cities like Ur or Haran.  They moved around from place to place in Canaan, wherever they could graze their sheep and goats.

    While they were camping out in Canaan, God made a covenant (a formal, legally binding agreement, with mutual obligations and promises) with Abraham representing the Hebrew people, giving them a special role in human history.  God promised the land of Canaan to Abraham and his descendants, so we call it the Promised Land.  God indicated that one aspect of Abraham's role would be to have many descendants, even though in his old age he had no children at all. 

    Since Abraham & Sarah really couldn't understand how God's covenant promise would be fulfilled, they took things into their own hands.  Sarah gave her servant Hagar to Abraham as a second wife, since polygamy was fully acceptable in the ancient world.  Abraham and Hagar produced a son named Ishmael ("God hears").  But Sarah was jealous of Hagar, and on two different occasions she drove Hagar out into the desert.  The second time, Hagar and Ishmael were about to die of thirst, when an angel appeared.  He said that God heard the voice of the boy, provided a well of life-giving water, and blessed Ishmael as the ancestor of a great nation. 

    Today Arab Muslims see themselves as descendants of Ishmael.  Arab Christians -- such as Palestinian Christians living in Bethlehem, Nazareth, and East Jerusalem -- have a dual heritage, since they also trace their spiritual ancestry back to the descendants of Abraham's other son, Isaac!

    The Bible indicates that God's covenant promise was to be fulfilled not by the birth of Ishmael, but by the birth of a son to Abraham and Sarah.  Sarah's "labor" would be especially difficult, since she would give birth to a child when she was about ninety years old!  She would raise up that child in the faith which she and Abraham shared.  Although she laughed out loud at the thought, she was willing to say "Yes" to God's plan.  And she named her child Yitzhak, meaning "laughter" or "ha-ha!"  We usually transliterate his name into English as Isaac. 

    Throughout the Bible, names have special significance.  Back home in Mesopotamia, the founding couple were named Abram and Sarai, names with no particular significance.  The new name given to the great patriarch consisted of two parts:  in Hebrew, Ab meant "father" or "ancestor," and raham meant "multitude."  He was given the name "father of a multitude" as part of God's covenant with him, when Abraham was a hundred years old and still had no children at all!  His wife's new name, Sarah, meant "princess" in Hebrew, recognizing her role as the mother of the Hebrews.  

    As a sign of God's covenant with the Hebrews, Abraham was told by God to make sure that his descendants circumcised all their boy babies, soon after they were born.  God's promise of a long line of Hebrews in the land of Canaan seemed in jeopardy at one point, when God ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, now a young man.  Even though it must have been a terrifying experience, since Abraham had so much faith that he would give up his beloved son, God reaffirmed his promise that Abraham's descendants would be as numerous as the grains of sand on the seashore or the stars in the sky.

    When he was an old man, Abraham chose a wife for his son Isaac, by sending a servant back to their homeland in the Euphrates River Valley.  The servant brought back a woman named Rebekah, from a good family with ties to Abraham's family.  Abraham died at a ripe old age and was buried with his wife Sarah in a cave in southern Canaan.

    Isaac and Rebekah had twin sons, Jacob and Esau.  Jacob was a sly, sneaky rascal, able to outwit his older twin brother who was born first and thus should have inherited the tribal leadership and decision-making.  In fear of his life after cheating his brother twice out of his birthright privileges, Jacob had to run away from home; he fled to the old homeland in the Euphrates River Valley.  There he met his match in a relative named Laban, who had daughters of marriageable age.  Jacob ended up working a total of fourteen years to win the hands of two of Laban's daughters, Leah and Rachel.

    Jacob was also a dreamer.  Two of his dreams are especially important in our tradition: 

    (1) When Jacob was running away from his brother Esau, he dreamed that he saw a ziggurat, a ladder-like temple mound stretching up to heaven.  Recognizing the sacredness of that place, he named it Bethel, "House of God."  We call the ziggurat "Jacob's Ladder."

    (2) When Jacob was returning home after many years in Mesopotamia, he dreamed that he wrestled all night long with a man who represented God himself.  Just before sunrise, the man blessed Jacob and changed his name to Isra-El, "Wrestler (isra-) with God (El)."   That name Israel also came to be used for the nation of extended families formed by Jacob's twelve sons; we call them the Israelites or children of Israel.

    The twelve tribes of Israel lived in the land of Canaan for many years.  For Christians, one of the most important of those twelve tribes was the one headed by Jacob's son Judah, because the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah would be traced back to Judah. 

    The book of Genesis focuses especially on a younger son of Jacob's named Joseph.  Like his dad, Joseph was a dreamer; he was an expert at dream interpretation, even if it got him in hot water with his brothers.  Sibling rivalry led to their selling him into slavery to a passing caravan which took him to Egypt.  There, after a number of adventures, he rose to a position of power and prestige in the Egyptian government.  In a very touching scene, Joseph forgave his brothers for what they had done to him, and he invited the whole extended family to come down to Egypt and settle.  The Israelites came to the land of Goshen, east of the Nile River, and lived there for many generations. 

    We could summarize the genealogy of key patriarchs and matriarchs like this:

                         Hagar --- Abraham --- Sarah

                              |                                   |

                        Ishmael                           Isaac --- Rebekah

                              |                                    |           |

                           Arabs                           Jacob    Esau

                                                                   |

                                                       Twelve tribes of Israel 

 

FROM EGYPT THROUGH THE SINAI WILDERNESS

    The Hebrews would have continued to live in Egypt, if later Pharaohs had not come to the Egyptian throne determined to exploit them as a labor force for their building projects.  One Pharaoh in particular made the freedom-loving Hebrews into virtual slaves.  Their situation led them to make their escape in the Exodus.  Who was this Pharaoh?

    I hope you thought of Rameses II, one of the most powerful kings in the ancient world.  A few years ago, a display of some of the great sculpture from his reign was brought to Charlotte.  According to the book of Exodus, God called one person to set his people free from Egyptian oppression and lead them back to Canaan.  That person was Moses.  But Moses did not fulfill his mission alone.  His brother Aaron assisted him in challenging the Egyptian leaders and in developing priestly rituals which would unify the Hebrews as a people.

    Together Moses and Aaron carried out a series of contests with the Pharaoh's magicians, to prove the legitimacy of their authority.  In the final version of the account, ten plagues were brought on Egypt, to show Yahweh's power over nature.  Some of the plagues involved huge numbers of animals swarming into Egypt.  Think for a minute:  can you name some of those kinds of animals?

    The last of the ten plagues was the most tragic of all:  the death of the first-born throughout Egypt.  The only homes spared were those marked with lamb's blood, in a ceremony identified as the origin of the festival of Passover.  After that plague, the Hebrews finally attained their freedom. 

    But Pharaoh Rameses II changed his mind again and sent an army that overtook them at the Reed Sea, a marshy lake which was a branch of the Red Sea.  The victory which came to the Hebrews that day was memorialized in a song by Moses' sister, Miriam.  Accompanied by a tambourine, and dancing with her friends, Miriam sang what we recognize as one of the oldest poems in the Bible:

"Sing to Yahweh, because he has won a glorious victory;
He has thrown the horses and their riders into the sea."  [Exodus 15:21]

    It would take forty years for the Hebrews to make the trip from Egypt to the Promised Land, even though they could normally have walked that distance in just a few weeks.  Why?  Because God had very special plans to help them become a genuine people during this time together, before they entered Canaan.  Exodus describes one part of the plan as the necessity for the Hebrews to come to Mount Sinai, to make a covenant with God.  The image in Exodus is that of a mother eagle, carrying her young to the mountain.  God said:  "You saw what I did to the Egyptians and how I carried you as an eagle carries her young on her wings.  I brought you here to me" [Exodus 19:4].  Christians sing a beautiful hymn, "On Eagle's Wings," based on this image.  

    At Mount Sinai God made a second covenant with the Hebrews.  This time Moses was the representative of the people.  There are striking parallels between the Abraham story and the Moses story.  To me, the most important common dimension is the tremendous amount of trust in the lives of both leaders. 

    The Bible has one key word for this trusting aspect of Abraham and Moses.  It's what God expects of each one of us, and it's far more important than obeying all the laws or worshipping on the Sabbath.  That central biblical concept is faith.  It's described beautifully in the Epistle to the Hebrews [11:1], in the New Testament:

"To have faith is to be sure of the things we hope for, to be certain of the things we cannot see."

    The responsibilities of the people in the Sinai covenant are spelled out most clearly in the Ten Commandments.  Scholars often compare this covenant with other types of laws and treaties in the ancient Middle East.  Two of the most familiar types of covenants are: 

    The Sinai covenant was of course a suzerainty covenant.  God continued to guide the Hebrews in their journey to land and nationhood.  After they had spent forty years in the Sinai wilderness, they looked forward to settling down in Canaan, which seemed like Paradise as they imagined what life would be like there.  One thing they especially anticipated was good food.  The Hebrews imagined Canaan as a land "flowing with milk and honey."  In the books of Joshua and Judges you can see if their dreams were fulfilled.

    In addition to his brother Aaron and his sister Miriam, Moses depended on another person for his understanding of God's will.  Moses' wife Zipporah was the daughter of a priest in the desert area of Midian, and she was able to use her religious knowledge to help him in a number of ways.  In fact, Zipporah reestablished the ancient covenant which God had made with his people, by symbolically carrying out the ritual of circumcision which was part of the covenant with Abraham.  Moses' parents had been unable to circumcise him, since he had to be hidden while still a baby.  But the priest's daughter knew just what to do.  She performed a proxy circumcision on their son, and it was valid for Moses too.  Although she had not grown up the Midianites did not practice circumcision, Zipporah recognized how central it was among Hebrew rituals.  The name Zipporah meant "Bird" in Hebrew, and she was a leader like the Byrds of Virginia!   

    The stories of the patriarchs and matriarchs were woven together with the laws and teachings of the Hebrew people.  They were handed down in oral tradition for many centuries, before they were written down on scrolls.  In the first unit, we've focused on Genesis and Exodus.  The books of Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy elaborate on the basic accounts in those first two books, but with new emphases and historical narratives. 

    The end result is the foundation of the entire Old Testament.  This basic document, which weaves together material from several sources, was not completed until the time of the Jewish Exile in Babylon, many centuries after the Exodus.  The collection includes stories, rituals, and laws.  But because of the prominent place of Jewish laws, it is called in Hebrew the Torah, meaning "Law" or "Teaching."  It is also identified in Greek as the Pentateuch, or "Five Books." 

    The Torah scroll is given a place of honor in every Jewish synagogue.  If you visit a Jewish synagogue today, such as Congregation B'nai Sholom near Bristol, you'll find the Torah scroll in the Ark of the Covenant.  In ancient times, the Ark was a chest which contained Aaron's rod, some manna, and other sacred Hebrew relics.  If it was lost, raiders such as Indiana Jones would search for it.  Today the Ark is usually a niche in the wall of a synagogue, covered with curtains, where the Torah scroll is stored with respect for its holiness.  

 

    This concludes our review of unit 1.  I hope that it has been helpful for you in remembering some of the key elements in the Torah.  Be sure to read through the recommended readings in the Torah carefully; there's so much that I can't include in a brief review like this.  If you have any suggestions or comments on this review program, please tell me.  If you would like, you can send me e-mail: fkellogg@ehc.edu

To look at one of my other review programs or syllabi, go to my Home Page, or go directly to one of the following:

    Unit 2, Israel in the Golden Age
    Unit 3, Kings and Prophets
    Unit 4. Writings After the Exile
 

If you prefer, you may return to the Emory & Henry College Home Page.  

 

Last updated:  September 29, 2009