Quote:
Originally Posted by redbreegull
4. What is your relationship to the Hebrew Bible as a Christian? Do you believe God has rejected the terms of his older covenant with humans, or merely updated it? Are the old laws to be ignored or incorporated into Christian life?
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I actually took a term of Biblical Hebrew at university, it was an 8:00am class. It was before I became a Christian, but after my psychosis. Lamentations was a weirdly prominent part of my psychosis - though I don’t know if by Hebrew Bible you mean all of what Christians call the Old Testament, or just the Pentateuch. I didn’t read Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Deutoronomy, Numbers in their entirety until after my second son was born (I read it in English of course, my Bible Hebrew is terrible, I'm an embarrassment to my teacher and to institutionalised learning in general) and I subscribed to a Read The Bible in a Year service. It was only then that I realised the extent of the laws contained in those books, and I suppose the quaintness of so many of them. It surprised me that there were detailed instructions for the building of the temple, for getting rid of mold in your tent, and for diagnosing and treating skin rashes. I guess all of that helped make my mind up about whether we could read the Bible as if it were written last year and good to go.
My grandfather was an Old Testament studies professor so the ideas he shared professionally are part of my life narrative I guess - that there are sort of ‘strands’ that run through the OT - the poetic strand - Lamentations, Psalms, etc. and the historic strand - that aimed to be a historical record, so Deuteronomy, Kings, etc. and then the wisdom strand - Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, etc. Obviously there’s no clean distinction between these strands but it helps to have a vague idea of what you’re reading, and what the purpose of the book is.
The Old Testament is the history of the people that Jesus belonged to, and their encounters with God, their greatest wisdom and poetry. All of that is useful and interesting to me - but it was written in a time when the authors didn’t know about the water cycle or gravity...so I guess it takes a bit of processing to work out how useful any of it is - which is no different to how I feel about the NT.