Saturday, 20 June 2009
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A Life-changing Book
I don't use that phrase flippantly. It is reserved for books that far outshine others in their profundity and beauty. Anthropology of the Old Testament by Hans Walter Wolff is one such book. I would have to say that it is one of the most important books I have read, and that you might read as well, for understanding the Bible with clearer eyes and a more humble heart. It may be slightly difficult to follow in some places if you don't know Hebrew, but it will be well worth the struggle. Don't be put off by the author's references to the JEDP theory, since it doesn't affect the value of his propositions or conclusions at all. Whether you are a seminary student or a video-game inclined teen or a hardworking mom, if you want to understand the Bible better—specifically how Scripture perceives you as a human being—this book is an essential one to read and re-read. It is a book of the same caliber as Dominion and Dynasty by Stephen Dempster, which I plan to re-read every year. Pure gold. Here are some quotes to wet your appetite:
Everything that is said about breath and blood in the anthropology of the Old Testament is instruction in an ultimate reverence for life. But this reference is not derived from the manifestations of life itself; it is based on the fact that the breath and the blood belong to Yahweh, and therefore life without a steady bond with him and an ultimate tending towards him is not really life at all (62).
Here we see a relationship to time that is different from the one familiar to us. It emerges even more clearly in a common Old Testament turn of speech. The Israelite sees former times as a reality before him, whereas we think that we have them behind us, as the past. Ps. 143.5:
I remember the days before me (miqqedem),
I meditate on all thy works.
The future, on the other hand, does not for the Israelite lie before him, but ‘at his back’ (’ahar). According to Jer. 29.11 Yahweh says:
I know the plans I have for you,
Plans of peace and not of evil,
That I may give you ’aharit and a hope.
’aharit means the future as that which is behind and which follows me. One detail of German usage is based on a similar attitude of mind, when it speaks of Vorfahren (those that go before), for forefathers, and Nachfaren (those that go after), as descendents. According to this viewpoint man proceeds through time like a rower who moves into the future backwards: he reaches his goal by taking his bearings from what is visibly in front of him; it is in this revealed history that for him the Lord of the future is attested (88).
New Testament witnesses took up the small number of texts about death which were interpreted as promise (such as Ps. 22 and Isa. 53), using them as types, in order to grasp more acutely the meaning of Jesus’ death. For man today, the complete demythologizing of death, through which the Old Testament stripped away every trace of halo from it, is important. Jesus died a death in which horror swallowed up the praise of God and the proclamation of his acts down to the last note. It was from this barren vacuum—a vacuum which today gapes more widely than ever—that he took away the power (118).
On Rest:
Surfeit takes away rest just like excessive zeal (Ecles. 2.23). Good sleep becomes the mark of the man who lives in the rhythm of Yahweh’s giving and calling. Rest manifests the art of living, that is to say the wisdom whose crowning characteristic is the fear of Yahweh. It knows that the ‘all for nothing’ which answers the fruitless efforts of the fanatically industrious man is finally replaced by the ‘all for nothing’ of Yahweh’s gift which he gives in sleep (Ps. 127.1f.) (134).
On Rest:
These concrete admonitions do not derive their force from the fear of punishment but from the desire for joy. The prophetic words resist all the inclination of the natural man to secure, or even to intensify, life through unceasing labour (140).
The late book of Ecclesiastes brings us a corresponding reflection on the human subject (3.11): ‘Also he has put remotest time into man’s mind. The Preacher teaches, therefore, that to ponder over the future is man’s inescapable fate, although he cannot survey and comprehend God’s work in its totality from beginning to end. Because the component parts of the future are also endangered, hope is, generally speaking, accompanied by fear. ‘Only who is joined with all the living has hope.’ says Eccles. 9.4. That is why man awaits the future with strained expectation (149).
If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink; for you will heap coals of fire on his head, and Yahweh will reward you [Prov 25:21].
Here the enemy’s emergency becomes the chance to overcome enmity. It emerges from Egyptian texts that fiery coals really were heaped on a man’s head in an atonement ritual, as a sign of shame and remorse on the part of someone who has been guilty of an offence (190).
It is the glory of God to conceal things (Prov 25:2).
Anyone who is not aware of the dark borders of reality and the impenetrable veil covering the total pattern of things has exchanged the actual world for a self-made illusion (212).
The fear of God is the crown of wisdom, because wisdom is first and last God’s wisdom, in which man participates on the basis of the few whispered words he perceives. Next to Job, Ecclesiastes is most aware of the limits set for the wise: the future is closed to him (8.7), he cannot discover the total coherence of all events from their beginnings to their end (3.11), and he is not capable of finding out what the work of God is in everything that is under the sun (8.16f.). Thus the truly wise man is burdened by the divine incognito, yet is at the same time a ‘hymnist of the divine mysteries’ (Prov. 30.1-4) (212).
Pride is the twin of foolishness. For arrogance which abandons the fear of God also robs man of his future. Only the humble remains truly man, for wisdom sets him on the true path of the fear of Yahweh (213).
Where the praise of God is absent, man has misunderstood the discord between his neediness and his capabilities. Here too inhuman man is not far away. The Psalter—passed down to us as ‘the Book of Praises’—has with its hymns grasped that man’s final destiny is to praise God. Here we can only remind ourselves of the multiplicity of the calls to praise that meet man when, with his experiences drawn from history and from creation, he turns into the sanctuary, there to pay homage to the only Merciful One, even in the complaints that he unfolds before God (228).
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