OBST 501 — Old Testament Introduction
OBST 501 is the graduate study of how the Old Testament came to be, the field known as introduction or isagogics. For every book of the Hebrew Bible it asks who stands behind the writing, by what stages the work reached its present form, in what years and out of what setting it arose, what end it first served, and how both its wording and its standing among the Scriptures were settled. This is the apparatus that the academic study of Scripture brings to each book, distinct from reading those books, which the Old Testament reading courses do; here composition and growth are foregrounded as the problem this literature presses hardest. Every book or corpus is taken up on the same five lines of inquiry, and each is weighed by testing what a book attests of itself against the witness around it, the answer held open as far as the evidence itself stays open. On the contested cases, the making of the Pentateuch, one Isaiah or three, the date of Daniel, and the shaping of the canon, the course sets out the critical reconstruction and the traditional account each in its strongest form, names the evidence behind each, and reaches no verdict of its own. The closing exercise hands the student a book left just outside the Protestant canon and asks the same questions, and the criteria by which the canon was settled, of that book in its turn.
Learning outcomes
- Put the five lines of inquiry, authorship and origin, composition and growth, date and setting, purpose and message, and text and canon, to any Old Testament book.
- Weigh a book’s own testimony against the surrounding evidence to answer an introductory question, and leave the verdict as provisional as the evidence allows.
- State the critical and the traditional cases for the composition of the Pentateuch, the Documentary Hypothesis and the conservative reply, each at full strength, and account for the J, E, D, and P sources.
- Account for the Deuteronomistic History and the Chronicler’s re-telling as forms of Old Testament history-writing.
- Trace the growth of a prophetic book from oracle to edited collection, and weigh the composition of Isaiah, one Isaiah against three.
- Describe the shape of the Writings, the international setting of Israel’s wisdom, and the second-century and sixth-century datings of Daniel.
- Account for the formation of the Old Testament canon, its criteria, and why the Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox lists differ over the deuterocanon.
- Describe the Masoretic Text and the witnesses behind it, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and the Septuagint, and read a real textual variant.
- Survey the approaches to Old Testament theology, and apply the five lines of inquiry and the canon criteria to a book outside the Protestant canon.
What Old Testament Introduction Asks
Every book of the Old Testament carries questions it never pauses to settle for its reader. This opening module sets out what introduction, the discipline of isagogics, asks, and how it stands apart from reading for devotion and from interpreting a passage clause by clause. It lays down the five lines of inquiry the course returns to at every book, authorship and origin, composition and growth, date and setting, purpose and message, and text and canon, with composition foregrounded as the problem this literature presses hardest. It then traces the rise of Old Testament criticism, from Astruc through Graf and Kuenen to Wellhausen, and establishes the fair-witness posture: the critical reconstruction and the traditional account are each to be set out at their best, the evidence each weighs named before any comparison, and no verdict reached between them.
The Torah
The five books of Moses come first, and with them the question that presses hardest on this literature, how the Torah reached the form now read. Read on the five lines of inquiry, the module sets the Mosaic tradition beside the marks that raised doubt, the post-Mosaic notices and the doublets. At its center stands the Documentary Hypothesis, Wellhausen’s reconstruction of the J, E, D, and P sources, laid out on its own evidence, the divine names, the parallel accounts, and the Priestly framework, with the two creation accounts placed side by side so the source-critical argument can be seen on the page. The supplementary, fragmentary, and tradition-historical alternatives are surveyed, and the conservative reply, the unity of the Pentateuch and the limits of the criteria, is given a full hearing.
The Former Prophets
Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings carry Israel’s story from the entry into the land to its loss, and they carry it with one standard and one recurring frame. This module reads them as the Deuteronomistic History, a connected work shaped by a Deuteronomic hand, with Noth’s thesis described in the course’s own voice and the evidence named, the repeated framework, the set speeches, and the measure of the Law. Chronicles is then read as a second telling of the same history with a different aim, and its date, sources, and purpose are weighed to show how Old Testament history-writing worked when one account was retold for a later community.
The Latter Prophets
A prophetic book seldom records a single sitting; it grew from spoken oracle to gathered sayings to edited scroll. This module follows that growth, the superscriptions, the third-person narrative, and the later additions, and then turns to the sharpest case, the composition of Isaiah. The argument for more than one Isaiah, from the book’s historical horizon and the naming of Cyrus, is set beside the single-author reply, each at full strength, and Isaiah 44:28 to 45:1 is placed on the page as the evidence in question. The module closes with the Book of the Twelve as a collection and the two editions of Jeremiah, the Masoretic and the shorter Greek, as both a composition and a text problem.
The Writings
The Writings are the latest-closing and most varied part of the Hebrew Bible, holding the Psalms, the wisdom books, the five Megilloth, and Daniel. This module accounts for the three-part shape of the canon and why that shape matters for introduction, then takes up Israel’s wisdom within the wider wisdom of the ancient Near East, setting Proverbs beside the Egyptian Instruction of Amenemope. It weighs the late language and dating of Job, Proverbs, and Qoheleth, gives a fair hearing to the second-century and sixth-century datings of Daniel, and accounts for the growth of the Psalter and its Davidic superscriptions.
Canon and Text
The Old Testament reached a fixed list and a fixed wording only across a long history of use and copying. This module accounts for the tripartite canon of Law, Prophets, and Writings, the reception evidence of Sirach’s prologue, Josephus, and the rabbinic discussions, and why the Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Old Testaments differ over the deuterocanon. It then describes the Masoretic Text, the work of the Masoretes, the vowel pointing, the Ketiv and Qere, and the great codices of Aleppo and Leningrad, and surveys the witnesses standing behind it, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and the Septuagint, with one real variant read at the introductory level. The hands-on text-critical method of the apparatus is left to its own later course.
Old Testament Theology
A collection so varied raises a closing question, whether the Old Testament speaks with one voice or many. This module describes what an Old Testament theology attempts and the chief approaches to it, the historical, the thematic, and the canonical, associated with von Rad, Eichrodt, and Childs, each set out in the course’s own voice and the question of unity and diversity held open. The capstone then puts the five lines of inquiry, and the canon criteria of the previous module, to a book that sits just outside the Protestant Old Testament, the Wisdom of Jesus son of Sirach, read fairly on its own evidence and accounted for where it stands in the differing canons.