Psalm 100:3
Know that the Lord, he is God!
It is he who made us, and we are his;

R. W. L. Moberly, professor of theology and biblical interpretation at Durham University, writes a “grammar” about God “present in the Scriptures of ancient Israel,” that is, “ground rules for appropriate speech and action in relation to the Lord, the God of Abraham and of Israel.” Moberly provides six chapters that tell us about God’s nature. Moberly doesn’t move in canonical order (Proverbs 8 is the first chapter, and Genesis 4 is the fourth). As Psalm 100:3 states, we are to know that the Lord is God. The following sentence (“It is he who made us, and we are his“) tells us that are created and relational. Moberly uses these six chapters as a type of text case of seeing how one who reads the Old Testament today can come to a point where he or she agrees with the psalmist and proclaims that “It is God who made us, and we are his.” Moberly offers six examples of how Israel’s scriptures can be read as Scripture today. It is a way to read, not the way. Moberly reads the Old Testament as the canonical text as we have it today, rather than looking at a hypothetical story behind the text and how it possibly came to us. And, to Moberly, imagination is important. Imagination gives us another perspective. Many perspectives by which to have conversations over the text to figure out what is going on and what it teaches us about God.

The Wise God: The Depths of Creation in Proverbs 8 (and Genesis 1)
The Mysterious God: The Voice from the Fire in Exodus 3
The Just God: The Nature of Deity in Psalm 82
The Inscrutable God: Divine Differentials and Human Choosing in Genesis 4
The Only God: Surprising Universality and Particularity in 2 Kings 5
The Trustworthy God: Assurance and Warning in Psalm 46, Jeremiah 7, and Micah 3
In chapter 4, Moberly compares the story of Cain and Abel and asks, “Is God unfair?” Everyone wonders what Cain did wrong in Genesis 4. But how often do we ask, Did Cain actually do anything wrong? After giving an example of how the Cain and Abel story may have come from another time but was recontextualized to fit the time before the earth was populated, Moberly moves to the birth of the boys. Since the text says that Eve conceived only once but bore twice, it may be possible (though not necessary) that Cain and Abel were twins. Moberly sees it as “preferable” that we aren’t given an explanation for why God preferred Abel’s sacrifice over Cain’s. God favored Jacob over Esau, why couldn’t he favor Abel over Cain? Moberly writes, “The issue is how to handle life in a world where some are more favored than others and, especially, how to cope with being, in one way or another, the one who is unfavored.” Having just looked at God as a God of justice in Psalm 82 (chapter 3), now we look at how God is impossible to fully understand.

Though Moberly points out what 1 John and the author of Hebrews say about Cain and Abel (and argues that they are basing their thoughts about Cain on the LXX of Genesis 4 which does give a reason for God’s rejection of Cain’s sacrifice), one still has to ask why God wouldn’t accept a sacrifice. While God does show favor to Jacob over Esau, Esau could still have followed the Lord. If Cain was actually trying to obey the Lord, why wouldn’t God accept his sacrifice? If chapter three (Psalm 82) shows us that the nature of our God is to be just, how does this jive with how God treats Cain? But the story doesn’t explain how or why God chooses Abel over Cain, only that he does. The point is to press us to think about “how best to respond in situations of being unfavored.” How will you respond when you are treated unfairly? Will you be a Cain or Esau?

People have different characteristics, abilities, situations, and outcomes. Inequity and inequality is naturally going to take place. Some people are more attractive, smart, musical, athletic, etc. In Psalm 82:3-4 (see also Deut 10:17-19), justice revolves around treating the poor, the orphan, and the widow with care and not exploiting them. God’s gracious purposes, though testing and inscrutable, “are always for good.”

Our wise God created the world in wisdom, and we are to gain wisdom “to become in tune with reality.” We are to live wisely every day according to God’s purposes. Chapter two looks at how God is a mysterious God, declaring his personal name (“Yahweh”) to Moses, “I am who/as I am.” Moberly argues that the idea behind God’s revelation here is that “the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” There is truth to this. On the one hand, as I understand it, who is the Lord? He reveals himself to Israel through his saving acts. At the same time, who would have guessed what he would do? God declares in Isaiah that his ways and thoughts are higher than ours. There will never be a pints where anybody feels like they really have a handle on God. Being infinite, there is always more and more to learn. (I’ll let the Hebrew linguists argue over Moberly’s exegesis of the Hebrew here.)

There is much more that could be said. Moberly is not offering a way of reading the text as the way of reading the text. Doing so can close down interpretation, as if to say, “This is the only way you can read or interpret this text. To do otherwise is to misunderstand it.” Rather, he provides an imaginative way of interpreting the text which opens it up to see how rich it is with implications toward theology and life.

One personal downside of the book is that I found Moberly hard to understand. He is both precise and mysterious with his words. He writes precisely what he means, and yet I still don’t always really know what he’s intending to say. That certainly won’t be everyone’s problem, but if you don’t read much on Old Testament theology, this will be difficult to move through.

Recommended?
This is a fine book on understanding aspects of God’s character. Those who have a strong academic bent (and can use their imagination) may enjoy this. You may not disagree with all Moberly writes (I didn’t), but he will certainly make you think and wrestle with the text. He will help you look at the text in a different way, and you will be sharper for it.

One thing I appreciated from studying under Iain Provan at Regent College was his emphasis on learning from Old Testament critical scholarship despite our disagreements with their theology and, as a result, many of their conclusions. Because we are looking at the same text, critical scholarship can help us Evangelicals see things that we have glossed over for any number of reasons. R. W. L. Moberly is not a critical scholar in the classic sense of the word, for he follows Brevard Childs in the desire to read the Bible as Christian “scripture,” as a document with relevance for faith and practice today. However, like Childs, this reading of the Bible as “scripture” involves building on and incorporating the best of critical scholarship towards one’s interpretation of the canonical text. Moberly describes the move from the scholarly conclusions to the scriptural understanding as engaging with the text with “full imaginative seriousness,” entering the world of the text and hearing how it might inform our lives today. I am thankful to have received a copy of The God of the Old Testament from Baker books for this reason, to learn from a well-learned and experienced scholar despite significant methodological disagreements in our approach to Scripture.

In The God of the Old Testament¸ Moberly displays his general approach to the Bible through an imaginatively serious interaction with eight key biblical texts in six chapters. By interacting with these texts, Moberly hopes to unpack what it means “to know that the Lord is God” for contemporary readers, with an eye particularly towards Christians but also Jews. In Chapter 1, he considers Genesis 1; in Chapter 2, Exodus 3; in Chapter 3, Psalm 82; in Chapter 4, Genesis 4; in Chapter 5, 2 Kings 5; and in Chapter 6, Psalm 46, Jeremiah 7, and Micah 3. Moberly bridges the scholarly world, drawing on much scholarly literature, and the world of the interested non-scholar, writing at a relatively accessible level. His discussion is attentive to the details and provides a challenging and provocative dialogue partner. For the Reformed or Evangelical reader who has not wrestled with the critical scholarship, it will be a challenging read; for the reader who has learned to engage with those who come from different presuppositions, there is much to be learned here. I recommend the book to those of the latter category and would caution those of the former. The methodology employed by Moberly is unhelpful for a truly confessional engagement with Scripture, and I think many of his conclusions fail to honour the world of the text, drawing too freely on the scholarly accounts of tradition history.

In the first case, Moberly attempts to read the Old Testament as a canonical unit apart from the New Testament. For the Reformed Evangelical—as I would identify myself—I think this is a problem. The biggest problem is that God has given us the two testaments as a single whole, a combined testimony to His faithfulness throughout the ages and his purpose to bring his kingdom to bear on earth through Jesus the Christ. It is not sufficient to read the Bible through larger dogmatic categories such as the Trinity, Christian Soteriology, and Christology; we must also approach it with a Biblically informed account of the Bible—a Christian bibliology. When we do so, I believe it is indefensible to treat the Old Testament in isolation from the New. This has important interpretative implications, as has been recognized from the days of the early Church. The use of tradition and history of religions or ideas is also highly problematic. Often this scholarship can help us see things in the text that we might never have seen otherwise, yet in as much as they offer us interpretations of the text based on their distinct methodologies, we as Christians should not follow them. That is, as has been shown repeatedly, the methodologies employed by critical scholarship are not neutral; they are informed by their own bibliologies, epistemologies, and theologies, which are often formed apart from the testimony of Scripture. Their conclusions, therefore, reflect unbiblical and (often) atheistic or deistic bibliologies, epistemologies, and theologies. Moreover, their findings are often unsustainable within their own frame of references, relying on significant conjecture. As it regards The God the Old Testament, I do not find the view that Psalm 82 draws on the Canaanite El tradition persuasive. It is clear that “God” (אל) and “the Most High” (עליון) can be used to refer to Yahweh, or God (אלוה or אלוהים) (e.g. Genesis, Psalm 51); given that אל may serve as either a title for God or a generic descriptor (divine), the Psalm can be accounted for wholly within in an Israelite frame of reference. Given that it makes great sense in its canonical context and can be explained without any reference to the El tradition, there is no reason to invoke this tradition to explain the origin of the Psalm, let alone its canonical interpretation. Moreover, as I am arguing in my PhD thesis, the traditional interpretation of the “gods” in this text as human judges is highly defensible. Moberly accepts the so-called “consensus” of the scholars (though there remains a lively discussion on the matter) without actually arguing that “gods” makes better sense as a reference to existential or ontological deities rather than humans. Another point of exegesis that is worth discussing is Moberly’s account of the Divine name. After a lengthy discussion, Moberly concludes that “I am what I am” (אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה) is best taken as a statement of divine incomprehensibility. I did not find his argument persuasive, and there are good reasons to disagree. Namely, the Divine name is given in a context where God is being identified and actively moves to reveal himself: though Yahweh is presented as beyond humanity, he repeatedly acts so that he may be known. Given that היה is used for predication in clauses that function in a subordinate or coordinate manner within discourse (as opposed to the use of verbless clauses or וַיְהִי to provide explanation or exposition in narrative and the use of the verb in narrative to describe events), theאָשֶׁר clause may be read as the content of a predicate clause, and so the equivalent of the English “I am what I am.” Though this is a tautology in form, in a context where God makes himself known, it does not state incomprehensibility but self-reference: God is not explained by reference to any other reality. Yet, because God repeatedly acts so that his people might know him, the Israelites and the Christian today is not left in ignorance; we are pointed away from the creation to the creator and find in his revelation an adequate and beautiful portrait of God our creator.

I recommend the God of the Old Testament not as a sufficient or convincing exposition of the texts Moberly handles but as a challenging dialogue partner for the Evangelical student of the Bible to better understand the Bible and, therefore, our God who reveals himself there.

R. W. L. Moberly’s “The God of the Old Testament” is simply an exquisite piece of scholarly literature that is not only academic in nature but perfect for the lay person seeking to understand the God of the Old Testament in a fresh, creative, smart, and challenging way. Excellent read!