Ann Jeffers

Book Review: The Meaning of the Old Testament — Then and Now: Steven L. Bridge, Getting the Old Testament: What it Means for Them, What it Means for Us (Hendrickson Publishers/Alban Books, 2009. £10.99. pp. 227. ISBN: 978-1-59856-045-9)

The publication of a second edition of Bryan W. Ball’s seminal work on Seventh-day communities in Britain from 1600 to 1800, fifteen years after the publication of the first, is greatly welcome. Ball’s scholarship is of excellent quality as is demonstrated in his previous monograph A Great Expectation: Eschatalogical Thought in English Protestantism to 1660 (Leiden: Brill, 1975), which, like the first edition of the work presently being reviewed, is rather difficult to attain. The great contribution of The Seventh-Day Men is its copious attention to detail, drawing upon disparate sources the history of a theological tradition that on occasion attempted to cover its own tracks. Ball’s years of research have been compiled in a very clear and engaging format, which both highlights continuity and denotes diversity. While giving fair attention to earlier expressions of Seventh-day Sabbatarianism, Ball clearly expresses the spontaneity of the movement’s development out of the contemporary puritan fervour of the early seventeenth century. The origins of Seventh-day Sabbatarianism in seventeenth-century England rested on a desire to complete the incomplete reformation of the Church of England, an emphasis on restoring the Christian church’s original practices and an assertion that the Decalogue is immutable. Crucially, Ball’s study demonstrates that although there were numerous personal and communal links among those who observed a Saturday Sabbath, Seventh-day Sabbatarianism cannot be limited to a homogenous tradition since it bore influence upon a number of communities seeking the restoration of church purity including Baptists, Episcopalians, Quakers and Unitarians, as well as communities that primarily identified themselves by their observance of the seventh day as the Sabbath. Ball’s second edition includes a new introduction describing additional fragmentary sources, additional notes that further elucidate his original arguments and provides a more easily available edition of the key study of the subject.

Book Review: Paradise Lost? Konrad Schmid & Christop Riedweg (eds), Beyond Eden: The Biblical Story of Paradise (Genesis 2-3) and its Reception in History (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008. 59.00. pp. xiv + 293. ISBN: 0978-3-16-149646-2)

rest of the volume in which the use of Exodus is described, evaluated, and alternate approaches are presented. From general use of Exodus imagery, we see a shift towards a discussion of what the author sees as a misappropriation of the Exodus story in liberation and feminist theologies which tend to find importance in the exodus from Egypt and liberation from Pharaohs laws, but neglect the entrance into the jurisdiction of God in favour of an interpretation which validates the self-creation of laws within a community. This discussion of law moves away from how people have already interpreted the Decalogue to a creative explanation of the law in Exodus as an ordering of desires which holds hermeneutic potential within modern society. There are several chapters dedicated to both the revelatory and eschatological significance of the tabernacle and also to its relevance to New Testament theology of the temple. The tabernacle, described at great length in Exodus, is treated as narrative and as such is compared to the presence of Christ within us in the New Testament. Finally we are taken from what the regular person or theological student should do with Exodus, to what the preacher might find to say about it. The author thus proposes an emphasis on the naming of God and how this might bring us into a more intimate relationship with the Lord our God. Whilst this is primarily a book aimed at making Exodus more approachable and straightforward to the modern reader, it continually stresses the need to contextualize the material in order for it to function in a meaningful way, making it a helpful reader for theologian, congregation member, and preacher alike.

Book Review: Lang, Dumézil and the Hebrew Bible

Bernhard Lang, The Hebrew God: Portrait of an Ancient Deity (London: Yale University Press, 2002, £25.00. pp. 246. ISBN 0–300–09025–0). This new book by Bernhard Lang explores further the idea of monotheism but gives it a new twist by following the nomenclature established by the French philologist and historian of religions Georges Dumézil. Dumézil has famously argued in Mythe et Epopée his magisterial study of Indo-European cultures that all Indo-European cultures share a common view of the world and organize their societies into a ‘tripartite ideology’: the sovereign and religious functions (spiritual), martial (a manifestation of physical strength) and economic function (fecundity). Lang’s contention is that this functional tripartition is also to be found among the Semites and in particular among the people of the Hebrew Bible. He adapts Dumézil’s insights to the basic three functions delineated above but develops the third (which Lang calls ‘life’). The book’s contents reflect this and explore five images in all: Lord of Wisdom, Lord of War, Lord of the Animals, Lord of the Individual (the ‘Personal God’), and fifthly Lord of Harvest. An epilogue synthesizes the book’s thesis with a discussion of historical beginnings, monotheism and how the three parts pattern applies to Christ. The temptations are seen as an example of continuity of the tradition. It will become clear from the above that Lang’s analysis owes much to comparative religions (and to some extent to the historical-critical method as the story of Jacob shows on pp. 173–76), and his use of Ancient Near Eastern texts is, if not completely new to some, always enlightening. There is much of interest in this book and without question Lang’s perceptive analysis throws much light on the Hebrew deity. However, a systematic analysis is always constrictive: it seems to this reviewer that there is much more flow between the images that such a presentation shows, and also that the troubling variety of the images reflecting the deity in the Hebrew Bible, its ‘dark’ manifestations, is not easily categorized within the tripartite theory. Like every theory, and study based on that theory, it is limited. It is a pity that there is no separate index for biblical passages as some texts discussed are omitted (e.g. Isaiah 43 and 46, p. 137) and it makes cross-referencing awkward.