Introduction

Well, let's begin by committing this session in this time for prayer. We will need to break in about a little less than a half hour so that you can get over to the bookstore. So, let's go now to prayer. Our Father, we thank You for the wonderful privilege that is ours, simply to call You Father. We thank You that You have by Your grace brought us into Your family through the work of Christ. We thank You that because of Him and His shed blood and what He has done for us, and approach Your throne with boldness and without fear. We thank You, too, that You are a God who has demonstrated in history that You care for Your own, and though You are high and lifted up that yet You see fit to stoop down and to look upon the affairs of men. Not only do You look upon our affairs and our doings and our needs and our cares, but You have entered into our history effectively, not only in Christ, but in many ways that have foreshadowed His coming and testified to His coming. And so, we thank You now for this time that we, as a class, can gather together to consider the historical books of the Old Testament. We thank You for what we can glean from them. We ask that You would make them effective in our lives as instruments of Your Word that would pierce home and find response in our hearts, the response that is engendered by Your Spirit for in and of ourselves we cannot bring any good thing to You, even a willing heart. And so, we pray that You would soften us this semester, and that You would teach us by Your Word in that You would draw us closer to Yourself. Not that we may be glorified, but that Your glory may go forth in our lives and in the lives of those His name. We are looking at the syllabus that may be a rather grandiose term for what is simply a course of description and a reading list. So, think of it as You like, but we need to look at it first to see where we are going in this class. Let me say first of all that the catalog description is very boring by design. It has to be short and somewhat to the point and also designed to stave off too many students. So, it's a boring catalog description that simply says, survey an analysis of the historical books of the Old Testament in the light of ancient Near Eastern history and historiography, credit, three units, assuming passage. To get onto something a little more significant or a little more descriptive, goals of the course as I see them are these. Now, You may have other goals for the course and I welcome Your interaction during break time or best after the evening session, sometimes because of the taping in our friends in far away places who will be looking at this, it may be difficult in a short seven or eight minute break, which is what I think will be a lot at most of the time. We'll have two of those each evening. It may be difficult for You to catch me and have any kind of substantive conversation, particularly if I'm sweating and worrying about what we're going to do in the next session and needing to look over something. So, You may want to just take a break and then catch me afterwards or catch me in my office, call me at home or whatever. But I do welcome Your input about the kinds of things You would like to learn. I can't please all of the people all the time, but I can probably please some of the people some of the time. So, let me know what You think. These are some of the goals that I have for the course and the kinds of things that I would like to see as accomplished together. Now, first of all, this course is designed to help students learn the content of the historical books of the Old Testament. Specifically, I mean by that, Joshua Judges, first and second Samuel, first and second Kings, Ezra, Nehemiah, and to a more minor extent, first and second Chronicles. I do not mean that first and second Chronicles are to a more minor extent historical, but we will engage ourselves with those books in a more minor way in this course. Nor by choosing these books, am I trying to imply that the Pentateuch, for instance, is not historical. It certainly is, in my opinion, but the historical books, as they are so designated in the English canon, are these. Joshua, to second Kings, and then also Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles. And so, we will be focusing really on those books that bear that designation, historical books. We want to investigate their messages, and the means by which these messages are conveyed, and we want to explore the significance of these important books for ourselves and for our time. And I do think that they are highly relevant, as indeed is my opinion of most of the Bible or all of the Bible, but I really love the historical books, and I hope you will grow to love them as we study them together. Secondly, I want to help students in this course to gain a proper orientation to some important hermeneutical issues, by that we mean issues relating to the interpretation of biblical historiography. Hermeneutics may be a new term to some of you, it simply has to do with principles of interpretation or the interpretive process. And these historical narratives pose certain challenges to us. And so, we need to look at that and see how we assess them, how we are to understand them. So, we will even wax a little philosophical from time to time in this course, and as you read my book, you will say why didn't he wax philosophical a little less often, but so be it, there it is. Third thing is I want to see this course helps students become competent readers of the Old Testament historical narratives. For essentially three purposes, obviously we could figure out some more, but for the purpose of information, it's important that we understand the events of Israel's past. And the way in which Israel has experienced God in that past. The way in which the story of Israel, the history of Israel prepares for the coming of Christ. Christ is Israel. Is all that Israel was meant to be. So in Christ we see the fulfillment of that which was foretold first in the life of Israel. Secondly, we want to look for points of application. We want to discover the lessons that these historical narratives have for us today. This will involve assessing the way in which these narratives addressed their original audience, how they function within the canonical context, and then how our own lives have certain points of contact with those ancient lives. So in the way that these narratives addressed them, we can expect that they are addressing us as well. I do not view them as being given to a different people at a different time and irrelevant to us today. Now certainly we live after the coming of Christ, and so we live in the age of fulfillment, but still much of what we read is still applicable today. We need to sort of work with discovering just how these narratives are applicable to us, and hopefully we will be changed by them. This brings me to the third point that I hope we will, the third purpose that I hope will be accomplished in this course. That is, I hope we will be inspired together to commit ourselves to lifelong study of the whole Council of God. It is very popular among Christians, and it is understandable to focus primarily on the New Testament, but as I will be wants to say from time to time, we need to think of the New Testament as chapter four in a four chapter book. And just as you don't fully understand chapter four, the climactic chapter, if you haven't read the preceding three, so we will discover even tonight that you don't fully understand the New Testament until you have a fair acquaintance with how it was foretold, how it was prepared for in the Old Testament. I will, from time to time, mention the figure 77%, that's what portion of the Bible is the Old Testament, and a large portion of that Old Testament are these books. And so we want to commit ourselves to exploring the riches of the full Council of God, not be those who simply delve in here or the other place. So those are some of the goals that I have for the course. Let me pause and ask if there are comments or questions or if something's on your mind right now, and you say, I'm getting ready to leave because I really thought this course was going to be about this or the other thing. Is there anything like that that's in your mind? Maybe not quite the way I could it. Some people I think come into this course with a name like Old Testament history, thinking that it will be a purely a reconstruction of the history of Israel per se. But my own opinion is it's much more beneficial to look at the way in which God's word depicts Israelite history to us, rather than using that as one source, by which we then go about trying to reconstruct our own notion of what Israel's history must have been like. I tend to think that given the theological perspective from which these books are written, the inspired authors got it right. And they have presented the realia, the events of the past, in the way that is meant to benefit us in many different ways, not least spiritually. So I think it's important that we understand not just the history behind the historiography, the writing of history, but we want to understand just how God has chosen to recount to us the events of the past. And so we will focus on the literature itself as a window onto the historical events which are being depicted and also as a window onto the theology that is being conveyed. So it's not exactly a reconstruction of Israelite history so much as it is a focus on the historical books of the Old Testament canon. Any comments or questions? Everyone willing to stay at least for the next 15 minutes? In terms of texts, I have down here English Bible, if you have had Hebrew, which I know of at least one of you in this class who has had Hebrew, feel free to read as much as you like in the Hebrew Bible. But I'm expecting that most of you have not had Hebrew and we will be dealing with the English Bible, that is that will be our basic text. However, I will not shy away from exploring some of the riches of the Hebrew text with you. I'll try to do it in such a way that it doesn't put you to sleep and I'll try to be selective and bring out those things which may be of interest to you. And perhaps my hidden agenda is to inspire some of you to want to take Hebrew someday. And so if that happens, I for one will not be sorry. You may be sorry midway into Hebrew class, but Hebrew too can be fun. David Howard's book, an excellent book. I'll hold it up here. You may already have this. I did get a message on my phone machine that the bookstore ran out. They have put in another order. They will get here soon. I will obviously not expect you to have... Unless it takes weeks. If it takes weeks, we'll have to start photocopying sections and such. But apart from that, if they can get it here quickly in some kind of rapid transit system, then I will not expect you to have read the assigned material on time until you get your book. That sounds imminently reasonable, doesn't it? Well, this is a very good book. It's come out quite recently. I was very glad to see it appear. David Howard's a fine man teaches up at Ted's, that is Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, a very gifted scholar. And I think he's done a very good job in this book and filled a gap that was very much in need of filling an introduction to these historical books. So I hope you will enjoy reading this book. That's sort of our main text book. I've also asked you to read this book, which is written by yours truly. The colors at least are nice. This is in a series called Foundations of Contemporary Interpretation Volume 5. It may be, if I can put it this way, it may be a bit of a stretch for some of you who have not read anything about history, historiography, philosophy of history, or anything like that. But it's the way I wrote it. The editor Moses Silva comments that very often evangelicals who have approached this topic have not gone much below the surface. They've either shied away from it or have given it rather superficial treatments. Frankly, I had to answer a lot of questions myself in working through this book. And so it sort of was my own exploration of questions. And I did write it knowing that it would be read not only by theology students but by other scholars and such, some of whom might not be persuaded that, for instance, the Bible is historically reliable. And so I felt like I needed to address questions on a level that would gain their respect. Now, whether I've fully done that or not, I'm not sure, but it is if I can use the term a little more monographic, you know, a little more of a scholarly book than sometimes is used in classroom work. So please be patient with it. Look for the big questions and I'll try to give you some more orientation as we get closer to reading this book so that you kind of know what you're looking for as you go in and maybe that will help. I have had mixed reviews from students. Some students have said, I loved it. Of course, they're wanting to get A's. But some students have really benefited from it. Love it. And others have said, wow. And I haven't known exactly what to make of it. But now that it's published, it tends to get a better read probably because of the colors on the cover. But that is that will come later in the semester. I could have you read that right now as orientation. But I prefer to place that later in the semester. Maybe when you have begun to ask some of the kinds of questions that I was asking by virtue of what you encounter in the texts. So as you read biblical texts and as you notice, for instance, that they seem to be wonderfully crafted as literature. I remember when I first began to appreciate the literary artistry of biblical text, it caused a bit of a crisis because I thought, well, I thought the Bible was history. Now I'm discovering it's this wonderful literature. You know, are the two compatible? That's the kind of question I felt myself that I had to ask. And maybe as you get along in the course, you'll begin asking those questions. So it comes sort of midway through the course that you read that and maybe then it'll help answer questions that are real questions to you by that point. Now I've also asked you, I don't seem to have pulled it out. I've also asked you to use Matthews and Benjamin will someone hold that book up just everyone who has one hold it up. There you go. Now you can get a glimpse of it. I didn't bring that one with me. This is called Old Testament parallels, laws and stories from the ancient Near East. As the title implies, it is intended to be ancient Near Eastern literature that is in some way comparable to the literature we find in the Bible. And I want to stress that it is in some way comparable just as world religions are in some way comparable to Christianity. You know, other world religions have prayer. Other world religions have a code of ethics and so forth and so on. Now I'm not for a minute implying that we should reduce Christianity to the level of world religions which we may regard as man's attempts to reach God, human attempts to find God as opposed to God's coming down and breaking into history to recapture his own. There is a distinction between those two and certainly there is a distinction between the Bible and these contemporary ancient Near Eastern literary works. But we can learn something from them. We can learn something about the kind of literature that was about when the Bible was being written, recalling that it was written over some considerable span of time. And so when you read that, be thinking in terms of apples and oranges or perhaps apples and wax apples that might be the best way to look at it. You know, you can learn something about a real apple from a wax apple in as much as it looks a lot like it. You know, it's got the same shape, the same contour, the same color, maybe even something of the same weight. The one is nourishing and the other is not. So bear that in mind as you read these and also I would encourage you as you read those parallel passages, occasionally the authors will put in parenthesis a biblical reference which they regard as in some way parallel. Now you probably won't take the time to look up all of them but I encourage you to look up some of them because it's very interesting to see in what ways the Bible is similar and in what ways it's very distinctive from these other literary traditions. Okay, so that's the other textbook that we'll be dealing with. So including the Bible 4, I hope you only had to purchase 3. I hope you came already owning a Bible but if that's not the case then by all means run out and buy the fourth textbook. Any questions on texts? All right, method of instruction. The primary method of instruction will be lecture, some class discussion given the size of the class that will be difficult to pull off. I have here student pre- student preparations which you will prepare and turn in to me and we'll see what those are in just a minute. Testing and assorted scare tactics. I just throw that in, you know, to write things up and let you know that I'm not seriously trying to scare you nor should these books scare you. In addition to evaluation, we hate to talk in these gross monetary terms but I guess you do have to think about grades to a certain extent. Your final grade will be calculated on the following basis. Readings and class assignments assuming that you do them all and turn them in will count for 30% of your grade. Now that doesn't mean that 30% of your grade will be 100. That portion of the course is more or less pass fail. We will be tracking what you turn in and giving it a very rough evaluation, adequate inadequate that kind of thing but not a carefully analyzed letter grade. So that will, the purpose of that aspect of the course will be more or less to tip the balance if in other aspects of the course you find yourself on a border somewhere, you know, like between an A minus and a B plus. If you've been very diligent and done all your classwork and turn things in then you will get bumped over the border to the A minus rather than getting the B plus. If you have been very recalcitrant and a negativity spreader and so forth and so on then you will not get, you will not get over the border, you will get left where you are to languish with your B plus. The midterm exam, 30%, and then final exam or a paper, 40%. Now we will later discover on the next page, really toward the bottom of the next page, that for the, in order to be, to qualify to do a paper, you have to be pulling a B plus average after the midterm. In other words, the writing of a paper is more or less the honors track. Now that doesn't mean that you have to write a paper to get an A by any means. Others can get A's just by testing, taking the midterm, taking the file. Some people love to take tests. These tests will be mostly objective. If you're a good writer this won't give you, the test won't give you a lot of opportunity to show that. And so you may want to strive for that B plus, at least by midterm, after the midterm is taken and thus qualify yourself to write a paper, but that is a qualifying sort of thing. Okay, well let's look briefly at the course requirements. And again, I think we're going to come up on our break before I quite finish this so I may come back to this afterwards. Reading assignments and class preparations, complete all the readings in the English Bible, which are there listed, they're the books that are the focus of this course, with the exclusion of chronicles. I'm not asking you to read first and second chronicles. You are certainly welcome to read those wonderful books. And really a fun thing to do, if you want to, is to purchase a synopsis of Samuel King's and Chronicles, which lays out the Samuel King's history. And the chronicles history in parallel columns, and it's a wonderful, wonderfully instructive experience to read the two history side by side because you can see that the same events are often recounted in quite different ways. And then we'll try to answer the kinds of questions that that may raise in your mind, but that's a, that's a good way to read them if you were to read Kings and Chronicles or Samuel Kings and Chronicles together. You're not required to read first and second chronicles for this course. You're also asked to read secondary literature, which will be mostly from our textbooks, and it is outlined below in our lecture schedule and preparation assignments. So we'll see that in succeeding pages. Secondly, as you read a biblical book, I would like you to outline it. I want this to be your outline, not the NIV Study Bibles outline or some other outline. I want this to be your outline. After all, if you're reading the books, what you're required to do. As you go through, I want you to think about each section or chapter. It doesn't have to be by chapter division, but that's often the most convenient even if not the most accurate. Think about how would I summarize in one little brief title, some or most of what happens in this chapter or in this section? And if you can be the, the brief or the better, just give yourself some kind of memory peg so that you can recall, OK, what happens in first Samuel chapter one? What happens in first Samuel chapter two? Because one of the great lacks that we have in our midst, not necessarily in this classroom, but generally is a lack of knowledge, biblical knowledge, generally, but Old Testament knowledge in particular. So I want you to use this exercise of outlining these books as you write them as a means toward gaining some command of Bible content. On the midterm and on the final, I will be testing your knowledge of Bible content even to the extent of describing an event and or, you know, describing 20 events and then giving you 20 or more references, not verse references, but chapter references and expect that you will match chapter and event. OK, now it can be kind of taxing. People have have languished under that system some in the past, but in the end, I think you learn a great deal by striving to do that. Let's not be perfectionist. Let's just do the best we can with that kind of thing. But do construct some kind of outline? I have asked for a synthetic outline and I'll explain that a little more after our break, which we need to take in just a few minutes. So I'll come back to that the third. Well, first let me mention one other thing about the outlines. Please turn in a copy. Turn in a photocopy. Don't turn in your original. I hope you will prize your original. I hope it will mean something to you. I hope you will keep it in a notebook. And I hope over time you will begin to collect your own outlines of biblical books that you have constructed by your own labors through your own reading because there's something special about your own outline of a book as opposed to what you might get from a commentary or a study Bible or whatever because it triggers recollections of things you discovered in reading. It's much more than some other someone else's outline. So I hope you will keep your original and turn in a photocopy of your outline because more likely than not, we will not be returning those to you. We will simply be tabulating. Yes, it's a pass. It was turned in. It looks good. Occasionally we'll turn it back with the notation saying you might improve in this area. But most of the time we'll just look it over, check it off, and not return it just because of the logistics of doing that much male distribution. So always turn in a photocopy. Always keep your original. And that way too if my dog eats them then you've still got one. Thirdly, be prepared for a brief objective quiz which may be given at any class session and may pertain to any assigned reading, biblical or other or to the lecture material from the more recent sessions. Now all I'm saying there is try to be learning right along and reviewing right along, look back over your class notes, look back over, read right along according to the assignment schedule, try to digest what you're reading because there's a lot to learn and it's much better if you're learning it as you go rather than thinking, well I'm storing all this stuff away in my notebook and then when it comes time to take the midterm I'll stay up all night and learn it. Well this notion of the threat if not always the reality of a quiz each time we meet each week may encourage you to kind of stay on top of the material. So that's the that's the generous gracious purpose behind that system. It's not to please me because I don't enjoy giving quizzes but I know you enjoy taking them so I do that for you. Now these will be done typically at the in the first ten minutes of class and sometimes we'll actually grade them in class other times we won't and again it's it's it's kind of Russian roulette. It's not a certainty that you'll have one but there is always the likelihood that you will have one there will be one other test apart from the midterm and that will be a test on the art of biblical history. After we've had a chance to talk about it and talk about some of the main points in it then there will be a test that's a bit bigger than a quiz that will be given and that may be given in the form of a take home test. I haven't quite decided exactly how to handle that but there will be some kind of test given on the art of biblical history. Now I give you further approximate reading totals and time management tips. I do this to kind of help you schedule your time and also to let you know that I do sit down and more or less mathematically try to figure out how much I can require of you without becoming unreasonable. And you may look at this and say you're still unreasonable but I tried okay I tried and what I did is I I tabulated the number of pages and or columns in one article you're going to read their columns instead of pages so I counted each one of those as a page and I came up with a total of eight hundred and fifty nine pages including Bible pages that you're to read in this course. Now assuming 20 pages an hour which is a little fast maybe for some of us still I had to choose something and so I chose that that would be 43 hours of reading. It may take you a little longer than that or you may be skimming at some point art of biblical history or something and it may go a little faster. But if that be the case if it takes you about 43 45 hours to do the reading that leaves you approximately 35 hours for accomplishing the synthetic outlines reviewing for quizzes for the midterm and the final or writing a paper instead of the final so about a little over half the course will be spent in reading and then the other allotment of your hours and it is the general rule of thumb is one hour in class two hours of preparation outside of class. So if you're taking a three hour course we meet once a week you really should try to find six hours apart from this evening to do your reading and so forth and so on. Okay time management suggestions I'm going to pause right here we're going to take a break so that you can get to the bookstore which is open between seven and seven thirty and when we return we will pick back up on this syllabus and then eventually move on into a lecture for the evening.