The first five books of the Bible are called the Torah, Hebrew for law or instruction. They are also called the Pentateuch, which is Greek for five scrolls. They are at the heart of Judaism. For Christians they are a major part of the Word of God. They tell the story God’s people from the creation of the world until its arrival under Moses to the promised land. Much of that story is familiar to us, but understanding the Pentateuch can still be challenging for modern readers. In this interview, Dr. John Bergsma will explain his pick of the books that can guide us through the Pentateuch.
Dr. John Bergsma is a Full Professor of Theology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, in Steubenville, Ohio. He served as a Protestant pastor for four years before entering the Catholic Church in 2001. He specializes in the Old Testament and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Among his various books are Bible Basics for Catholics: A New Picture of Salvation History and A Catholic Introduction to the Bible: The Old Testament (co-authored with Brant Pitre).
- Pentateuch as Narrative
by John Sailhamer - The Old Testament of the Old Testament
by R.W. Moberly - Murmuring Against Moses
by Jeff Morrow and John Bergsma - A Father Who Keeps His Promises
by Scott Hahn - The Book of the Torah
by Thomas W. Mann
What led you to become an Old Testament scholar?
I was always drawn to the Scriptures. I grew up in a devout Protestant home. My mother taught me to reading the Bible through a year, as a devotional practice, when I was twelve years old. I kept that up through my adolescence and into college. As a result, I developed a great love for Scripture. My main way of communing with the Lord—my main form of prayer—was meditation on Scripture and daily reading of it. That contributed to me feeling a call to the Ministry of the Word: to be a pastor in the denomination that I was part of. When I got into the seminary, I discovered that I had academic gifts and began to explore the possibility of getting a doctorate in theology. I had always loved languages and had a BA in classical languages. Old Testament is the most language intensive subdiscipline of theology. You need to know Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and, preferably, several languages that are cognate to Hebrew. With my proclivity for languages, it felt like a smart subdiscipline to get into.
There was a more spiritual dimension as well. Certain passages of the New Testament began to strike me very powerfully. For example, there was the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. Near the end of the parable, the rich man pleads with father Abraham to send Lazarus back to his brothers. Abraham famously says, “They have Moses and the prophets. The rich man complains, “If somebody comes back from the dead they shall believe,” and Abraham replies, “If they do not believe Moses and the prophets, they will not believe even if someone rises from the dead.” That is a very epic statement within the Gospel of Luke because it is looking forward to the resurrection of our Lord. In my own devotional reading of Scripture at that stage in my life, it struck me that the Old Testament—Moses and the prophets—is really foundational for understanding the Gospel. It struck me that part of the reason for the growth of heresies, for the evangelistic ineffectiveness of the Church in our own age, was a loss of faith in these foundational scriptural texts. That, together with statements from the Lord to that effect (e.g. “If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me.” John 5:46) really contributed to a sense of call to devote my life to the study and the defence of Moses and the prophets to shore up faith in these foundational scriptural books so that people could understand and appreciate the fullness of the Gospel.
Although you have selected commentaries and guides written by modern biblical scholars. Is there the one of the Church Fathers that you would single out for his commentaries on the books of the Pentateuch?
One cannot go too far wrong with Augustine. Probably, his best-known work on a Pentateuchal book is The Literal Meaning of Genesis. In terms of biblical theology, Irenaeus does a wonderful job at identifying the different covenant areas that are represented already in the Old Testament narrative. Those are two Church Fathers to start with.
In drawing up your list of five best books on the Pentateuch, you appear to have followed two principles. First, you have not picked line-by-line commentaries but studies that present the big picture of the Pentateuch taken as a whole. Second, you have taken an ecumenical approach, picking both Catholic and Protestant guides to the Pentateuch. Is this a correct description of the principles behind your selection?
No, you're correct. I tried to pick at different stages of accessibility. At one end of the spectrum, Scott Hahn's A Father Who Keeps His Promises is very readable. Upper elementary students could appreciate it as well as adults. Thomas Mann is a step up in terms of complexity and accessibility; Sailhamer one step more. Then Moberly's book is not a commentary on the whole Pentateuch but a monograph that makes a very important point about Pentateuchal interpretation. My own work, written with Jeff Morrow, is probably the densest of the different books on our on our list. It is rather technical and gets into the history of scholarship on the Pentateuch. So, I have picked books that span a wide range of readability and coverage of the Pentateuch.
1.
Your first book, John Sailhamer’s The Pentateuch as Narrative, takes the traditional view that Moses is the human author of the first five books of the Bible, and that these constitute a single work. Is the Pentateuch a single book or five different ones? Does it have a single human author, Moses, or many different ones?
Both are true. The Pentateuch is a literary unit as a whole as well as a composition in five books. Each book has its own character and yet together they present us with a collection that has a unity to it: a beginning, an end, and narrative resolutions. An analogy would be Tolkien's famous trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. Each of the three books has a different character, and yet it contributes to an entire storyline.
I am convinced of what I would call substantial Mosaic authorship. In other words, Moses is the primary source of the material that is in the Pentateuch. This is the traditional view of the Church.
As to the author of the Pentateuch, we can recognise that there are different hands present. I am convinced of what I would call substantial Mosaic authorship. In other words, Moses is the primary source of the material that is in the Pentateuch. This is the traditional view of the Church. We can see evidence in certain instances of later hands at work: editorial remarks, glosses, and things of that nature. Theologically, what is most important is that they assert that the laws were revealed by God to Moses at Sinai. The laws are connected to the historical Moses. That is a claim that the text itself makes, whereas, for example, on the issue of the authorship of the Book of Genesis, the text itself makes no claims. We are just dealing with tradition at that point.
We can safely say that the Pentateuch did involve an editorial process, but the narrative and the structure of it also seems to be the product of a single mind because of its coherence. The Scriptures—and both Jewish and Christian tradition—give us strong reason to attribute the substantial authorship or source of most of the content to the figure of Moses.
2.
Next is R.W. Moberly’s The Old Testament of the Old Testament. Can you explain the title and why you have chosen this book?
Moberly’s monograph, The Old Testament of the Old Testament, presents us with one of the most significant contributions to the understanding of the Pentateuch in the modern period. Basically, the thesis of the book is that within the Pentateuch you have two different forms of religion. You have the patriarchal form of religion, centered around the patriarchal covenant, often called the Abrahamic covenant, and then you have a religious sea change with Moses and the institution of Mosaic or Sinaitic covenant, which establishes the people of Israel as a sacred civil state.
After Moses establishes the Covenant on Sinai, the priestly functions are limited to a priestly class. First, it is the first-born sons. Rather rapidly, due to the Golden Calf episode, that priestly duty is given to the Levitical tribe as a whole, and the sons of Aaron in particular. So, we have a reservation of priestly duty to a priestly class. Then, you have a whole categorization of sacrifices, a central sanctuary, cleanliness lawsm and cultic regulations imposed upon the people. None of that was present earlier on in the narrative. When we look at Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, we see the father of the clan or the father of the tribe functioning as a natural priest and building altars, whenever he feels it is appropriate, at different sacred places in the land. He himself offers sacrifice. All of this is prohibited after Moses institutes the covenant with Israel. There is a development in the religion of the people of Israel. The Church Fathers would call it a development in the economy. In my own teaching, I would say that there is a distinction of the covenant form between the Abrahamic and the Mosaic. Moberly is just trying to point out what is often lost, not just by popular readers, but oftentimes professional interpreters as well: that there are two very different expressions of faith in the God of Israel within the Pentateuch. The Pentateuch bears witness to a dramatic change in the way that Israel expressed and practised her faith toward her God within the period that these books cover.
3.
Your third recommended book has not been published yet. It is Murmuring Against Moses, which you have co-authored with Jeff Morrow. How would you sum it up?
Jeff Morrow and I take a look at the history of scholarship on the Pentateuch. Of course, this goes back quite some time. Jeff has written other books that traced the history of Pentateuchal scholarship all the way back to the fourteenth century. There is a lot to be said about that. But in recent times, the history of Pentateuchal research tends to only go back so far as the late 1800s and begin with the figure of Julius Wellhausen. He was a famous German, Old Testament scholar who taught at the University of Berlin. He had great social, cultural, and academic influence in the latter part of the 1800s. Wellhausen finalized or crystallised the very popular documentary hypothesis for the composition of the Pentateuch. This hypothesis divides the Pentateuch into four sources, known as the Jahwist, the Elohist, the Deuteronomist, and the Priestly source, or, more popularly, J, E, D, and P. Wellhausen postulated different chronological time periods and theological emphasis for each of these supposed authors. Then he hypothesised that a final redactor took their work and, in an often incompetent way, wove it all together into the narrative that we have in Genesis through Deuteronomy.
Neither Dr. Morrow nor I are convinced of this hypothesis. We think that it has many weaknesses. However, it is often taught both at the undergraduate and the graduate level as if it were established fact. Those who work in the field of Old Testament research, especially Pentateuchal studies, know that it is not an established fact. In fact, there is hardly anything about the theory that is not subject to debate among scholars who are currently writing.
If you assume that the prophets were written after the Books of Moses, then the literary relationships between the books make sense. You can observe where Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel are quoting and alluding to different passages of the Pentateuch in a way that advances their message.
Morrow and I took up the task of writing an alternative history of Pentateuchal studies. The story has never really been told of all the contrary voices, all the objectors, to the documentary hypothesis over the past 150 years. Dr Morrow, who is an intellectual historian, gives that counter-history by looking at literally hundreds of Bible scholars who have adopted a non-documentary approach to interpreting the Pentateuch and tells the story of this alternative model. The alternative model posits just one or two authors of the Pentateuch and tries to understand the collection of five books as a coherent narrative.
My contribution to the book looks at modern research on the relationship between the Pentateuch and the prophets. One of the things that Wellhausen was best known for was advancing the view that the Pentateuch as a whole was not composed and published until after most of the classical prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel—had written and published their works. He reversed the canonical order of the law and the prophets. He argued for the prophets, and then the law. Most of my contributions in the book are technical studies demonstrating that this chronological ordering of the biblical documents is untenable. You cannot explain the literary relationships between the Torah or the Pentateuch and the prophets if you posit that the prophets were written first. However, if you assume that the prophets were written after the Books of Moses, then the literary relationships between the books make sense. You can observe where Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel are quoting and alluding to different passages of the Pentateuch in a way that advances their message.
So, on the fundamental question of which came first, the law or the prophets, I have demonstrated that Wellhausen was clearly incorrect. If he is incorrect on that, it overturns his whole edifice and the field is wide open for alternative theories on the composition of the Pentateuch.
A lot of the heavy-lifting of the biblical-theological storyline is all done in the first five books. By the time we get to the end of the Pentateuch, we have gone through four major rearrangements of God's family relationship with his people.
4.
The next book—Scott Hahn’s A Father Who Keeps His Promises—is not on the Pentateuch as such. It takes us through not just the Pentateuch but the whole Bible, as it traces how God makes and keeps his covenants to gradually form his family, the Church. Why have you recommended this book?
I recommended this book because I was trying to think of a very accessible introduction for folks just beginning to study the Pentateuch. Ostensibly, Hahn’s book covers the whole Bible. Actually, of the thirteen chapters, ten cover the period between Genesis and Joshua. So, about 80% of the book is really is about the Pentateuchal story. And for good reason. When you understand the what the Church Fathers called the divine economy—the development of God’s household plan with his people—then you realise that a huge span of time, namely, from creation to the death of Moses, is covered by the Pentateuch. Within that time, there are four biblical covenants: the Adamic, the Noahide, the Abrahamic, and the Mosaic. A lot of the heavy-lifting of the biblical-theological storyline is all done in the first five books. By the time we get to the end of the Pentateuch, we have gone through four major rearrangements of God's family relationship with his people. That is why Hahn spends most of his book dealing with the Pentateuch. Things move more quickly thereafter. Once we cross the threshold from Deuteronomy into Joshua, there is just a single covenant in the rest of the Old Testament: the Davidic covenant. The rest of the Old Testament is very much concerned with that covenant because it is the one that the New Covenant, promised in the prophets, is meant to restore. After we get out of the Pentateuch, the rest of the Old Testament is about the Davidic covenant, its reformulation, and its restoration: its transformation, we could add, into something that Jeremiah calls the New Cup, and Isaiah and Ezekiel prefer to refer to as the eternal covenant or the covenant of peace. That, of course, is the covenant that comes to us through Christ and the Eucharist. So, I recommended Hahn for a very readable introduction to the Pentateuch. His great strength is on the nature and the development of covenants. This is so important for us as Catholics, because, at every Mass, we identify the Eucharist as the new and Eternal Covenant. That statement implies that there were old and temporary ones that came before. It is not necessary to have great understanding in order to receive the graces present in the Eucharist. Nonetheless, we can better dispose ourselves to receive those graces if we if we grow in knowledge of God’s saving plan. That would involve knowing something about these old and temporary ones that come before andwhich are summed up in the Fourth Eucharistic prayer by a beautiful line: “Tima and agin you offered them you offered them covenants and through the prophets taught them to look forward to salvation.” That is an elegant summary of the Old Testament and how it leads up to the revelation of Christ and the gift of himself in the Eucharist, which of, course, Christ identifies as the New Covenant in Luke 22:20, where he speaks over the cup: “This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” We can extend that to the body as well. The real presence of Christ in the Eucharist constitutes that New Covenant, that new family bond. Hahn stresses that the covenant is a way of forming a family by swearing an oath. Understanding that familial dimension of covenants enables us to appreciate then why the Eucharist is called the New Covenant. It is Christ’s body and blood. You are what you eat. When we consume it, we become assimilated into his body and blood, which of course makes us a family of God. It makes us sons in the Son, as the Fathers liked to say. We partake of Christ's filial relationship with the Father through the New Covenant. So that is why I recommended that book.
5.
The final book on your list is The Book of the Torah by Thomas Mann. This is a narrative reading of the Pentateuch from the perspective of a believer. How can that help those who are not so familiar with the Pentateuch and Scripture to read it from that perspective.
Thomas Mann's book is a great text for a college class or adult education class in a parish. It is barely over 150 pages long, and yet it very adequately and competently introduces the reader to each of the five books of the Pentateuch. It explains the puzzling aspects of the Pentateuch, but not by recourse to different sources, which is what Wellhausen did. Instead Mann looks carefully at the narrative and every time we are presented with some kind of puzzle or enigma in the text. Mann's first recourse again is to dive deeper dive into the narrative art. What is the ancient sacred author trying to tell us? A complex literary interaction going on throughout the Pentateuch. The early parts are constantly foreshadowing later ones. When we get into the later books, again and again we find allusions and references to earlier narratives, themes, and motifs. In a relatively short book, Mann really conveys the literary genius behind this great sacred work of literature. This provides a very firm and coherent platform for doing further biblical theology in the rest of the Old Testament and in the New.
Naturally, the books you have recommended are meant to help us read the Pentateuch, not substitute it. Which translations would you recommend?
I have a great affection for the Revised Standard Version Second Catholic Edition (RSV-2CE) This is published, usually in a burgundy cover, by Ignatius Press. It has the approval of the bishops of England and Wales. One of the reasons I like that translation is, first of all, it stays close to the Revised Standard Version, that goes back to the King James translation and respects the tradition of translating the Bible into the English language. Its cadences are familiar to us from cultural monuments, like Handel's Messiah. I appreciate it for hewing close to the tradition of English Bible translation.
Then there are brilliant translational innovations at certain places in the RSV-2CE. My favourite is in Genesis 22 where, three times in that chapter, Isaac is referred to by a rare Hebrew word that means “one and only” or “singular.” The RSV-2CE renders it as “only-begotten” to pick up in the English reader’s consciousness the connection with John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son.” That is accurate. The point can be defended on the scholarly level: that indeed the author of the Fourth Gospel is rendering the rare Hebrew word yachid as monogenēs in John 3:16 and intending to pick up the typological connection between Jesus and Isaac.
More recently, there is the Holy Bible of the Augustine Institute. This is the English Standard Version Catholic Edition. It was authorised by the Bishops of India. We need to remember that India is an English-speaking country. The ESV translation was very well thought-out hermeneutically by a team of Bible scholars to produce a modern English translation that they describe as being substantially literal. As far as they can, they try to do a word for word translation of the Hebrew into English. They also strive for consistency: to render the same Hebrew word into the same English word. The importance of that is so that you can see the interconnections within the document itself. If I render the same Hebrew word with five different English words, then the English reader does not recognise a motif that is running through the Pentateuch. If I render the single Hebrew term with the same English term consistently then the English reader begins to detect the literary motifs and the literary interactions that are present in the original language. That is what the ESV strives for.
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