My Own View of the Old Testament

I am not a “Bible scholar” who graduated from a seminary or theological school. Nor am I an archaeologist or a historian (although I do have a B.A. in history). But I have read up enough on the subject to have established my own opinion about the Old Testament of the Bible. And why and by whom it was written.

Those writing the Old Testament (a.k.a. the Hebrew Scriptures) never could have envisioned it being printed, distributed, promoted, and read on a mass scale across the world. Reading the scriptures was an exclusive privilege designed for the priesthood and whomever they deemed qualified for the task. They were written with the view of justifying the regime in power by establishing it as God-ordained, with roots going back even to creation itself. By making this clear to the people, the ruler had the advantage of being approved and installed by God himself.

Which ruler was it that started the idea of having his rule justified by God and retroactively established? Well, I imagine that this sort of thing had been common for some time in the ancient Mesopotamian/Egyptian world. But in the area we now refer to as Palestine, or Israel, this all began with King David of Israel. The territory he ruled over comprised many different nationalities. How to convince the people there to be loyal subjects would have been a difficult task. One way to partially realize this would be to retroactively create a history that showed events leading inexorably to his rule, with God’s approval stamped over it. The idea that the god of all creation would be specifically interested in promising and endorsing the rule of an individual such as David may seem to be rather egotistical, but it actually was quite a progressive departure from other societies of the time, in which the ruler would often flat-out declare his own divinity.

I believe that reading old scriptures with the intent of discerning the original writer’s true message and motivations behind that message is more in line with the idea of reading “reverently”. For wouldn’t you consider it a simple matter of high respect (which is what reverence is) for a reader of your writings to want to understand exactly where you are coming from without adding extraneous or agenda-driven meanings to them? But nowadays the idea of reading reverently has been turned on its head and usually means reading through the filter of a narrowly-defined church doctrine that discounts the historical and social context of the writings.