Lecture 10: Did the Patriarchs Live? Chronology, Shiloh, and How to Preach Narrative

The lecture, section by section

1. Four positions on the patriarchs

   Genesis 12 through 50 reads as historical narrative, selective and literary, recounting what happened. Two centuries of debate have produced four stances. The traditional orthodox view, Merrill's and this course's, receives the text as accurate and uses outside data only to illuminate it. The maximalist school of archaeology, associated with Albright, holds that the finds broadly support the Bible read at face value, though it also bends the Bible to the finds, most notably in dating the exodus late. The tradition-historical school grants only kernels of fact embellished by generations of oral tradition. And the minimalists of the last quarter century deny the history altogether.

2. How far the skepticism runs

   The minimalist position now dominates university religion courses: the Old Testament as religious propaganda, Israel's whole history allegedly invented by post-exilic Jews to ground their claims before Persia. Essex tells of a UPS driver who, learning the school was Bible-believing, recited the latest case against Genesis, absorbed secondhand from a brother's university reading. The preacher of the Old Testament will meet this in the pews, and evangelical avoidance of Old Testament preaching owes something to not knowing how to answer it.

3. Artifacts need interpreters too

   Essex's answer when a find is said to disprove Scripture: there must be some misunderstanding of the artifact, because archaeological data is not self-interpreting; someone interprets it from presuppositions, exactly as with the biblical text. He walks through a sensational headline from that very week, a town from the Gospels supposedly found, which dissolves on reading into it seems and process of elimination. And the standing caution to the skeptics is one word: remember the Hittites, a whole people the scholars declared unattested until their entire empire surfaced in central Anatolia.

4. The chronology of the patriarchs

   Working from the Bible's own numbers, Merrill's tables set Abraham's birth at 2166 BC and Joseph's death at 1806. Two decisions govern the math: the early date of the exodus, 1446 BC, and the long sojourn, taking Exodus 12:40 as the Masoretic text gives it, four hundred thirty years in Egypt. The Septuagint stretches those years over Canaan and Egypt together, which the patriarchs' recorded ages would split at two hundred fifteen each; but no one knows where that reading came from, and the working presupposition, freshly strengthened among evangelical text critics, is to take the Hebrew text at face value. Counting back, Jacob's descent into Egypt lands at 1876 BC.

5. Accurate, but not always sequential

   The chronology exposes something about the narrative's order: Jacob and Esau were born before Abraham died, yet Genesis 25 finishes Abraham's story before it begins theirs. Old Testament narrative never claims strict chronological sequence; it claims that whatever it recounts happened. The arrangement serves the teaching, Moses under the Spirit completing one life before taking up the next, and the reader must stay alert to that across the whole Old Testament.

6. Judah's blessing: the one to whom it belongs

   The key passage of later Genesis is Jacob's word over Judah in chapter 49: his brothers will praise him and bow to him, his hand will be on the neck of his enemies, he is a lion's whelp whom none dares rouse. The scepter will not depart from Judah until Shiloh comes, and the best reading of that debated word is neither a personal name nor the town in the hills, but the phrase to whom it belongs: the rule stays in Judah until the one arrives to whom the rule belongs, and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples. Verses 11 and 12 paint his reign in pictures of extravagance, a foal tied carelessly to the choicest vine, garments washed in wine, because abundance will be that plentiful.

7. The narrowing seed

   Genesis 49 answers the question left open by Genesis 22: who is the singular seed who will possess the gate of his enemies and bless all nations? The promise narrows step by step: the seed of the woman in Genesis 3, the line of Shem in Genesis 11, the seed of Abraham in Genesis 22, the tribe of Judah in Genesis 49, and, when Scripture reaches 2 Samuel 7, the house of David. Numbers 24 will pick up the lion and the coming king within the Torah itself. Genesis ends with the Messiah's address growing more precise.

8. Interpreting narrative: the working rules

   For handling narrative, the course points to Kaiser's seven guidelines in Cracking Old Testament Codes, identifying scenes and watching the author's devices, repetition, omission, inclusio, chiasm, irony, worked out on Jacob's wrestling in Genesis 32, and to Merrill's principles for narrative as history. Two of Merrill's rules carry the day's weight: historical narrative describes what happened, not what should happen, Abram married his sister and Jacob married two, and not every narrative carries a devotional or doctrinal payload; some narrative simply moves the story from here to there.

9. The allegory trap

   Essex retells, with affection and alarm, the famous allegorical sermon on Genesis 24: the servant becomes the Holy Spirit sent to fetch a bride for the son, Rebekah falls in love along the journey with a bridegroom she has never seen, just as we love Christ unseen. The principle may be true; the text is wrong. Read at face value, Genesis 24 is about Abraham refusing a Canaanite wife for Isaac because the Canaanites lie under God's curse, and the covenant line must not be joined to it. The right principle preached from the wrong text is still mishandling the word.

10. What Genesis 39 is actually about

    Joseph's resistance of Potiphar's wife really happened, and Joseph really is a model of purity when a preacher needs an illustration for a didactic text like the seventh commandment or Proverbs 7. But the authorial point of Genesis 39 is sounded twice: the LORD was with Joseph, prospering him in the house and extending kindness in the prison. The chapter shows the dream of chapter 37 moving toward fulfillment through calamity after calamity, because when God has set his call on a life, no calamity can thwart it, the very truth Romans 8 states as doctrine.

11. Narrative can still give examples

    Description is not prescription, yet Scripture itself draws examples from narrative: Romans 4 holds up Abraham's justifying faith for imitation, and 1 Corinthians 10 reads Israel's wilderness history as examples for those on whom the end of the ages has come. The test is whether the lesson is implicit in the text rather than imported into it, and the Torah's own didactic material, culminating in Moses' history-preaching in Deuteronomy, models how history teaches.

12. The curriculum behind the curriculum

    Essex warns the class, half smiling, that enrolling in seminary is enrolling in calamity: the curriculum behind the curriculum. The takeaway from Genesis 39 for such seasons is twofold: Lord, keep me from sin as you kept Joseph, and let me know that, like Joseph, the calamity is not interrupting your call but fulfilling it.

13. Learning to preach the stories

    The closing shelf for narrative preaching: Kaiser's Preaching and Teaching from the Old Testament; Mathewson's The Art of Preaching Old Testament Narrative, a third on interpreting, a third on preaching, a third of worked examples; Dale Ralph Davis's The Word Became Fresh; and Richard Pratt's He Gave Us Stories for the interpretive groundwork. Learn to interpret narrative before you presume to preach it, and then preach it, carefully.

1. When a claim against Scripture reaches you secondhand, from a class, an article, a confident stranger, what would it look like to respond the way this lecture models: unshaken, informed, and patient?

2. The right principle from the wrong text is still mishandling the word. Why is that standard worth keeping even when the sermon that breaks it is moving and true in its theology?

3. The curriculum behind the curriculum: calamity that cannot thwart God's call. Where has Genesis 39's twofold prayer, keep me from sin, and let me trust your purpose, met your own experience?