Dr. Keith Essex · The Master's Seminary · 67 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Keith Essex, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
The course crosses from the Torah into the second division of the Hebrew Bible, the Former Prophets. Dr. Essex sorts out the names first, historical books, Hexateuch, Deuteronomistic History, primary history, then shows what these four books actually are: one linked narrative, told through prophetic eyes, running 820 years from gaining the land to losing it. Listen for the pattern every book shares, each opens with a death, and for who stands at the precise middle of the whole story.
The threefold canon Jesus names in Luke 24, the law, the prophets, and the psalms standing for the writings, can be traced to about 190 BC, right when the Septuagint was being translated. The Jewish canon calls the next division the Prophets and splits it: Former Prophets, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings; Latter Prophets to come. The Greek translators reordered things into historical books, slipping Ruth between Judges and Samuel and appending Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, books the Hebrew canon keeps among the Writings. This course follows the Hebrew order: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, with Ruth waiting for the Writings.
When nineteenth-century skeptics dismissed Mosaic authorship, one result was the Hexateuch: Joshua promoted to sixth book of the Torah as the true conclusion of the story begun in Genesis. Remove Moses' death from the equation and there is a line of truth in it, for the narrative of the second generation that opens at Numbers 26 does not finish until the end of Joshua. But it is a truth better stated without dismantling the Torah.
Martin Noth turned the theory around: instead of adding Joshua to the Torah he subtracted Deuteronomy from it, leaving a Tetrateuch and making Deuteronomy the introduction to a Deuteronomistic History running through Kings, the work of a school rather than an author. This is now the dominant critical framework, and its grain of truth is real: Deuteronomy echoes all through the Former Prophets. But the echoes run further, into the Latter Prophets, the Writings, and the New Testament, because Deuteronomy is the keystone of Scripture, not the preface to four books. Readers should expect these theories inside the standard lexicons and dictionaries, BDB shaped by the older criticism, Holladay by Noth.
The most recent framework listens to the Hebrew itself. Joshua opens with a linking construction, and it came about after the death of Moses, which presupposes a narrative already under way; Joshua 1 is not a beginning. Genesis through Kings reads as one continuous story, the primary history, from creation to the exile of 2 Kings 25, with Chronicles as the secondary history retelling it from Adam to Cyrus's decree. Some scholars credit the continuity to a prophetic shaper in the exile; Essex credits it to the Holy Spirit directing the human authors.
Who wrote these books? Joshua's death is narrated in Joshua; Samuel dies in 1 Samuel 25 with two thirds of his book remaining; Kings must come from the exile, since its last scene is Jehoiachin honored at the Babylonian table. Four anonymous prophets, then, compiled them, and that is the point of the title Former Prophets: this is Israel's history in the land through prophetic eyes. No history records everything; these authors, directed by the Spirit, selected the events and speeches that carry the meaning, and they interpret everything by the standard of Moses.
The Former Prophets stand with the Torah as the foundation the Latter Prophets build on. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve will indict Israel and Judah's lawbreaking and predict Yahweh's future restoration, and neither the indictment nor the hope can be understood without the history and its theological interpretation. Theologically these books are secondary to the Torah, everything needed is already there, but they fill in the details that make the prophets, and much of the New Testament, intelligible.
As in the Torah, Yahweh speaks first and last. He addresses Joshua as he addressed Moses, and three attributes dominate. He is the mighty warrior: every victory Israel wins is his, and every defeat means he was not with them. He is the righteous judge: Jericho falls in chapter 6, and in chapter 7 tiny Ai wins because there is sin in the camp, the paradigm for the whole history. And he is the Lord who blesses obedience and curses disobedience, Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 worked out in real time across eight centuries.
Kings crowd the story from the start: the king of Jericho in Joshua 2, thirty-one defeated kings in the summary of Joshua 12, and behind them Deuteronomy 17's prediction that Israel would one day ask for a king like the nations. Yahweh's charge to Joshua, keep this book of the law on your lips and meditate on it day and night, echoes the king's duty in Deuteronomy 17 word for word. Joshua is not a king, wrong tribe, but he is deliberately kinglike: the prototype of what Israel's king should be, a brother shaped by the Torah, until God's actual choice, David, arrives. Even the royal cities are seeded early: Gibeah and Bethlehem enter in Joshua and dominate Judges 19; Jerusalem appears at Joshua 10 on its way to becoming the chosen city.
A small and telling title threads the books. Moses is the servant of the Lord in Joshua 1, once he has died; Joshua receives the title at his death in Judges 2:8; David receives it while he still lives, as do Elijah and Jonah, both prophets of the north. And 2 Kings 17 gathers the whole prophetic line under it: my servants the prophets, whom Israel refused to hear. The servant roll is quietly preparing readers for the prophets to come.
The four books share one literary skeleton. Each begins with death: Moses dead in Joshua 1, Joshua dead in Judges 1, Samson's death implied behind 1 Samuel 1, David senile and dying in 1 Kings 1. Death keeps the reader remembering disobedience, for even the best of these men are men at best and none is the ultimate anointed. Then comes an extended narrative blending success and failure, and each book closes with an epilogue: Joshua's final dialogues, the two dark narratives of Judges 17 to 21, the non-chronological window of 2 Samuel 21 to 24 ending on David's proud census, and 2 Kings 25, rebellion to the last, yet with the Davidic dynasty alive and honored, a live coal of hope carried straight into the Latter Prophets.
The whole narrative runs 820 years, conquest in 1406 BC to exile in 586, land gained and land lost, and the patience of those eight centuries is itself grace. Split the span and the midpoint lands at 1003 BC, the year all twelve tribes acclaim David king and he takes Jerusalem. Chart the books as literature and the midpoint is the same place, 2 Samuel 5 to 8: David king over all Israel, the ark in Jerusalem, the covenant promised, the victories summarized. From 2 Samuel 9 the slide begins, in David, then Solomon, then the whole house. At the quarter mark, Judges 17, tribal-sanctioned idolatry enters the bloodstream, the secret sin of Joshua 24 gone public, and it remains the besetting sin to the end.
Read whole, the Former Prophets make one argument: God raised up David and covenanted with him, and neither David nor any son of his proved to be the ultimate seed. Israel's Messiah, these books conclude, was not in the past; therefore, say the Latter Prophets, he must be in the future. History, but never merely history. For further study Essex names the Dictionary of the Old Testament: Historical Books as the preeminent tool and David Howard's Introduction to the Old Testament Historical Books as the single volume to own, a book whose outline so resembles the course notes that he must insist neither stole from the other.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all thirteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. How does the Hebrew canon organize the books after the Torah?
2. What did the Hexateuch theory claim?
3. What did Martin Noth propose?
4. What does the opening of Joshua, and it came about after the death of Moses, signal?
5. Why must the book of Kings come from the exile?
6. What makes the Former Prophets prophetic rather than mere chronicle?
7. What do the Former Prophets provide for the Latter Prophets?
8. What does the defeat at Ai in Joshua 7 establish?
9. How does Yahweh's charge to Joshua echo Deuteronomy 17?
10. Who receives the title servant of the Lord while still alive?
11. What structural feature opens all four books?
12. What stands at both the chronological and literary center of the Former Prophets?
13. What conclusion do these books force about the Messiah?
All thirteen correct. Lecture 26 is complete.
Every one of these books opens with a death, because even the best of men are men at best. How does that refrain guard you from putting a leader, ancient or modern, in a place only the Lord's Anointed can fill?
The Ai paradigm says God's people can lose with God against them more surely than they can win with the strongest army. Where does the church today most need that lesson about sin in the camp?
Eight hundred twenty years passed between gaining the land and losing it, and Essex calls the delay itself grace. What does the patience of God across those centuries teach you about how he deals with slow, repeated failure, including yours?
Yahweh's charge as the story resumes in Joshua 1: this book of the law shall not depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, and be careful to do all that is written in it, for then you will make your way prosperous and have success.
The lecture's own tools: the Dictionary of the Old Testament: Historical Books, named the preeminent reference for this division, and David Howard Jr.'s Introduction to the Old Testament Historical Books, the single volume Essex tells the class to own, with Chisholm and Hamilton among the alternatives surveyed.