Lecture 4: The Themes of the Torah, and the Search for Its Purpose

The lecture, section by section

1. A theocentric book

   In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth; at the end of Deuteronomy, God buries Moses. He is the only person present at both the Torah's first verse and its last chapter. Men come and go, Adam through Moses, but God remains, and the Torah unfolds his character: Creator, whom the song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32 names Israel's own maker; the powerful one, El Shaddai, who floods the earth, plagues Egypt, divides the sea, rains manna with a double portion before each Sabbath, and gives victory over Amalek; the Holy One of Leviticus, echoed for believers in 1 Peter 1; the faithful one who remembers his promises; the sovereign; the righteous; the redeemer.

2. A transfer of sovereignty

   Exodus 19 marks a transference: Israel had been slaves under Pharaoh's authority, and now the God who redeemed them and brought them to himself stands as their sovereign. As Pharaoh once commanded and directed them, now the LORD commands and directs. The commandments that follow are the shape of belonging to a new master.

3. What a covenant is

   A covenant is a relationship between two parties formalized by a binding agreement with a sworn oath. Covenants do not create relationships; they flow out of relationships already established, and there is no covenant without the oath. The Torah shows men making covenants with men, Abraham and Isaac each with Abimelech, Jacob with Laban, precisely because fallen men are untrustworthy and their promises need binding.

4. The God who swears

   The astonishing thing is that the completely trustworthy God also binds himself by oath. Four theocratic covenants stand in the Torah: with Noah, his seed, and every living creature in Genesis 9; with Abram in Genesis 15, where God answers the question how may I know by cutting a covenant that the land is given to his seed; with Israel at Sinai in Exodus 19, where for the first time the people also speak, pledging to do all the LORD has said; and with Phinehas in Numbers 25, a perpetual priesthood secured by oath. God kept his side at Sinai; Israel's unfaithfulness began at the golden calf and never fully stopped.

5. The persistence of sin

   Disobedience enters at Genesis 3, when Eve and Adam eat from the one forbidden tree, and it never leaves the stage: every intent of the heart only evil in Genesis 6, the tower of Babel in Genesis 11, the golden calf in Exodus 32, Nadab and Abihu's strange fire in Leviticus 10, the rebellion at Kadesh-barnea, Moses and Aaron's own rebellion in Numbers 20, the sin at Peor in Numbers 25, and Deuteronomy 1 retelling the wilderness failures. Even the chosen deceive; Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob each lied. The sin of man only shines a brighter light on the faithfulness and righteousness of God.

6. The God who chooses

   Election runs through the Torah: God chose Abram, chose the younger Jacob and not Esau, chose Judah, the fourth-born, as the royal line in Genesis 49, chose Israel out of all nations in Deuteronomy 7, and would choose a place for his name in Deuteronomy 12. Asked why Judah's sin with Tamar did not disqualify him as his older brothers' sins disqualified them, Essex gives the answer Scripture itself gives: God's choice, whose ways are inscrutable, as Paul says at the close of Romans 11. Sometimes God makes the basis of his choice known; sometimes he does not, and faith accepts it.

7. The exodus, past and future

   The exodus is anticipated in Genesis 15, where Abram's seed is foretold to serve another nation and come out with great possessions, and again by Joseph at the end of Genesis. It happens in Exodus 12 through 15, and from then on God continually identifies himself as the one who brought Israel out of Egypt. It becomes the most important event in Israel's past, and the latter prophets will announce an even greater exodus still future.

8. Instruction, and the ten words

   Law in the sense of statutes and ordinances fills long stretches: the ordinances of Exodus 21 through 23, Leviticus, Numbers, and the reiteration of Deuteronomy 5 through 26 as Israel prepares to enter the land. Essex notes a detail worth keeping: nowhere in the Torah are the ten commandments called commandments; they are the words of the LORD, though cast in command form.

9. Worship before the tabernacle

   The tabernacle brings the cultic emphasis to full form, God dwelling among his people, approached through priestly mediation and proper sacrifice. But offerings do not wait for Sinai: Cain and Abel bring offerings in Genesis 4, Noah offers burnt offerings when he leaves the ark, and Abram builds an altar when God shows him the land. Worship through offering belongs to the Torah's whole fabric.

10. A land with surveyed borders

    In the genealogy of Genesis 10, one descendant of Noah's sons receives what no other receives: the territory of the Canaanites is traced border by border. Why the special interest? Because the Torah is being given to a people camped on that very boundary. The land promised in Genesis 12 has its borders spoken again at the covenant of Genesis 15, in Numbers 34, and in Deuteronomy 1. God wanted Israel to know exactly what was and was not the land he had promised.

11. The Torah is deliberately incomplete

    Where is Israel when the Torah ends? Outside the land, peering over into what was promised. Their entry is prophesied, their later exile is prophesied, but the book closes with the promise untaken. The Torah is foundational, not final: there is more to come, and everything from Joshua to Revelation is the fleshing out of the skeleton the Torah has already set.

12. The story of five men

    Biographically the Torah is the story of five men. Adam is created in Genesis 1 and dies in Genesis 5; a genealogy carries the line to Noah, who with his sons holds the stage to Genesis 11; Abram then dominates to Genesis 25; Jacob, born in almost the same breath as Abraham's death notice, carries the narrative to Genesis 50; and Moses rules the account from Exodus 2 to Deuteronomy 34, so thoroughly that Gordon Wenham can describe the Torah as a biography of Moses. Isaac and Joseph, important as they are, stand subsumed under Abraham and Jacob. The selectivity is the point: centuries pass in a genealogy while Jacob receives twenty-five chapters, because Moses is telling Israel about Israel.

13. Three proposals for the Torah's purpose

    Only in the last forty years have scholars seriously returned to reading the Torah as one literary unit and asking its single purpose. David Clines opened the discussion in 1978: the Torah records the partial fulfillment of the promise to the patriarchs, seed, divine relationship, and land, God's initiative in a world where human initiatives end in disaster, reaffirming his primal intentions for man; on this reading Genesis 12:1 to 3 is the Torah's hinge, and Clines has largely won the commentators. Gordon Wenham refines him: Clines underplays the blessing promised to the nations, forgets that the covenant with Noah comes before the covenant with Abraham, and omits Moses; Wenham's own statement keeps the patriarchal promises but names God's mercy, Moses' collaboration, and a completion that awaits the future. John Sailhamer, Essex's closest friend from seminary, reads the Torah through faith and failure: Genesis 15:6, Abram believed the LORD and it was counted to him as righteousness, is the key, faith marking the time before Sinai and failure the time after, pointing ahead to a future king and a new covenant.

14. The kingdom understanding

    Essex declares his own lean: Eugene Merrill's kingdom understanding, that God chose Israel, the seed of Abraham, to be the priestly nation through which mankind would be restored to its proper role as rulers for God over the created earth. Its key texts are Genesis 1:26 to 28 and their echo in Exodus 19:4 to 6, and Merrill's Old Testament theology, Everlasting Dominion, works it out across the canon. Why insist on one purpose rather than several? Because a literary document has an ultimate purpose under which the true elements of the others can be gathered, and the purpose you adopt will steer your reading of every particular. The frame is the whole Bible's frame: Genesis 1 and 2 echoed in Revelation 21 and 22, the beginning answered by the end, and the Torah already speaks in those terms.

1. God binds himself by oath, though he is completely trustworthy. What does it say about his condescension to us that he confirms his promises the way untrustworthy men must confirm theirs?

2. The Torah ends with the promise in sight but untaken. Where in your own life does God's timing leave you outside looking in, and how does the Torah's incompleteness by design reframe that waiting?

3. Essex answers some questions with because that was God's choice. Where do you find that answer hardest to receive, and what would it mean to receive it the way Romans 11 does, in doxology rather than complaint?