Lecture 5: The Shape of the Torah: Three Divisions, Three Speeches, and the End of the Days

The lecture, section by section

1. Structure flows from coherence

   Compositional strategy is where the presupposition of a single, Spirit-directed author cashes out: an author with a purpose works it out in an orderly way, so the interpreter looks for how the particulars form a unified whole. Begin with the assumption that there is no unity, as much scholarship of the last two or three centuries has, and you will not find the coherence that is actually there.

2. The traditional five, and Clines's two

   The most ancient structural scheme is the five books, in place since somewhere between 400 and 250 BC, though the book names were added later and are not intrinsic to the text Israel received. David Clines, consistent with his reading of Genesis 12:1 to 3 as the Torah's hinge, outlines two great parts: Genesis 1 through 11 showing the need for the promise, then Genesis 12 through Deuteronomy 34 as its outworking, seed in Genesis 12 to 50, divine relationship in Exodus 1 through Leviticus 27, and land from Numbers 1, the census of Israel's fighting men, to the end.

3. The prevailing six-part plan

   The most common outline today, represented by Hill and Walton's survey, shows Clines's influence: Genesis is split at chapter 12, creation, fall, and judgment first, then covenant promise, election, and the preservation of the family; Exodus brings deliverance from Egypt and the covenant at Sinai as Israel's theocratic charter; Leviticus expands the covenant law for holiness, since the LORD will dwell in their midst; Numbers is the testing and purging of the wilderness; Deuteronomy is covenant renewal and second law-giving for the generation about to enter the land. The five books have quietly become six, with the two unequal halves of Genesis standing as peers of whole books.

4. Three speeches with one grammar

   Essex does not follow John Sailhamer on the Torah's purpose, but credits him with the best insight into its structure. Setting the traditional book divisions aside and reading Genesis 1 to Deuteronomy 34 as text, Sailhamer noticed that at three concluding points, Genesis 49, Numbers 24, and Deuteronomy 31, the Torah uses the same grammatical construction: an imperative, a cohortative, and an announcement of what will happen in the end of the days, a phrase used only four times in the whole Torah. The book that opens with the beginning keeps pausing to point at the end.

5. Jacob, Balaam, and Moses

   In Genesis 49 the dying Jacob summons his sons: gather together, that I may tell you what will befall you in the days to come, then blesses each tribe's future in poetry. In Numbers 24 Balaam, the pagan prophet hired to curse Israel who can only bless, announces what this people will do in the days to come, his fourth oracle. In Deuteronomy 31 Moses assembles the elders to speak the words of his song, knowing that after his death Israel will act corruptly and evil will befall them in the latter days. Narrative leads up to each speech, the speech itself is poetry, and an epilogue follows in which the speaker dies. The hope is never in the immediacy, which ends in death; the hope stands at the end of the days.

6. The fourth occurrence: Deuteronomy 4

   The one use of the phrase without the grammatical formula is Deuteronomy 4:30. Moses foretells idolatry, scattering, and distress, and then this: from among the nations Israel will seek the LORD and find him when they search with all their heart, for at the end of the days they will return to him, and the compassionate God will not fail them or forget the covenant he swore to their fathers. The Abrahamic promise will be fulfilled at the end of the days, when God turns Israel's heart, the very note Deuteronomy 31 echoes on the eve of Moses' death.

7. The Torah's threefold shape

   Laid over the whole, the three speeches mark a threefold structure with striking symmetry. Genesis, about a quarter of the Torah by word count, is the narrative of the fathers, pre-national Israel: you are associated with Adam, with Noah, with Abraham, with Jacob whose name became Israel. Exodus 1 through Numbers 25, about half, is the first generation, numbered in the census of Numbers 1. Numbers 26 through Deuteronomy 34, the final quarter, belongs to the second generation, marked off by the second census, and it is to this generation the Torah is addressed: here is your background, here are the promises, here is what God desires to do through you.

8. The covenants carry the emphases

   The structure rides on the covenants God swore: the promises stated to Adam in Genesis 1 are codified by oath in the covenant with Noah, which is why Essex sees no need for a separate Adamic covenant; the Abrahamic covenant drives the deliverance; the Mosaic covenant orders the nation; and within it stands the priestly covenant with Phinehas, a perpetual priesthood in the line of Levi. That last covenant, Essex notes, is one of the strongest arguments for a premillennial reading of Scripture, since the priest it promises comes from Levi, not Judah, a thread to follow into 1 Samuel 2 and Ezekiel 44 and 45. And ahead lie Deuteronomy 29 and 30, a covenant made though not yet experienced, which Essex calls probably the most important two chapters in the whole Torah.

9. Sinai is the heart

   Exodus 19 through Numbers 10 covers eleven months at Sinai, and it is the longest single stretch of the Torah, its literary heart. A modern reader might wish Moses had spent the space on creation, the flood, or the logistics of decades in the wilderness, the very points where skeptics press. The wilderness years pass quickly; the eleven months at Sinai do not. Moses, borne along by the Spirit, was not answering our apologetic concerns; the Torah camps at Sinai, so its readers must camp there too.

10. The shelf behind the course

    The session closes with the working library: the Bible Knowledge Commentary and the Expositor's Bible Commentary as foundations; Keil and Delitzsch, to whom the last century and a half of Old Testament studies is a footnote; VanGemeren's New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis; and the Dictionary of the Old Testament: Pentateuch. On the Torah itself, the book that has most shaped Essex is his friend Sailhamer's The Pentateuch as Narrative, a hundred-page introduction followed by a running commentary on the whole, and the most influential book of the last forty years remains Clines's The Theme of the Pentateuch.

11. The age of biblical theologies

    On whole-Bible theology Essex issues a friendly correction to the new movement. Reading Schreiner's The King in His Beauty, a good synthesis of the newer works, he notes it never cites the earlier whole-Bible theologians, Talbot's God's Plan of the Ages, Erich Sauer, Alva McClain, Walter Kaiser, men who put the Bible together from beginning to end before the current, largely covenantal wave rediscovered the project. The newer works, Gentry and Wellum, Goldsworthy, Hamilton, Beale, Schreiner, are valuable, and the recovery of whole-Bible reading is a welcome reprieve from two centuries of tearing the text apart; his favorite Old Testament theology remains Merrill's Everlasting Dominion.

12. Discernment with every book but one

    Asked which works need caution, Essex widens the question: exercise caution with everything that is not the Bible. Check even Dr. MacArthur's study notes against the text, as MacArthur himself would be the first to urge. The recommended list is evangelical, though a couple of the dictionaries carry articles from beyond that commitment; discernment, not suspicion, is the working posture, and Scripture alone is read without it.

1. The Torah's hope is never in the immediacy, which ends in death, but at the end of the days. How does that pattern, promise deferred beyond the speaker's lifetime, teach a believer to hope?

2. Moses gives eleven months at Sinai more space than decades of wandering, and none of it answers our apologetic questions. What does the Torah's own sense of proportion suggest about the questions we bring to it?

3. Essex says to check everything against the Bible, even the study notes of teachers he trusts most. What does healthy discernment look like in practice, and how is it different from suspicion?