15) The relationship of Old Testament Books to each other

This might seem an odd topic to introduce here but it often happens that general readers of the Old Testament are not aware of the ways in which the various works and streams of tradition that make up the Old Testament are related to one another.

For a start the order of the books as we have it in the Old Testament is not necessarily the order in which they were written. This already introduces a level of complexity that can be perplexing when we begin the process of interpreting a passage or book. We are so used to being able to carry around countless documents electronically in our phones, iPads and laptops that it becomes hard to imagine what it was like in the Ancient Near East where materials were preserved by being written on parchment scrolls, or on papyrus. To carry about the information held in any modern edition of the Bible would have required many scrolls, and that was expensive and such collections would have been the normally held in synagogues or in scriptoria such as the Essenes had in Qumran.

In an earlier post we have already made mention of the ways in which the developing scriptural traditions were gradually formed into larger collections: the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. We have also indicated that even within a single book like Genesis a number of streams of tradition have been combined. To my mind this is a reminder that the Old Testament is the end result of complex and dynamic processes - the result of many hands, voices and hearts over centuries.

An example that may help when thinking of the Old Testament is to look up at the stars. When you look at the night sky light is coming from many different stars and galaxies. The light might be hitting our eyes at the one time, but some of those stars are no longer in existence, while other light comes to us from our own Sun and is reflected off the Moon. Some of the beams of light have travelled for a thousand years, others but a few minutes. In a similar way when we pick up the Old Testament we look at it as a whole when in reality it preserves traditions, voices and experiences from many different times and places.

We are not used to reading the book of Deuteronomy, and thinking of looking at the prophet Jeremiah, or dipping into the Psalms, mainly because we tend to look at them as unrelated. The reality is that many of the voices can be coming from the same time in Biblical Israel's life. For this reason it is very helpful to  consult reference works that can assist us by providing timelines and indicating how books we think of as separate were written at the same time - sometimes expressing different points of view, at other times with more uniformity and agreement. I appreciate this makes things sound more complex than you may have imagined. On the other hand, it serves as a powerful reminder that the Bible is an immensely rich tapestry, and much more intricately woven than we might have otherwise imagined.