A simple travel guide to the Old Testament
The Old Testament and its Context
Introduction
“The Old Testament? Really? You’ve got to be kidding me, right?” This is a typical reaction when you propose to read or study the Old Testament as part of the Christian formation of the community, as something good and useful for their life. We feel it so distant and strange to us, so alien to our faith and to the message of Jesus, in all aspects and not only in time, that its reading seems to us like an ascent to the summit of Mount Everest [Which is certainly a difficult and complicated ascent]. I will certainly not deny that the Old Testament has its difficulties, but it is possible to navigate it efficiently and profitably if we have the right help. That is the purpose of this, I hope pleasant, short introduction to the writings of the Old Testament, to the people who produced them and to the social and cultural environment in which they were born and collected. The final intention is not to give you an exhaustive knowledge of that set of works but, above all, to offer an effective knowledge that generates both the ability to properly and profitably understand the main ideas behind those texts and to motivate their reading and meditation as an integral part of our spiritual routine. Nothing more and nothing less.
Usually, and regrettably, we Christians read little of the Bible, and when we do, we tend to focus on the New Testament [indeed, a very holy and good thing], the problem is that we do it in an almost exclusive way and we tend, therefore, to put the Old Testament aside [and this is very unfortunate, take my word for it]. Certainly, the beginning of our Bibles is made up of a series of texts that we never or almost never read because, generally, when we read the Bible we move directly to the pages that make up the New Testament. We feel that as Christians the Old Testament has little to say to us, and if anything, it should serve as a preamble or forerunner to the coming of the Messiah. Thus, it is not uncommon to find Christians who know the order, number and name of the documents that make up the New Testament but who ignore those same data referring to the Old Testament. The Old Testament, they think, was only valid for Israel. Christianity has passed that stage and therefore, they argue, although the texts of the Old Testament are Sacred Scripture, for Christians they are not of great value, or at least they are not at the same level as the NT writings. And while this idea may not be expressed in words, it is thought and believed with the heart. The New Testament has corrected and surpassed the Old, therefore in the New Testament we have everything we need. But is that so?
At this point, it will not be idle to remember that Jesus only knew the Old Testament, those are the texts that he read, meditated, obeyed and whose distilled doctrine he passed on to his followers. Jesus clearly taught that He had not come to abolish the Law, that is, the instruction and teaching contained in the writings of the Old Testament, but to bring them to perfect fulfillment and to teach human beings to obey the will of God.
A simple travel guide to the Old Testament Some previous questions
Thus, knowledge of the Old Testament and its understanding are necessary conditions for understanding Jesus' message, his words, and his gestures, which were deeply influenced and shaped by the Scriptures. Moreover, and this is another objection to which we will respond later, some Christians say, “After all, is not the God of the Old Testament a God of wrath while Jesus reveals to us the Father, the God who is love? The attentive and loving reading of these texts will allow us to have a deeper knowledge of God, of his nature; we will discover a good number of men and women whose example will teach us in a very practical way the social and political dimension of faith and we will obtain a more complete knowledge of the activity and the message of Jesus. I hope that by the end of this study, if anyone had this negative perception of the Old Testament, they will have changed their perspective of it and can begin to appreciate those writings, free of prejudice, for their true value which, as I have briefly pointed out, is immense.