Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations Foreword by Samuel Greengus 1. Introduction 2. Cuneiform Law 3. Cuneiform Prologues and Epilogues to Legal Collections 4. The Problem of Prologue and Epilogue to the Book of the Covenant and Leading Features of Biblical Law 5. Annotations to the Laws of the Book of the Covenant 6. Summary Appendix I. Verse Arrangement of the Laws of the Book of the Covenant Appendix II. Cuneiform and Biblical Legal Formulations Bibliography Index of Sources
A study of Paul's theology in the Bible, focusing on his view of the old covenant God made with Israel and the new covenant Jesus announced at the Last Supper.
These two ideas are fundamental to the message of the Bible, and yet they are shockingly misunderstood and misapplied. Some take a literal approach to biblical law and adopt customs that make no sense in the modern world. Others think that the law has become irrelevant or, even worse, that it has been abolished and nailed to the cross. They hold this belief in spite of the plain statement by Jesus that the written law would remain as long as heaven and earth last. This suggests that we need to find a new way of looking at biblical law, one that makes sense, that actually helps make life work in the 21st century. Law is about understanding God and his purpose for man. Covenant is closely related because it is about knowing God, personally, intimately, and about being in a relationship with him. Nothing is more central to the Christian relationship with God than the covenant we have with Jesus. In this covenant, you actually carry his name-you are family, with all the rights, privileges and obligations of a brother or a son. Law & Covenant will untangle mysteries and bring simple, understandable insights. Ronald Dart will take you deeper into the Word of God than you've gone before-to a higher logic of the law. He will add an interesting worldview that will make it hard for you to put this book down.
Most scholars believe that the numerous similarities between the Covenant Code (Exodus 20:23-23:19) and Mesopotamian law collections, especially the Laws of Hammurabi, which date to around 1750 BCE, are due to oral tradition that extended from the second to the first millennium. This book offers a fundamentally new understanding of the Covenant Code, arguing that it depends directly and primarily upon the Laws of Hammurabi and that the use of this source text occurred during the Neo-Assyrian period, sometime between 740-640 BCE, when Mesopotamia exerted strong and continuous political and cultural influence over the kingdoms of Israel and Judah and a time when the Laws of Hammurabi were actively copied in Mesopotamia as a literary-canonical text. The study offers significant new evidence demonstrating that a model of literary dependence is the only viable explanation for the work. It further examines the compositional logic used in transforming the source text to produce the Covenant Code, thus providing a commentary to the biblical composition from the new theoretical perspective. This analysis shows that the Covenant Code is primarily a creative academic work rather than a repository of laws practiced by Israelites or Judeans over the course of their history. The Covenant Code, too, is an ideological work, which transformed a paradigmatic and prestigious legal text of Israel's and Judah's imperial overlords into a statement symbolically countering foreign hegemony. The study goes further to study the relationship of the Covenant Code to the narrative of the book of Exodus and explores how this may relate to the development of the Pentateuch as a whole.
A fresh look at the earliest Christian movement reveals what made the new faith so compelling...and what we need to change today to make it so again. Once upon a time there was a version of the Christian faith that was practically irresistible. After all, what could be more so than the gospel that Jesus ushered in? Why, then, isn't it the same with Christianity today? Author and pastor Andy Stanley is deeply concerned with the present-day church and its future. He believes that many of the solutions to our issues can be found by investigating our roots. In Irresistible, Andy chronicles what made the early Jesus Movement so compelling, resilient, and irresistible by answering these questions: What did first-century Christians know that we don't—about God's Word, about their lives, about love? What did they do that we're not doing? What makes Christianity so resistible in today's culture? What needs to change in order to repeat the growth our faith had at its beginning? Many people who leave or disparage the faith cite reasons that have less to do with Jesus than with the conduct of his followers. It's time to hit pause and consider the faith modeled by our first-century brothers and sisters who had no official Bible, no status, and little chance of survival. It's time to embrace the version of faith that initiated—against all human odds—a chain of events resulting in the most significant and extensive cultural transformation the world has ever seen. This is a version of Christianity we must remember and re-embrace if we want to be salt and light in an increasingly savorless and dark world.
Is the Mosaic covenant in some sense a republication of the covenant of works? What is the nature of its demand for obedience, since sinful man is unable to obey as God requires? How in turn was the law to drive Israel to Jesus? This book explores these issues pertaining to the doctrine of republication--once a staple in Reformed theology--a doctrine with far-reaching implications for Paul's theology, our relationship to Old Testament law, justification, and more.
Popular claims about the old and new covenants have diminished the gospel and narrowed the faith and spiritual life of millions of Christians. Those claims have introduced confusion about what it truly means to "keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus." Christians earnest in their walk with the Lord will see a dynamic element of the gospel in the profound relationship between love and law. They will, perhaps for the first time, understand the apparent dichotomy of old and new covenants in the New Testament. And in the process they will be confronted with a powerful appeal and an unmistakable warning.
The now familiar new perspective asserts that the covenantal nomism characteristic of second-temple Judaism softened the Mosaic law s requirement of perfect obedience. Because of God s gracious covenant with Israel, manifested in election and the provision of atoning sacrifices, one could be righteous under the law despite occasional failures to obey the law perfectly. This view concludes that Paul, as a first-century Jew, could not have been troubled by the law s stringent demands, because it was generally understood that the gracious framework of the covenant provided a way of dealing with occasional lapses. Consequently, it is claimed, Paul s problem with the law must have to do with its misuse as a means of enforcing ethnic boundaries and excluding Gentile believers. However, as Das demonstrates in this book, whenever the gracious framework of covenantal nomism is called into question, the law s demands take on central importance. Das traces this development in a number of second-temple Jewish works and especially in the writings of Paul. Covenantal nomism is probably an apt characterization of Paul s opponents, and indeed of Paul s past life; thus he can assert that formerly he was blameless under the law. But now Paul sees God s grace as active only in Christ. He emphatically denies that God will show special grace in his judgment of Jews; to do so would be favoritism. Similarly, Paul sees no atoning benefit to the sacrificial system. In effect, Paul is no longer a covenantal nomist. Since the gracious framework of the covenant has collapsed, all that remains for Paul is the law, with its oppressive requirement of perfect obedience and ethnic exclusivism. Contra the "newperspective," the "works of the law" should not be construed so narrowly as only the law's ethnic exclusivity. Christ is "the end" of the law in general, both in the sense that he is the goal to which the law always pointed, and in that he is the sole agent of God's grace apart from which the law's demands would be impossible.
In Promise, Law, Faith, T. David Gordon argues that Paul uses “promise/ἐπαγγελία,” “law/νόµος,” and “faith/πίστις” in Galatians to denote three covenant-administrations by synecdoche (a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa), and that he chose each synecdoche because it characterized the distinctive (but not exclusive) feature of that covenant. For instance, Gordon argues, the Abrahamic covenant was characterized by three remarkable promises made to an aging couple (to have numerous descendants, who would inherit a large, arable land, and the “Seed” of whom would one day bless all the nations of the world); the Sinai covenant was characterized by the many laws given (both originally at Sinai and later in the remainder of the Mosaic corpus); and the New Covenant is characterized by faith in the dying and rising of Christ. As Gordon’s subtitle suggests, he believes that both the “dominant Protestant approach” to Galatians and the New Perspectives on Paul approach fail to appreciate that Paul’s reasoning in Galatians is covenant-historical (this is what Gordon calls perhaps a “Third Perspective on Paul”). In Galatians, Paul is not arguing that one covenant is good and the other bad; rather, he is arguing that the Sinai covenant was only a temporary covenant-administration between the promissory Abrahamic covenant and its ultimate fulfilment in the New Covenant in Jesus. For a specific time, the Sinai covenant isolated the Israelites from the nations to preserve the memory of the Abrahamic promises and to preserve the integrity of his “seed/Seed,” through whom one day the same nations would one day be richly blessed. But once that Seed arrived in Jesus, providing the “grace of repentance” to the Gentiles, it was no longer necessary or proper to segregate them from the descendants of Abraham. Paul’s argument in Galatians is therefore covenant-historical; he corrects misbehaviors (that is, requiring observance of the Mosaic Law) associated with the New Covenant by describing the relation of that New Covenant to the two covenants instituted before it—the Abrahamic and the Sinaitic—hence the covenants of promise, law, and faith. Effectively, Paul argues that the New Covenant is a covenant in its own right that displaces the temporary, Christ-anticipating, Israel-threatening, and Gentile-excluding Sinai covenant.
