Perhaps no biblical episode is more troubling than the conquest of Canaan. But do the so-called holy war texts of the Old Testament portray a divinely inspired genocide? John Walton and J. Harvey Walton take us on an archaeological dig, reframing our questions and excavating the layers of translation and interpretation that cloud our perception of these difficult texts.
In this astute mix of cultural critique and biblical studies, John H. Walton presents and defends twenty propositions supporting a literary and theological understanding of Genesis 1 within the context of the ancient Near Eastern world and unpacks its implications for our modern scientific understanding of origins.
The Genesis flood account has been probed and analyzed for centuries. But what might the biblical author have been saying to his ancient audience? In order to rediscover the biblical flood, we must set aside our own cultural and interpretive assumptions and visit the distant world of the ancient Near East. Walton and Longman lead us on this enlightening journey toward a more responsible reading of a timeless biblical narrative.
To modern eyes, what we call the biblical law, or Torah, seems either odd beyond comprehension (not eating lobster) or positively reprehensible (executing children). Using a consistent methodology to look at the Torah through the lens of the ancient Near East, Walton and Walton offer a restorative understanding that will have dramatic effects in interpreting the text and in discerning the significance of the Torah for today.
Christopher Wright examines a theological, social and economic framework for Old Testament ethics. Then he explores a variety of themes in relation to contemporary issues including economics, the land, the poor, politics, law and justice, and community.
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.
The Old Testament was written for us, but not to us. Inviting us to leave our modern Christian preconceptions behind, John Walton contends that we will only grasp the Old Testament’s theology when we are immersed in its Ancient Near Eastern context, being guided by what the ancient authors intended as they wrote within their cognitive environment.
What if reading Genesis 2–3 in its ancient Near Eastern context shows that the creation account makes no claims regarding Adam and Eve's material origins? John Walton's groundbreaking insights into this text create space for a faithful reading of Scripture along with full engagement with science, creating a new way forward in the human origins debate.
Walton and Sandy summarize what we know of orality and oral tradition as well as the composition and transmission of texts in the ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world, and how this shapes our understanding of the Old and New Testaments. The authors then translate these insights into a helpful model for understanding the reliability of Scripture.
As one of the most prominent themes in Scripture, the covenant is crucial to all Christian theological systems, from dispensationalism to covenant theology to theonomy to liberation theology. One would think that by now all controversies have been exhausted, but an issue of this magnitude can never finally be laid to rest. Because disagreements persist, there is room for yet another attempt to study the covenant and improve our understanding of it. This book proposes that the path toward an evangelical consensus is not to be found in building another modified systematic theology, but in a biblical theology approach. Grounded in this approach, John Walton's perspective is that while the covenant is characteristically redemptive, formulated along the lines of ancient treaties, and ultimately soteric, it is essentially revelatory. This view in turn has implications regarding the continuity or discontinuity of the covenant phases, the conditionality of the covenant, and our understanding of the people of God. And this ultimately affects the way the Old Testament is preached and taught. Walton's thesis is an important contribution to the discussion of the covenant and the attempts to find common ground among evangelicals of diverse theological traditions.
