This week I am reminded again that these narratives are not historical accounts of individuals, rather the characters symbolize a group of people, the Israelites, in the present world of the authors, as they reflect back upon tradition, and their original audience. These stories of the patriarchs are all familiar stories to me. I love these stories filled with drama, adventure, love and deceit. God gave Abram a threefold promise: God will give Abraham abundant land, many descendants to form a great people, and blessing. Yet God does not forget the unloved, outsider, and foreigner, as we see with Hagar and Leah as well as many others. I thought I had a good understanding of how God acted through these people.
Suddenly with new information about ancient cultures and stretching my mind around times frames of when these stories were written as opposed to their oral tradition, my head is spinning with question and wonder. I have to re-frame my lens in how I understand these stories. I am learning to think critically, by applying the social dynamics, traditions, myths, and norms of the time, but at the same time I wonder if I'm picking at things that are not important to understanding the message of God. How do you "know" God? That is what Yahweh wanted--for Pharaoh, the Egyptians, and the Israelites, to "know that I am God." As I reflect on God's activity with Abraham , Sarah and their son; Isaac , Rebekah and their sons; Jacob , Rachel and Leah and their sons; Joseph's story, and the exodus story I do indeed see that God does accomplish God's purpose through people, as God plans, for there is no time with God.
These writers put together stories that tell of God's activity among God's people. The drama, adventures, love, and deceit, set in the ancient culture, get our attention and help us to "know" God. God's love for us. I tell my students that whenever they have questions about how that could happen in the Bible, they should ask themselves the question, What does this story tell me about God's love for God's people? Yet I understand that the purpose of this course is to get me to thing more critically and question what is the writer's message to his audience, in the context of the ancient culture. So I wonder, do I find the message more clearly in this close study of the expressed meaning of the text? Or is understanding the expressed meaning of the author a confirming of the message of God that I already hold?
As I shared with my colleagues this week, my understanding of the OT stories has been shaken up, but not in a frightening way, as a shaking of my faith, but in such a way that I am realizing that there is so much more than just reading these stories.