Who Needs the Old Testament?

Katharine Dell, like many Old Testament scholars, stands between two warring camps. One consists of those cultured despisers of religion who ridicule the Old Testament’s allegedly violent, hateful, immoral God: How could anyone believe this stuff? At the same time, she also faces many mainline churches who fear the Old Testament, are ill-equipped to wrestle with its complexities, and who would rather focus on the good Jesus than on the bad Yahweh: We don’t understand this stuff!

Dell’s book responds to both camps, particularly New Atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. However, she also aims her book at churchgoers, preachers, and religious educators who are often unsure of how to handle the complex, culturally distant books of the Christian Bible. She encourages Christian teachers and preachers to courageously bring the Old Testament into ministry and teaching.

Dell divides her book in halves, each devoted to one of her audiences but appropriate for the other. The first part, “Breaking the New Atheist Spell,” engages critically with Dawkins’s and Hitchens’s jeremiads against the Old Testament: it is implausible as historical evidence, it is morally unacceptable for our times, and besides, Christians derive their morality from the kosher Jesus rather than from the treif Old Testament anyway. While acknowledging that at times the Old Testament displays a God whose morality is appalling, nationalistic (90), or mercilessly legalistic (97, 215), Dell calls for readers to move beyond prima facie disgust with God’s destruction of humanity in the flood, Abraham’s cruelty to Isaac in the aqedah, or the rigidity of Jephthah’s vow. Without condoning such behavior, much less advocating for adopting it today, Dell wants her readers to understand the cultural and historical context of such texts, and the other meanings they might have. While it is easy to be disgusted with Abraham’s parenting prowess, for example, we can also read his story as one of faith and trust, of giving up one’s most valued possession for God.

In the second half of her book, “Engaging with the Old Testament,” Dell redirects readers’ attention from the texts of terror favored by the New Atheists, surveying instead some texts of justice, wonder, and beauty in the Writings, Prophets, Pentateuch, and Histories. These three survey chapters read as an introduction to the Old Testament, written for someone with little biblical literacy, pointing to passages of awe and delight. The penultimate chapter surveys some current theories about the history of Israel, both minimalist and maximalist. She avoids firm conclusions but reminds the reader that such scholarly debates cannot be reduced to Dawkins’s jabs and clickbait.

Her final chapter, “A Christian Perspective on the Old Testament,” calls for Christians to engage the Old Testament with nuance and appreciation. She reminds the reader that the Old Testament is crucial for understanding the New—but the Old Testament is also valuable for its own message. She laments the “over-sanitization” (213) of the lectionary which fails to convey the broad narrative arc and canonical shape of the Old Testament, and she bemoans the stark separation between the academy and the church in scriptural scholarship. Her readers’ task, then, is to repair that breach—to educate.

Dell unifies her two audiences through the charge of Marcionism, an early Christian heresy which held that the Old Testament and the New Testament depicted wholly different deities, the New Testament God of love versus the Old Testament God of law. Both the New Atheists and many Christians, she argues, fall into this trap. Dawkins lapses into Marcionism when he affirms Jesus’s ethics while denying his own scripture. Churchgoers fall into a more implicit, “soft” Marcionism merely by ignoring the Old Testament. Many a churchgoing Old testament scholar has heard such phrases, at coffee hour or Bible studies: “I don’t like the Old Testament,” “The Old Testament intimidates me,” or “I much prefer sticking to the Gospels.” When faced with Dawkins’s arguments, such a churchgoer’s only response is the bland affirmation that Jesus changed things: thus Marcionism quickly slides into supersessionism. While it would have been helpful for Dell to more explicitly combat that view, she convincingly shows that the God of love, justice, and mercy of the New Testament is quite present in the Old.

Since Dell aims to do two tasks with two audiences, her book must be evaluated twice. First, would she succeed with the New Atheist crowd? It depends on what “success” means. She does not try to argue away the moral challenges of the Old Testament, so that an atheist critic would find all objections removed. She could hardly absolve all ethical qualms from the aqedah, since Jews and Christians themselves struggle with it. But that is what makes Dell different from an unscholarly apologist. She is honest about what the text says, and merely tries to give context. That intellectual honesty is more likely to win over an atheist reader. However, as a rejoinder to the New Atheists, Dell comes quite late to the party: Dawkins’s The God Delusion was published in 2006, and Hitchens’s God Is Not Great in 2007. I also wonder how effectively the charge of the Marcionite heresy would land on someone who does not care about Christian doctrinal orthodoxy.

As for her church audience, parts of Dell’s book (especially chapters 6–8) would be very helpful for church groups looking to dig into the jewels of the Old Testament but not sure where to start. Other chapters in part 2 are better suited to those with some theological training. Still, her insights are timely, fitting neatly into a conversation with other recent primers for Christians on how to resurrect the Old Testament, such as those by Matthew Richard Schlimm (This Strange and Sacred Scripture, Baker Academic, 2015) and Brent Strawn (The Old Testament is Dying, Baker Academic, 2017). I would recommend this book for Christians concerned with the life of the Old Testament in the churches.

Jonathan Homrighausen is a graduate student in Biblical Studies at the Graduate Theological Union.

Jonathan Homrighausen

Date Of Review:

March 23, 2018