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Prophecy plays an important role in the Old Testament. This importance does not end but continues throughout early Judaism, albeit under different forms and genres such as apocalyptic literature, eschatological prophecy, clerical prophecy, and sapiental prophecy. It equally continues in the history and writings of the early church. The New Testament portrays Christ as the supreme prophet in not merely forwarding words of God to God's people, but being the word of God. Prophecy continued to mutate in the history of Christianity but kept its vigor. It re-emerged in the monastic movements, medieval visionary mysticism, passion mysticism, the great Marian apparitions, augmenting in the 19th century, and in possible contemporary prophetic personalities such as the Greek-Orthodox Vassula Rydén.

This is the last of five chapters on the Old Testament and the reader, and is devoted to a discussion of Old Testament ethics. Begins by outlining possible reasons for people being interested in Old Testament ethics, and then discusses the strategies employed in each of these approaches. Four reasons for ethical study are advanced: first, from a confessional (religious/theological/devotional) standpoint, it could be maintained that the Old Testament in some sense contains the revealed will of God and that its ethical teaching therefore makes a claim upon Jews and Christians if not upon all humanity; a second reason springs from the conviction that the confessional position is mistaken and that it is the duty of scholarship to expose the crudities of Old Testament morality in order to prevent humankind from being subjected to its claims; a third answer might be that the study of Old Testament ethics is a valid subject in its own right, as is the study of the ethics of the Greeks or of the historical background to the Old Testament; a fourth response might go further than this and say that because the Old Testament is a classic text, what it has to say on ethical matters is of interest to ethicists. The next section starts by discussing the fact that differing agendas have shaped approaches to Old Testament ethics in earlier periods of history, and goes on to review three recent large‐scale confessional attempts to deal with Old Testament ethics: those of Walter Kaiser, Christopher Wright, and Bruce Birch. The following section attempts to illustrate how different results can follow if different approaches are made to the Old Testament, and discusses the evidence of moral and ethical sensitivity within the biblical text, discourse ethics, and the need for a plurality of methods and approaches.

With the exception of sacrifice and the food laws, the subject of food has been almost universally overlooked by Old Testament scholars. Yet food appears on almost every page of the Old Testament and was a matter of concern to the biblical writers. The influential work of William Robertson Smith on ancient Semitic feasting is examined as well as recent works that touch on food in the Old Testament. Despite many advantages each of these modern works are compromised by ideological or methodological concerns that result in the focus being on matters other than food.

This chapter discusses and presents a survey of the Old Testament, beginning with the Hebrew text of the Old Testament and its ancient versions. It examines the rise of traditional biblical criticism and considers a study of the Hebrew language and its cognate Semitic languages. Finally, a survey of various topics and their historical perspectives is provided, along with some recent developments. The main focus of the chapter is to describe the dominant position of the mid-twentieth century.

This is the third of five chapters on the Old Testament and the reader, and discusses canonical criticism and Old Testament theology. Canonical criticism can be understood as a relatively recent proposal for reordering exegetical priorities, while Old Testament theology is usually seen as a summarizing discipline as old as modernity itself. The two areas of research could be treated separately but the juxtaposition is instructive: both are in some sense orientated towards the readers of biblical texts, both have been charged with under‐valuing historical research, both are involved in seemingly intractable arguments about the relationship between descriptive and normative claims in biblical studies, and both are implicated in debates about the role of biblical research within the larger religious traditions of Christianity and Judaism. The discussion in this chapter highlights only the most important issues addressed in these overlapping programmes of research setting out to provide only an orientation to the key issues in current research. The chapter is arranged in three sections: Canonical criticism; Old Testament theology and readers’ commitments; and Biblical studies and theology.

This is the third of five chapters on the text of the Old Testament. It aims to trace the development of a canon (or several slightly different canons) of the Old Testament, and to examine some ways in which the canonization of the Bible made a difference to the perceived meaning and significance of its component parts. The first section, ‘The Old Testament canon today’ discusses the Hebrew canon, the Greek Bible, the Latin Bible, and the Ethiopic Bible. The second section, ‘The origins of diversity in the canons of the Old Testament’ presents the three major hypotheses that have been put forward to account for the complicated development of the Old Testament canon: the Alexandrian canon hypothesis—Sundberg's theory, which sets completion of the Greek canon as a work of the early Christian era; the Greek Bible as Christian canon; and more recent (traditional) attempts to go back behind the Alexandrian canon hypothesis to something more like the consensus that prevailed in the nineteenth century, which have been spearheaded by an alliance of Jewish and evangelical scholars (Leiman and Beckwith), who put the completion of the canon well before the end of the Second Temple period. The third section, ‘The origins and interpretation of ‘canonical’ Scripture’ looks at the growth and canonization of the Old Testament Scriptures.

This final chapter engages with the knotty problem of how, if at all, it is possible to derive contemporary ethics from biblical texts. It discusses the rise of interest in the ethics of the Old Testament over recent years. It then provides a brief summary of contemporary ethical principles, including the development of environmental ethics. Finally, the chapter explores connections that can be drawn between the ancient texts and contemporary environmental ethics, and proposes a new model for a biblical environmental ethic, one that integrates the intrinsic worth of all creation with human need for community and response to God.

This chapter presents an essay on Old Testament theology. It discusses the change in the understanding of the Old Testament theology from being a historical discipline related to the history of Israel to normative representation of the essence of Israelite religion. It suggests that the task and the nature of an Old Testament theology should be defined as being concerned with the generic understanding of Old Testament religion, creating a systematic cross-section of that process, and demonstrating its special characteristics over against the surrounding world of religion.

This is the third of six chapters on the Old Testament and its authors. Its subject is wisdom in Israel, and this involves the three wisdom texts of the Bible: Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes, which make up the main wisdom literature, and in addition the phenomenon of wisdom, which is seen to be wider than just these three books. The first section discusses the definition, scope, and influence of the Israelite wisdom. The second analyses the Old Testament wisdom literature—Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, and the wisdom Psalms. The last section discusses the place of wisdom in Old Testament theology.

Pilgram Marpeck was a civil engineer and an Anabaptist leader, who stressed the discontinuity between the Old Testament and the New in his theology. He argued that the Old Testament belongs to yesterday – a yesterday marked by violence, polygamy, and the circumcision of infants – while the New Testament belongs to today – a today marked by nonviolence, monogamy, and the baptism of believing adults. He believed that the interpretation of Scripture must be a communal activity in which the exegesis of any individual member is subject to the judgment of the community as a whole.

This chapter traces some significant shifts within the historical paradigm that has guided most modern biblical scholarship. It details the development of historical-critical study in the nineteenth century. The chapter then considers the expansion of sociological interest in both the Old and New Testaments. This is followed by a discussion of the work of Rudolf Bultmann, focusing on the strategies he employs in order to undertake theological interpretation. The chapter suggests that behind Bultmann's theological hostility to the liberals' quest for the historical Jesus stood a variety of Lutheran and existentialist emphases and phobias.

This is the last of six chapters on the Old Testament and its authors, and its subject is the religion of Israel. The introduction to the chapter briefly reviews previous work on this subject. The sections of the rest of the chapter are devoted to the following topics; the pre‐monarchical period; Canaanite syncretism in the religion of Israel; divination and the cult of the dead; the Deuteronomic movement Josiah's reform and covenant theology; monotheism and the prohibition of images; cultic law; natural theology; universalism and exclusivism; and the apocalyptic movement.

George Wishart Anderson was appointed Professor of Old Testament Literature and Theology at Edinburgh University in 1962. In 1968, after the retirement of N. W. Porteous as Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages, the title of Anderson's chair was changed to Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament Studies. He taught Hebrew to undergraduates in the Faculty of Arts, and lectured on the Old Testament to candidates for the ministry of the Church of Scotland and for the degree of BD. In addition, Anderson taught graduate students, not only from the United Kingdom, but also from various countries, including several from South-East Asia. He was an active member of the Society for Old Testament Study. From 1957 to 1966 he edited the Society's annual Book List, which contains brief reviews of books that had recently been published on the Old Testament and related subjects and is an invaluable bibliographical aid to those interested in biblical studies.

This chapter first addresses claims and terms found in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, such as covenants and “Leviathan.” New Testament references to and views of other animals are then examined. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the vocabulary and the views held by major post‐biblical theologians based on an examination of the Greek and Latin words used by Justin Martyr, Irenaeus of Lyons, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Augustine of Hippo, as well as various words found in the Septuagint and Vulgate.