My Notes of "Introduction to the Old Testament" by Amy-Jill Levine -- Part 3

2.6 The Novella

The later books of the canon move to the “novella,” i.e., short stories like Ruth and Jonah which explore in an extremely entertaining way how Israel is to relate to its neighbours. Ruth, the hero of her book, is a Moabite, one of the traditional enemies of Israel. And yet Ruth becomes the great grandmother of the famous King David. Jonah, who is probably the only prophet whose audience actually listened to him, is commissioned to go and speak to the people of Nineveh, the capital city of Assyria, Israel’s major enemy. Jonah doesn’t want to go. He doesn’t want the Assyrians to listen to him. Yet he goes and the Assyrians listen to him and God relents!

We also find court tales; stories of Jews, queens, and courtiers, who find themselves in royal courts outside of Israel in the Diaspora, (which simply means “the dispersion”), like the book of Esther. She was the great Jewish queen who managed to save her people from certain genocide. Then there’s the story of Daniel, who finds himself in both Babylonian and Persian courts where he has to fight to retain his identity while pressures were placed on him to assimilate to a Gentile culture, to eat food which is not permitted according to his religious laws, to pray in a manner that is not permitted according to his religious ideals. So, what these court tales do is to provide instructions to Jews on how to live in the Diaspora and how to live when Greek cultures put pressure on them to conform. How do you retain your identity? What do you give into? What makes you, you? These are problems people have in covenant communities today. For Jews and Christians who want to obey the law, how much do we give into secular society, and how much do we attempt to retain our independent and unique identity? The problems that the Bible raises are problems that will always continue.

2.7 Apocalyptic Visions

Finally, there are the apocalyptic visions. The latter part of the book of Daniel asks questions like, “When does righteousness ever show up?  Who is the messiah and when can we tell that he’s arrived? What happens at the end of time? Is there a resurrection of the dead? Does God make everything good again? And if so, how and when?”

And throughout the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, we encounter story tellers and lawmakers and bureaucrats and priests and prophets and scribes and visionaries and they all wrote for different audiences at different times using different literary genres. They don’t always agree with each other and we may not agree with them either. That’s part of the glory of this text.