Understanding the Bible --- The Books of Moses
The First five books of the Bible establish several themes that run through the entire rest of the Bible. We will in fact end up at the end of the book of Revelation returning to the same images and ideas we encounter here in the very first three chapters of the first book, Genesis: a new creation, the tree of life, rivers of water, and a wedding. What we are introduced to in these books is the foundation for all that is to come.
The first five books of the Bible are known as the Books of Moses, or also as the “Pentateuch,” which simply means “five scrolls.” They are traditionally attributed to Moses. Conservative scholars would attribute them to a single author, Moses, whom they see as an actual historical figure. They would date these writings to somewhere around 1400 BC. Other scholars would most likely consider Moses to be a legendary figure, and most see these five books as products of multiple authors, edited at several points over many years, up until around 500 BC, maybe later.
The five books in our English Bibles are named Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Genesis stands on its own in many respects, and the other four go together in their own way as well. Since Genesis especially contains so much foundational material, we will give it a little more space here at first.
Genesis
The Beginnings
“Genesis” means “beginning.” This is aptly named because it is the first words in the book: “In the beginning.” Also, the book records the beginning of all creation, the world, the universe, time, plants, animals, humans, as well as all things human: love, sin, death, shame, betrayal, murder, fear, jealousy, envy, ambition, conquest, war, technology, childbirth, hope, and God’s plan for man’s salvation from sin and death. It is also our first introduction to God and who he is.
In the creation stories, we learn that God is both separate from his creation, and totally sovereign over it. Both of these are crucial theological realities reflected throughout the Bible, and also distinguish Christianity in different ways from some other religions. God is separate from his creation. He is not identified with it. Creation is not divine, nor partly divine. It is only a creature. Only God himself is divine. God is wholly other.
God is sovereign over his creation. It is his creation. He is all-powerful to create it out of nothing with only his words. He can do with it as he pleases, and he does. Yet he is also intimate with his creation. He is present, close, everywhere with it.
We also learn that God has a complex nature. He refers to himself as “us,” and when he creates mankind, he speaks to himself of “our” image. He is one God, and yet he is also plural. God is both perfect unity and perfect community at the same time. He is one and many. We will later learn that the “us” is three persons in one God: the Trinity. In short, the Bible introduces us to a God who is all-powerful, all-knowing, ever-present, incomprehensible, but also loving, caring, and good, providing for his creatures.
We learn that God is pleased to create his creation, and when he is done creating it, he calls it good. The Bible views the material world as a good thing, unlike some philosophies and religions that see physical matter as the source of evil, filth, etc. We will see that we have fallen into sin, but that God’s plan for man is not to eradicate this world or escape it forever, but to redeem it.
Immediately after Adam and Eve fall, the torturous effects of sin appear in nearly every story. Their oldest son Cain murders his younger brother Abel. He murdered him out of envy. Abel had presented God an offering in worship. He did what God had shown them to do: symbolically represent a blood sacrifice in offering an animal. Cain tried to do it his own way. He took an easier route: offering vegetables from his garden. God did not accept Cain’s offering. Instead of taking ownership of his own mistake, Cain looked over at Abel and envied his acceptance. Feeling guilty and alienated in himself, Cain reacted by tearing down the one whose innocence outshined Cain.
Cain never repented of his sin, and it ate him up. He was a self-centered, self-glorifying man. He lived with a tortured conscience and in fear that someone was out to get him. He then built a civilization that reflected his psychology of guilt, fear, and lust for glory.
Cain was the first builder of a city. But this was no mere “city.” It was the first of the ancient walled fortress-cities. It was Cain’s projection of his paranoia. Instead of trusting God’s promises of protection from vigilantism, Cain erected his own security—walls, wealth, power, and arms.
The first city Cain built he selfishly named after his son Enoch. The name means “dedication,” in the sense of “inauguration” or “founding.” Cain was thus dedicating the city he founded to the memory of his own legacy and progeny. This represents fallen man’s attempts at immortality apart from God. Lawmakers and celebrities still attempt this today.
Five generations down the line, a real character shows up: Cain’s great, great, great grandson Lamech. This guy seems to have been bored even with Cain’s standards. Lamech wanted to outdo that old legacy. He sought to be even more evil, more ambitious, more prominent in his rebellion than the now-infamous Cain.
Lamech was the first polygamist. He bragged in a song about how he had taken two wives instead of just one. He also bragged that he had murdered a man, yet boasted himself more greatly to be avenged than his “father” Cain. In Genesis 4:23–24, he sings,
Adah and Zillah, hear my voice;
you wives of Lamech, listen to what I say: I have killed a man for wounding me,
a young man for striking me.
If Cain’s revenge is sevenfold,
then Lamech’s is seventy-sevenfold.
Lamech boasts himself as ten times greater than Cain. He makes his own law and takes vengeance into his own hands. He kills a man who merely struck him—hardly a punishment fitting the crime.
Lamech’s actions imply his empire will be bigger and better than Cain’s. His sons contribute to this. It is they who make all the technological breakthroughs. Jabal improved cultivation of livestock. This increased food supplies through wool and cheese, as well as increased cultivation of land with livestock. More food in these cities can sustain more people. More people means more industry and greater armies. Jabal’s work also improved wool supplies for clothing and blankets. Through the nature of his trade, he developed nomadic life. He lived in tents, but sold to the cities. His transitory nature also led to the domestication of animals for transport, and the development of the caravan. He innovated in trade between cities and created markets to meet the needs in different areas.
His brother Jubal created harps and pipes and was the first to play them. After his trade arose an entire industry of music and entertainment. In a world where food grew more abundant and cheap, people had increased leisure. Leisure soon becomes a market for entertainment, especially among a shallow and selfish people. Powerful leaders soon see the potential of the arts for controlling people and for shaping their values and beliefs. Jubal made it possible to unify the hearts and minds of masses through music.
A third brother, Tubal-Cain, was the smith. He learned the ways of forging bronze and iron, and invented all kinds of instruments. These included implements for agriculture, tools for building, but also weapons of warfare.
Through an explosion of science, these men transformed society. It was industrial revolution. From their trades grew up hundreds of applications. The great men of the cities, the leaders, began touting their greatness by speaking of how many jobs they could create, how they could educate men, how they could achieve greatness in union, how they could make a name for themselves, how they could achieve personal dreams and improve the quality of life, and for their own ambitions, they spoke often of national greatness and exceptionalism.
The problem, again, was that Cain built his cities for his own glory and legacy. His children did the same. They had plenty of ability, but perverted motives—lust rather than love.
A society that booms technologically and economically, yet is full of misguided ambition and humanism, is on a slow-glide path to destruction. Personal ambition, narcissism, consumerism, and self-worship will consume the culture. It will be led by tyrants who embody those traits most powerfully. Violence will emerge throughout society, some of it sanctioned by legal experts.
This is exactly what occurs in Genesis which leads to the whole land being filled with violence: rapine, rebellion, organized violence through gangs and corrupt governments. The violence grew so widespread that God decided to destroy this civilization through the famous flood of Noah. This story takes place in Genesis chapters 6–9. The idea is that God saved the only civilized and righteous folk left in the family of Noah. He wiped out the rest. Afterward, Noah started over in a new creation.
In no time at all, however, one of Noah’s sons was seeking power and control. His son Ham was caught trying to usurp his father’s authority, and he was cursed to servitude as a result. He was like a new Cain, expelled into the wilderness. Again, like Cain’s family, Ham’s posterity built civilizations based on power and control. One of his grandsons, Nimrod, built the famous cities of Babel and Nineveh. It was at Babel that men tried to replace God by building a tower that reached to heaven and established their own glory. They were falling for the same temptation the deceiver had given to Eve: you can be like God. God responded with a new type of judgment. He mitigated the evil they could accomplish as a unified civilization by scattering them and confusing their languages.
The Patriarchs and the Promise
The story shifts focus again from the cycle of rampant evil and crushing judgments to the promise of a Messiah God made to the faithful. It picks up with perhaps the most important figure of the Old Testament, Abraham. God, purely on his own initiative and in pure grace, calls Abraham at random to leave his home in the Mesopotamian city of Ur. God promises to give him his own land, a new land, which was at the time undisclosed, but known since as the Promised Land. Abraham simply obeyed and went.
God also meets Abraham and makes a covenant-relationship with him. God swears not only to give Abraham this Promised Land, but also to provide him an heir. This was especially interesting because Abraham’s wife had been unable to have children so far, and they were now very old.
We learn later in the New Testament, particularly in the books of Romans, Galatians, and Hebrews, that God was making promises about earthly things that mainly had tremendous spiritual meanings as well. Most of all, when God was promising Abraham a son, he was not speaking primarily of the immediate son Isaac, or his first son, Ishmael, but of the Messiah who would be a much later descendant. Then, all those who would believe the promise like Abraham did would become children of Abraham, and thus children of God, through faith.
Abraham’s children did have very interesting lives, mainly because they had power struggles with each other and their many children had many struggles with each other as well. Too often, it seems, they looked to immediate physical power as fulfilments of God’s promises. So, Abraham had Isaac and Ishmael as sons, then Isaac had Jacob and Esau. God repeated the promises he gave to Abraham to both Isaac and then Jacob.
Jacob had an immediate experience with God who manifested as a man. They wrestled and struggled together for the better part of the night. God let Jacob win ultimately, showing that he would condescend and give of himself in order to bless mankind. But Jacob also demanded to be blessed before he released the man. The man blessed him, but also changed Jacob’s name to “Israel,” which means, “prevailed with God.” All of the descendants of Jacob from then on were known as children of Israel, or “Israel” collectively. We will also learn later, however, that this was meant to be the same spiritual reality as the children of Abraham: it referred to all who believe in the one child of promise, the Messiah.
Jacob had twelve children with four different mothers. Two mothers were his two wives. They had a rivalry over who was Jacob’s favorite. They kept having children in attempted shows of who was the superior wife. They got their servant girls involved, having them each lay with Jacob and bear children on their behalf. This fierce rivalry flowed into the siblings, who often fought with each other for superiority just like their mothers.
The eleventh son was Joseph. While not the youngest, he was the dad’s favorite. His dad gave him a special coat—a coat of “palms” (not “of many colors” as is popularly misunderstood). This referred to a long coat which reached the hands and feet. Such a coat was worn by those in authority. In other words, Jacob made his youngest son a manager over the others working in the fields. It is no wonder they despised him. They fought among themselves enough already, but this young, entitled upstart now gave them something to unify against. When he started telling them about dreams he had in which they would all bow down to him someday, they grew even more agitated. They were soon plotting his demise.
They put an animal’s blood on Jacob’s coat and tricked their father into believing he was killed and dragged off by wild animals. They actually, however, sold off Joseph into slavery.
Joseph ended up in a jail in Egypt. By a series of providential events, and a God-given gift of interpreting dreams, he actually ends up in Pharaoh’s court and is exalted to a position of state leadership. When a famine strikes, Joseph’s brothers are forced to come to Egypt in search of food. They had no idea they would be walking right into the court in which their little brother was a national ruler.
After putting them through tests of loyalty, and requiring them to bring their whole family before him in Egypt, Joseph reveals himself. Then, he forgives them with one of the most powerful statements of faith in the Bible: “you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20). He trusted that God had orchestrated this event to save his family, and the promised seed, in the midst of a famine.
The book of Genesis then basically ends on this note. Jacob and Joseph both die and are buried, and the whole children of Israel are allowed to live in the most verdant area of Egypt. They flourish and multiply while living there.
In a short time, however, a new Pharaoh takes over. He does not know Joseph and does not recognize the arrangements made by the previous administration. He sees the growing wealth and vibrance of the Israelite community as a threat to his nation. He makes a move to suppress them and subjects them to hard slavery under his rule. This is where the book of Exodus picks up.
Deliverance and Freedom
The other four of the five books of Moses recount the story of the oppression of the Israelites in Egypt, the miraculous deliverance of them by God, God’s giving them the Ten Commandments, their sojourn through the wilderness, and eventually their preparation to enter and possess the Promised Land.
The second book, Exodus, tells how God delivered the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt and gave them the Ten Commandments as well as detailed instructions for a priesthood and tabernacle. God effected the exodus out of Egypt by means of great plagues upon the Egyptians. These included plagues of locust, lice, frogs, mice, and more. The last great plague was the destruction of all the firstborn sons during the night in which the Lord’s Angel of Death passed over the land. God’s people were forewarned and instructed to place the blood of a sacrificial lamb over their door. On seeing this, the Angel of Death would pass over their house; but the Egyptians would not be spared. The Hebrews were further instructed to eat the Passover lamb with bitter herbs and with their bags packed, ready to leave on a moment’s notice. This was the eve of the actual exodus out of Egypt.
Perhaps the most enduring and important part of Exodus is the Ten Commandments. Notably, God began these commandments with the phrase, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Exodus 20:1). This preamble shows that God’s law established a free society for a free people. Today we should understand the basics of the Ten Commandments as the foundation for any free society to remain free and prosper. Chapters 21–23 contain various case laws for life and justice under God’s law during that time. Many of them still apply for today, though by no means all.
The rest of Exodus contains detailed instructions for the religious building of the Jews, the tabernacle, its furniture and service items, curtains, holy oil, the garments of the priests, and many other detailed, ceremonial aspects of the sacrificial laws.
The book of Leviticus follows with a special set of instructions for God’s priests who would work in his temple. This was designed to work under the Old Testament system of sacrifices and symbolism. Priests were gatekeepers and mediators to God’s holiness. All sacrifices had to be brought to them and through them to God’s altar. Holiness is an especially important theme in this book: holy living in terms of personal ethics, for all time, but also in terms of special rituals and symbolic behaviors for the old symbolic system. The famous ceremonial laws about unclean foods as well as not wearing certain types of fabrics mixed in the same clothing, and much more, are also contained here. However, so are very central and eternal principles such as:
You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor. . . .
You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord (Leviticus 19:15, 18).
The book of Numbers is so named because God summoned his people into a militia for holy battle. Every able-bodied and willing male over age 20 was expected to be numbered among the troops. Forming a militia was the only time the civil government was allowed to take a census in the Bible. In this case, God was preparing his people to go take possession of the Promised Land. This book records the exploits of that army, as well as acts of treason and cowardice. Numbers contains many interesting stories about the failures of the people to trust God along this journey, and how the journey ended up taking many years longer than it should have due to this.
Finally, “Deuteronomy” means “second law.” As the Israelites finally arrived at the border of the Promised Land, they would need to prepare to adapt from a transitory life in the wilderness to an established, permanent civilization in one land. God, through Moses, provided a newly adapted and expanded form of his law for this purpose. This “second” law was the same as the first, built on the same principles of the Ten Commandments, just somewhat expanded. It is sometimes called a “covenant renewal,” or merely a second reading of the law.
Conclusion
The first five books of the Bible are crucial for establishing the foundation of all that comes later. The creation, fall, and promise of redemption of mankind are the reason all of the rest of the books and narrative exist for us.
God continues the promise of the seed of the woman by renewing it through Abraham and the patriarchs. He then renews it through the Hebrew people, their exodus from Egypt, and their establishment in the Promised Land. He provides for them a system of religion in sacrifices and symbolic worship. This all aimed at the promise of a savior to come. The law also provided a standard of morals and justice for how a people called by God should also relate to each other and the rest of the world. All of these things—the promises, the religion, and the social system of morals and justice—are all gifts of God’s grace.
As we shall see, just as this people quite often failed while traveling through the wilderness, they would often do so once established in the land as well, and for the same reasons. This will highlight the need for that savior to come all the more.
(To be continued. . . .)
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