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Theology of the Old Testament, Volume 1
This book, the first of two volumes, offers a comprehensive profiling of the theology contained in the Old Testament. The Old Testament Library provides fresh and authoritative treatments of important aspects of Old Testament study through commentaries and general surveys. The contributors are scholars of international standing.
544 pages, Paperback
First published January 19, 1960
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October 8, 2025
In prototypically academic fashion, this masterly and definitive summa by a revered professor formerly at the University of Basel in Switzerland starts out with fighting words on method:
Among all the problems known to OT studies, one of the most far-reaching in its importance is that of the theology of the OT: for its concern is to construct a complete picture of the OT realm of belief, in other words to comprehend in all its uniqueness and immensity what is, strictly speaking, the proper object of OT study. The tasks of this science are very various in character, but this is the crown of them all; and to this, therefore, the other disciplines involved are ancillary. [p. 25]
This ringing statement of principle is worth highlighting because of the contrast it presents with the secular historian’s view, as exemplified by the Oxford History of the Biblical World edited by Michael D. Coogan (Oxford University Press, 1998)—in comparison coming across as peculiarly narrow and pedantic (a withering review of which we intend to affix immediately following our postings on Eichrodt’s masterpiece).
Walther Eichdrodt’s Theology of the Old Testament appears in English translation in two volumes as part of the Westminster Press’ Old Testament Library (originally published in 1957 resp. 1967). Let us seek briefly to characterize vol. 1 versus vol. 2? It looks as if the second volume gets into themes that someone accustomed to Christian dogmatics would recognize as properly theological (in the theoretical sense) while the first is more basic, devoted to a description of the God whom Israel worshipped and the means by which she did so. See, for instance, the Canaanite deity Baal as a divinization of nature versus Yahweh as Lord of history not tied to any particular locality; i.e., as Eichrodt says somewhere, God reveals himself through how he acts not by teaching an abstract system of ideas, such as one has come to expect in the Greek mold (say, the Gnosticism of later antiquity, which has no revelation of its own to base itself on but is merely a speculative development of an eisegesis of the NT or perhaps, arguably, the kabbalah as it came to be elaborated by medieval Jewish mystical theologians, who like the Gnostics subject the scriptural text to an esoteric interpretation that is wholly alien to the exoteric meaning that the original authors would have intended).
For the record, let us also compare the present monograph by Eichrodt with Lawrence Boadt’s more introductory Reading the Old Testament (Paulist Press, 1984), which we have recently reviewed, here. Boadt concentrates for the most part on enumerating material content, while Eichrodt compensates for a lesser degree of specificity by being packed with theoretical observations aiming to motivate a certain viewpoint by furnishing it with a rational warrant. Thus, usually specific verses are cited in the nature of proof texts supporting a scholarly interpretation rather than as a mere listing of data. So, the two are complementary and Eichrodt is evidently pitched at a higher scholarly level and intended for a seminar audience, presupposing familiarity at the level of Boadt.
Chapter four on the cultus will be eye-opening for a modern brought up in one of the higher monotheistic religions in the sense that he can back out from it by contrast a feeling for what it must have been like to be a pagan in Canaan or Babylonia; i.e., Eichrodt discusses primitive beliefs that had already become a dead letter by the time of Israel’s flourishing and a fortiori for us as well. We sum up by quoting an apposite remark indicative of the tenor of Eichrodt’s exposition in this work:
Indicative of the pattern of Old Testament piety is the fact that the dominant motives of prayer never included that of losing oneself, through contemplation, in the divine infinity. There was no room in Israel for mystical prayer; the nature of the Mosaic Yahweh with his mighty personal will effectively prevented the development of that type of prayer which seeks to dissolve the individual I in the unbounded One. Just as the God of the Old Testament is no being reposing in his own beatitude, but reveals himself as the controlling will of the eternal King, so the pious Israelite is no intoxicated, world-denying mystic reveling in the Beyond, but a warrior, who wrestles even in prayer, and looks for the life of power in communion with his divine Lord. His goal is not the static concept of the summum bonum, but the dynamic fact of the βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ. [p. 176]
The latter half of vol. 1 reviews the instruments of the Covenant, viz., charismatic leaders (the judges and the prophets), on the one hand, and the official leaders, on the other (priests and king). Nothing even remotely approaching this level of analysis can be found in Oxford handbook, needless to say, in light of which it must be charged with an entire failure to cognize its object, viz., the very scriptural revelation, eo ipso, devoting itself instead merely to a futile game of scoring trivial academic points (the Bible is right about this, wrong about that). First, prophecy, which evolved from an early stage known as nabism to its classical period of the writing prophets:
On the one hand nabism can be seen to be a powerful reaction of the religion of Yahweh against the whole process of the Canaanization of the Israelite spirit; in other words, it is a great new surge forward of the revelation of Yahweh in Israel, such as had not occurred since the time of Moses….But this struggle was directed not only against those influences breaking in from without, the Nature religion and the culture that was bound up with it, but also against the perversion of the original character of Yahwism by the national and religious institutions which were being formed in its own bosom. For the age of prophetism was also the period in which new forms of social life of a political and religious nature were either emerging for the first time or were firsts fully revealing their true character. To the first group belong the monarchy and the various forms of the social organization of the state….The revolutions, conspiracies and civil wars; the reckless expenditure of the national resources on dynastic ends and unscrupulous power politics; the abuse of their position by the kings and his officials in their dealings with the citizens; the commercial exploitation of the distressed condition of the peasantry by the wealthy towns; the one-sided concern for material advantage in relations with neighboring states; all these phenomena were already on the increase in the period of early prophetism, and all were symptoms of a gradual dissociation of the political institutions from responsibility to the national God and the standard of his will….This resulted, however, in battle being joined on yet another front with a class now rising to power for the first time, namely the priesthood. King and priest were united by a common interest in the stability and continuity of settled forms of community life….The king’s religious pretensions to being the fount of absolute authority in his role as son of God, and to concentrating the whole life of the nation on the service of himself, could be more easily combined with the religious practice of the priesthood than with that of the prophets. All that the former required was a nominal subjection to the God whom it represented, and a guarantee that the cult would be sumptuously maintained. As a result of this close association with the political power, and a consequent dependence on it even in the religious sphere, the priesthood came more and more to stand at the opposite pole from the prophetic movement….The whole prophetic movement, which on principle subjected all political and national considerations to the sovereign will of the nation’s God, inevitably acted as a vociferous protest against any subordination of religion to the program of the civil power. [pp. 328-331]
The following passages expand on what is distinctive about the writing prophets:
Corresponding to the less important role now played by the ecstatic element is the fact that, as time went by, the prophets came increasingly to recognize and make explicit the principle that a habitually heightened state of feeling was only something of very relative significance. Thus Isaiah, in his famous diatribe against the priests and the prophets (28:7ff), reveals a clear apprehension that all visionary insight may be deceitful, if serious concern for moral truth is missing….Jeremiah stresses even more clearly the utter worthlessness of all dreams and visions in those who have lost their sense of truth and justice. Ezekiel takes the same stand, when he reproaches the prophets who speak the people fair and cover up the grievous offenses of the nation with giving lying oracles and deceitful visions. [pp. 341-342]
The menacing irruption of a divine reality unperceived by their contemporaries—it is this, to put it in the most general terms, which is the decisively new factor in the phenomenon of classical prophecy, and which, in spite of many close affinities, both separates them fundamentally from the nebī’īm, and at the same time, despite all their individual differences, binds them together in a real unity. [p. 344]
What the terrifying, irresistible power of Yahweh meant to the faith of the earlier period is now, in accordance with a larger vision and understanding of the world, conceived as his exaltedness over the universe, thus giving intelligible form and basis to that which had hitherto been simply accepted as the datum of his numinous otherness….What confronts us here is a resurgence of the primary element in Mosaic religion, only enriched and deepened in content. [p. 351]
For the Israelite, the experience of God is almost, as it were, anti-theoretical in comparison with how the educated pagan Greek would view the matter:
It is quite true that the prophetic preaching did in fact mediate a deepened and purified knowledge of God. But this did not come about because they felt themselves bound to smash a false image of God by the proclamation of new and hitherto unknown divine attributes. It was simply that they established the relevance of that new sense of God’s reality which had come to them to every department of life. [p. 352]
The strong emphasis which we find in Hosea and Jeremiah on the ‘knowledge of God’ does not, according to the generally agreed opinion, equate this da‘at yhwh with intellectual contemplation or theoretical knowledge of the divine will, but with the act whereby man admits the nature and will of God as these have been revealed into his inmost spiritual self, with the result that that self now seems permeated and conditioned by the essential character of God….But what does this all mean, if not that the knowledge of God can only be achieved by a real act on the part of man?—an act, moreover, which is something quite different from mere cerebration, namely a real personal decision and acknowledgment, and not knowledge in the ordinary, neutral sense of the word? [p. 359]
It is well known how successfully Isaiah was able to imbue the ancient, traditional predicate of God, qādōš, with the new sense of ethical exaltedness. But the exceptional quality of his achievement lies in the fact that this concept now became wide enough to embrace the absolute otherness of the divine nature, from the angle of his moral perfection as well as from that of his transcendental majesty, and so provided an expression adequate both to the all-surpassing greatness and to the goodness of God….Even where the formal language of monotheism is found, as in Jeremiah and Deutro-Isaiah, it is still linked with the living, inner dynamic of the divine personhood, confirming the divine majesty simply by virtue of its inconceivable inherent richness. [pp. 363-364]
To round out the picture, Eichrodt brings in the eschatological aspect:
It is, indeed, only in the eschatological pictures that the message of the prophets is really presented in its completeness, at any rate in so far as it is in them that an answer is given to the difficult questions of world imperialism, the future of the people of God, and the self-assertion of the individual. Nor are these answers given on the basis of an historico-philosophical discussion of earthly possibilities; they spring from confidence in the Creator God, who is bringing his plan for humanity to a victorious conclusion. They are infallible signs that what is meant by the world of the future, now coming to birth, is not the end-product of some natural, earthly process, but the creative transformation of the world by the irruption of new divine realities; and it is this which gives the Kingdom of God its quality of being beyond time. [p. 386]
The portrait of prophecy in chapter eight has to be completed with a parallel portrayal of the priestly tradition in chapter nine. The following passages abstract a good idea of it:
If this separation of the divine Being from all that is not God leads, in this context, to the use of the divine Name to describe the way in which God exists as a transcendent personality supreme over this world, the Priestly writer finds another equally suitable means of expressing the same idea in his picture of the Word of Creation. It is by this means that the Lord of the universe regulates his relationship with our world without in any way becoming involved in its laws, or tied to its order. Here God’s transcendence of the material world is set in the sharpest possible contrast to any pantheistic conception of interfusion or evolutionary development. The divine will invades this world in the form of the most super sensory reality our experience can conceive. The Godhead stands over the cosmos in independent fullness of life; but its inaccessible majesty derives from its essential nature of purely transcendent being. [p. 410]
The really profound distinction, however, between this approach and that of the prophets is to be found in the fact that the moral teaching of the priest is concerned to guide an actually existent people into a particular pattern of life in which the eternal will of God for men is to be given in visible form. This means that the status of morality is described within the limits imposed by an earthly community, that is so say, it is presented in the form of law. [p. 418]
In contrast to the dynamic of the prophetic world-view the spiritual structure of the priestly faith is patently static in character. The common factor of all its assertions about God and man is to be found in the concept of permanent order. [p. 433]
There are at least two ways, therefore, in which it is wrong to think of the priesthood. It is not simply an enemy of the prophetic preaching, destined to be gradually overpowered. Nor is it just a historically necessary custodian of pregnant but uncomprehended spiritual material, useful only until the time when that material shall come to maturity and final liberation. Rather it is a form of man’s experience of divine revelation which is complementary to that of prophetism, and helps to make the full wealth of that revelation fruitful and effective in Israel not of itself alone, but because it is constantly being completed and fertilized by its opposite number. [p. 436]
The very concept of a covenant between God and Israel invites a dialectic between the particularity of a single nation among all others and the universality of a God who rules over all men. In rabbinical Judaism this crucial factor has gone largely missing and forgotten (as one can discern in our day in the writings of Jacob Neusner). Eichrodt, in contrast, stresses throughout the universalism that was always an integral part of the OT revelation:
In this ancient Israelite expectation of a doom embracing the Gentile world the universalist element in the Yahweh religion, which in the empirical present was largely restricted and suppressed by limitations of the actual situation, now attained powerful and uninhibited development….Here the idea of divine wrath working itself out in historical acts is intensified into an eschatological event, and so becomes intimately connected with the consummation of the kingdom of God. In this way futuristic expectations are removed from the sphere of myth, and exalted into a historical hope. [p. 461]
Moreover the prophets teach men to see the inner necessity of this final reckoning of Yahweh with his people by showing how deep is the alienation which separates Israel from her God. Just as, for them, Israel’s favored position, based on God’s redemption and election, finds its true meaning in man’s trustful surrender of himself to God in faith, love and obedience, and in the way of life which springs from these, so the essential nature of sin lies ultimately in the nation’s deliberate turning away from God….Israel is placed on a par with the nations; and in the day when Yahweh establishes his universal sovereignty she can look forward not simply to the punishment of the heathen, but primarily to her own condemnation. This eschatological expectation of doom is so radical and complete that rationalist categories of thought are helpless to counter it; only God’s promise of a new Creation, transcending human thinking, can do that. But this very quality makes it the ultimate guarantee against any human abuse of the covenant concept, and enables it to purge the religious interpretation of history of all traces of egoistic wishful thinking. The vital nerve of the prophetic proclamation of doom is the assertion that ‘Yahweh alone shall be exalted in that day’ (Isaiah 2:11). [pp. 466-467]
To conclude, we want to say something about the level of spiritual maturity required to read Eichrodt with profit. It is not at all catechetical in orientation, but only the reader who has been thus instructed and who enjoys the benefit, moreover, of having had adult experience of the religious life will be in a position fully to comprehend Eichrodt’s refined points, such as when he contrasts Israelite understandings with pagan practices. As an illustration: the pagan tendency to view sacrifice as an opus operatum that can compel the divinity versus God’s freedom of response, always honored by the leading lights in Israel. Nonetheless, the reader will find interesting that some elements of pagan cult were retained with modification while others were rejected as totally incompatible (e.g., the institution of sacred prostitution).
Among all the problems known to OT studies, one of the most far-reaching in its importance is that of the theology of the OT: for its concern is to construct a complete picture of the OT realm of belief, in other words to comprehend in all its uniqueness and immensity what is, strictly speaking, the proper object of OT study. The tasks of this science are very various in character, but this is the crown of them all; and to this, therefore, the other disciplines involved are ancillary. [p. 25]
This ringing statement of principle is worth highlighting because of the contrast it presents with the secular historian’s view, as exemplified by the Oxford History of the Biblical World edited by Michael D. Coogan (Oxford University Press, 1998)—in comparison coming across as peculiarly narrow and pedantic (a withering review of which we intend to affix immediately following our postings on Eichrodt’s masterpiece).
Walther Eichdrodt’s Theology of the Old Testament appears in English translation in two volumes as part of the Westminster Press’ Old Testament Library (originally published in 1957 resp. 1967). Let us seek briefly to characterize vol. 1 versus vol. 2? It looks as if the second volume gets into themes that someone accustomed to Christian dogmatics would recognize as properly theological (in the theoretical sense) while the first is more basic, devoted to a description of the God whom Israel worshipped and the means by which she did so. See, for instance, the Canaanite deity Baal as a divinization of nature versus Yahweh as Lord of history not tied to any particular locality; i.e., as Eichrodt says somewhere, God reveals himself through how he acts not by teaching an abstract system of ideas, such as one has come to expect in the Greek mold (say, the Gnosticism of later antiquity, which has no revelation of its own to base itself on but is merely a speculative development of an eisegesis of the NT or perhaps, arguably, the kabbalah as it came to be elaborated by medieval Jewish mystical theologians, who like the Gnostics subject the scriptural text to an esoteric interpretation that is wholly alien to the exoteric meaning that the original authors would have intended).
For the record, let us also compare the present monograph by Eichrodt with Lawrence Boadt’s more introductory Reading the Old Testament (Paulist Press, 1984), which we have recently reviewed, here. Boadt concentrates for the most part on enumerating material content, while Eichrodt compensates for a lesser degree of specificity by being packed with theoretical observations aiming to motivate a certain viewpoint by furnishing it with a rational warrant. Thus, usually specific verses are cited in the nature of proof texts supporting a scholarly interpretation rather than as a mere listing of data. So, the two are complementary and Eichrodt is evidently pitched at a higher scholarly level and intended for a seminar audience, presupposing familiarity at the level of Boadt.
Chapter four on the cultus will be eye-opening for a modern brought up in one of the higher monotheistic religions in the sense that he can back out from it by contrast a feeling for what it must have been like to be a pagan in Canaan or Babylonia; i.e., Eichrodt discusses primitive beliefs that had already become a dead letter by the time of Israel’s flourishing and a fortiori for us as well. We sum up by quoting an apposite remark indicative of the tenor of Eichrodt’s exposition in this work:
Indicative of the pattern of Old Testament piety is the fact that the dominant motives of prayer never included that of losing oneself, through contemplation, in the divine infinity. There was no room in Israel for mystical prayer; the nature of the Mosaic Yahweh with his mighty personal will effectively prevented the development of that type of prayer which seeks to dissolve the individual I in the unbounded One. Just as the God of the Old Testament is no being reposing in his own beatitude, but reveals himself as the controlling will of the eternal King, so the pious Israelite is no intoxicated, world-denying mystic reveling in the Beyond, but a warrior, who wrestles even in prayer, and looks for the life of power in communion with his divine Lord. His goal is not the static concept of the summum bonum, but the dynamic fact of the βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ. [p. 176]
The latter half of vol. 1 reviews the instruments of the Covenant, viz., charismatic leaders (the judges and the prophets), on the one hand, and the official leaders, on the other (priests and king). Nothing even remotely approaching this level of analysis can be found in Oxford handbook, needless to say, in light of which it must be charged with an entire failure to cognize its object, viz., the very scriptural revelation, eo ipso, devoting itself instead merely to a futile game of scoring trivial academic points (the Bible is right about this, wrong about that). First, prophecy, which evolved from an early stage known as nabism to its classical period of the writing prophets:
On the one hand nabism can be seen to be a powerful reaction of the religion of Yahweh against the whole process of the Canaanization of the Israelite spirit; in other words, it is a great new surge forward of the revelation of Yahweh in Israel, such as had not occurred since the time of Moses….But this struggle was directed not only against those influences breaking in from without, the Nature religion and the culture that was bound up with it, but also against the perversion of the original character of Yahwism by the national and religious institutions which were being formed in its own bosom. For the age of prophetism was also the period in which new forms of social life of a political and religious nature were either emerging for the first time or were firsts fully revealing their true character. To the first group belong the monarchy and the various forms of the social organization of the state….The revolutions, conspiracies and civil wars; the reckless expenditure of the national resources on dynastic ends and unscrupulous power politics; the abuse of their position by the kings and his officials in their dealings with the citizens; the commercial exploitation of the distressed condition of the peasantry by the wealthy towns; the one-sided concern for material advantage in relations with neighboring states; all these phenomena were already on the increase in the period of early prophetism, and all were symptoms of a gradual dissociation of the political institutions from responsibility to the national God and the standard of his will….This resulted, however, in battle being joined on yet another front with a class now rising to power for the first time, namely the priesthood. King and priest were united by a common interest in the stability and continuity of settled forms of community life….The king’s religious pretensions to being the fount of absolute authority in his role as son of God, and to concentrating the whole life of the nation on the service of himself, could be more easily combined with the religious practice of the priesthood than with that of the prophets. All that the former required was a nominal subjection to the God whom it represented, and a guarantee that the cult would be sumptuously maintained. As a result of this close association with the political power, and a consequent dependence on it even in the religious sphere, the priesthood came more and more to stand at the opposite pole from the prophetic movement….The whole prophetic movement, which on principle subjected all political and national considerations to the sovereign will of the nation’s God, inevitably acted as a vociferous protest against any subordination of religion to the program of the civil power. [pp. 328-331]
The following passages expand on what is distinctive about the writing prophets:
Corresponding to the less important role now played by the ecstatic element is the fact that, as time went by, the prophets came increasingly to recognize and make explicit the principle that a habitually heightened state of feeling was only something of very relative significance. Thus Isaiah, in his famous diatribe against the priests and the prophets (28:7ff), reveals a clear apprehension that all visionary insight may be deceitful, if serious concern for moral truth is missing….Jeremiah stresses even more clearly the utter worthlessness of all dreams and visions in those who have lost their sense of truth and justice. Ezekiel takes the same stand, when he reproaches the prophets who speak the people fair and cover up the grievous offenses of the nation with giving lying oracles and deceitful visions. [pp. 341-342]
The menacing irruption of a divine reality unperceived by their contemporaries—it is this, to put it in the most general terms, which is the decisively new factor in the phenomenon of classical prophecy, and which, in spite of many close affinities, both separates them fundamentally from the nebī’īm, and at the same time, despite all their individual differences, binds them together in a real unity. [p. 344]
What the terrifying, irresistible power of Yahweh meant to the faith of the earlier period is now, in accordance with a larger vision and understanding of the world, conceived as his exaltedness over the universe, thus giving intelligible form and basis to that which had hitherto been simply accepted as the datum of his numinous otherness….What confronts us here is a resurgence of the primary element in Mosaic religion, only enriched and deepened in content. [p. 351]
For the Israelite, the experience of God is almost, as it were, anti-theoretical in comparison with how the educated pagan Greek would view the matter:
It is quite true that the prophetic preaching did in fact mediate a deepened and purified knowledge of God. But this did not come about because they felt themselves bound to smash a false image of God by the proclamation of new and hitherto unknown divine attributes. It was simply that they established the relevance of that new sense of God’s reality which had come to them to every department of life. [p. 352]
The strong emphasis which we find in Hosea and Jeremiah on the ‘knowledge of God’ does not, according to the generally agreed opinion, equate this da‘at yhwh with intellectual contemplation or theoretical knowledge of the divine will, but with the act whereby man admits the nature and will of God as these have been revealed into his inmost spiritual self, with the result that that self now seems permeated and conditioned by the essential character of God….But what does this all mean, if not that the knowledge of God can only be achieved by a real act on the part of man?—an act, moreover, which is something quite different from mere cerebration, namely a real personal decision and acknowledgment, and not knowledge in the ordinary, neutral sense of the word? [p. 359]
It is well known how successfully Isaiah was able to imbue the ancient, traditional predicate of God, qādōš, with the new sense of ethical exaltedness. But the exceptional quality of his achievement lies in the fact that this concept now became wide enough to embrace the absolute otherness of the divine nature, from the angle of his moral perfection as well as from that of his transcendental majesty, and so provided an expression adequate both to the all-surpassing greatness and to the goodness of God….Even where the formal language of monotheism is found, as in Jeremiah and Deutro-Isaiah, it is still linked with the living, inner dynamic of the divine personhood, confirming the divine majesty simply by virtue of its inconceivable inherent richness. [pp. 363-364]
To round out the picture, Eichrodt brings in the eschatological aspect:
It is, indeed, only in the eschatological pictures that the message of the prophets is really presented in its completeness, at any rate in so far as it is in them that an answer is given to the difficult questions of world imperialism, the future of the people of God, and the self-assertion of the individual. Nor are these answers given on the basis of an historico-philosophical discussion of earthly possibilities; they spring from confidence in the Creator God, who is bringing his plan for humanity to a victorious conclusion. They are infallible signs that what is meant by the world of the future, now coming to birth, is not the end-product of some natural, earthly process, but the creative transformation of the world by the irruption of new divine realities; and it is this which gives the Kingdom of God its quality of being beyond time. [p. 386]
The portrait of prophecy in chapter eight has to be completed with a parallel portrayal of the priestly tradition in chapter nine. The following passages abstract a good idea of it:
If this separation of the divine Being from all that is not God leads, in this context, to the use of the divine Name to describe the way in which God exists as a transcendent personality supreme over this world, the Priestly writer finds another equally suitable means of expressing the same idea in his picture of the Word of Creation. It is by this means that the Lord of the universe regulates his relationship with our world without in any way becoming involved in its laws, or tied to its order. Here God’s transcendence of the material world is set in the sharpest possible contrast to any pantheistic conception of interfusion or evolutionary development. The divine will invades this world in the form of the most super sensory reality our experience can conceive. The Godhead stands over the cosmos in independent fullness of life; but its inaccessible majesty derives from its essential nature of purely transcendent being. [p. 410]
The really profound distinction, however, between this approach and that of the prophets is to be found in the fact that the moral teaching of the priest is concerned to guide an actually existent people into a particular pattern of life in which the eternal will of God for men is to be given in visible form. This means that the status of morality is described within the limits imposed by an earthly community, that is so say, it is presented in the form of law. [p. 418]
In contrast to the dynamic of the prophetic world-view the spiritual structure of the priestly faith is patently static in character. The common factor of all its assertions about God and man is to be found in the concept of permanent order. [p. 433]
There are at least two ways, therefore, in which it is wrong to think of the priesthood. It is not simply an enemy of the prophetic preaching, destined to be gradually overpowered. Nor is it just a historically necessary custodian of pregnant but uncomprehended spiritual material, useful only until the time when that material shall come to maturity and final liberation. Rather it is a form of man’s experience of divine revelation which is complementary to that of prophetism, and helps to make the full wealth of that revelation fruitful and effective in Israel not of itself alone, but because it is constantly being completed and fertilized by its opposite number. [p. 436]
The very concept of a covenant between God and Israel invites a dialectic between the particularity of a single nation among all others and the universality of a God who rules over all men. In rabbinical Judaism this crucial factor has gone largely missing and forgotten (as one can discern in our day in the writings of Jacob Neusner). Eichrodt, in contrast, stresses throughout the universalism that was always an integral part of the OT revelation:
In this ancient Israelite expectation of a doom embracing the Gentile world the universalist element in the Yahweh religion, which in the empirical present was largely restricted and suppressed by limitations of the actual situation, now attained powerful and uninhibited development….Here the idea of divine wrath working itself out in historical acts is intensified into an eschatological event, and so becomes intimately connected with the consummation of the kingdom of God. In this way futuristic expectations are removed from the sphere of myth, and exalted into a historical hope. [p. 461]
Moreover the prophets teach men to see the inner necessity of this final reckoning of Yahweh with his people by showing how deep is the alienation which separates Israel from her God. Just as, for them, Israel’s favored position, based on God’s redemption and election, finds its true meaning in man’s trustful surrender of himself to God in faith, love and obedience, and in the way of life which springs from these, so the essential nature of sin lies ultimately in the nation’s deliberate turning away from God….Israel is placed on a par with the nations; and in the day when Yahweh establishes his universal sovereignty she can look forward not simply to the punishment of the heathen, but primarily to her own condemnation. This eschatological expectation of doom is so radical and complete that rationalist categories of thought are helpless to counter it; only God’s promise of a new Creation, transcending human thinking, can do that. But this very quality makes it the ultimate guarantee against any human abuse of the covenant concept, and enables it to purge the religious interpretation of history of all traces of egoistic wishful thinking. The vital nerve of the prophetic proclamation of doom is the assertion that ‘Yahweh alone shall be exalted in that day’ (Isaiah 2:11). [pp. 466-467]
To conclude, we want to say something about the level of spiritual maturity required to read Eichrodt with profit. It is not at all catechetical in orientation, but only the reader who has been thus instructed and who enjoys the benefit, moreover, of having had adult experience of the religious life will be in a position fully to comprehend Eichrodt’s refined points, such as when he contrasts Israelite understandings with pagan practices. As an illustration: the pagan tendency to view sacrifice as an opus operatum that can compel the divinity versus God’s freedom of response, always honored by the leading lights in Israel. Nonetheless, the reader will find interesting that some elements of pagan cult were retained with modification while others were rejected as totally incompatible (e.g., the institution of sacred prostitution).
July 27, 2017
The book that changed my view of the Hebrew bible. Start and finish date in the 70s.
January 15, 2019
The thesis of this volume is to affirm a unifying theme to Old Testament writings, despite of all its diversity, tensions, and genres. This uniting theme, according to Eichrodt, is “the concept of the covenant,” without which not only the faith of ancient Israel will collapse. But also, Israel could not have been established as a nation. Eichrodt methodology rests on two aspects: first comparative study of ANE as they relate to the faith of Ancient Israel, second, looking on towards the New Testament as it reflects on the Old.
September 22, 2012
Commentaries are on going reading projcts
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews