Ethics and the Old Testament

by John Barton

Establishing the relevance of Old Testament ethics to contemporary life is, as John Barton concedes, an uphill task. For many Christians today - let alone those with no religious commitment - to find some way of accommodating them into a coherent moral system by which to live in this new century and millennium seems at best implausible and at worst ridiculous or even immoral. However, Barton is convinced that in many aras of ethical enquiry the Old Testament has much to teach us. He looks again at the Ten Commandmens; the narrative about David and his children; the ethical issue of ecology; sexual morality and proprty; human morality as the express command of God; and the motivation for moral conduct. An additional chapter offers some fresh views about the value of Old Testament ethics in general. By the end of the book it is clear that although the Old Testament comes to us from a remote, alien and apparently unsophistocaled context, the powerful minds who worked on its books still have things to say which remain evocative and suggestive for our moral enquiries. John Barton is Oriel and Lain Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture in the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Oriel College. He is the author of many books, including The Spirit and the Letter, and he edited the Cambridge Companion to the Old Testament.

Genres: Old Testament, Theology, Religion, Biblical Studies

100 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1998

About the author

John Barton is Oriel & Laing Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture, University of Oxford. His publications include The Theology of the Book of Amos (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Oracles of God: Perceptions of Ancient Prophecy in Israel after the Exile (2007).

For the Canadian poet, see John Barton.

Reviews

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 4 out of 5]

For many people, the ethics of the Old Testament (OT) are relics of the past, no better than Hammurabi's code, incapable of informing our present-day morality. Even for Christians there is often an uneasiness about the OT law in light of the New Testament. One solution is to divide OT law into the ceremonial, civil, and moral, and to insist that only the moral law is still binding on believers today (a division that John Barton notes modern Jews decry, p. 43).

Barton does some clever things in this brief book. Addressing modern skeptics, he contends that the OT should not be entirely dismissed out of hand. He asserts "Among texts from past cultures some are simply dated, and a dialogue with them is impossible. But others survive because they have been found by successive generations to illuminate the human condition, and for that reason we keep coming back to them, and never exhaust their meaning" (p. 7). Just as we ought not to discard 'The Iliad' or Plato's "Republic," we should also preserve a place for the OT in our intellectual discourse because it is a text that has stood the test of time and can still offer wisdom to us, even IF we do not subscribe to its theological claims.

Related to this is Barton's claim that the OT can relate to US, particularly through its narratives. Relying on the insights of Christian theologian Stanley Hauerwas and ethicist Martha C. Nussbaum, Barton reflects that "when we read fiction, we find (if it is good fiction) that the characters are real in rather the same sense: their characters hang together and add up to a certain kind of whole. This again is a deeply anti-relativistic point: such a line of thought is only possible if we believe that all human beings, real ones and plausible fictional ones alike, share certain common aspects of what we call human nature, have similar needs and desires and potentialities. If that idea is abandoned, then we cannot truly 'read' either fiction or the human world around us. The outcome is a kind of solipsism in human relationships in which we regard everyone as totally opaque to us, and in the reading of literature an abandonment of the idea that we can be in touch with the intentions behind texts" (p. 30). Barton admits that sometimes there is misunderstanding among different people "But we recognize it when understanding has broken down precisely because we have experienced occasions when it didn't break down; and this is true both in real life and in our reading of stories" (p. 30-31). Barton notes that OT ethics emerge out of the PARTICULAR, NOT the UNIVERSAL, and this is often through a moral developed out of a narrative. To those who would dismiss OT narratives as not being of value to us today, Barton reminds us that modern people are still deeply moved by "The Odyssey," by the tragic tale of 'Romeo and Juliet,' by the novels of Jane Austen, even those these stories are hundreds, if not thousands, of years old. We still relate to and learn about human nature from these stories and we can do the same from reading about Adam and Eve, King David, and the prophet Daniel in exile.

More nuggets in this book are a comparison of Catholic natural law tradition vs. the more Protestant perspective on "positive law" found in the Bible, reflections on ecology, sexuality, and property, and a brief discussion of how Israel believed they "encountered" God through the LAW ITSELF - "It is indeed BY giving us the law that God makes himself known to us. It is not surprising that some early Christians seem to have developed a law christology: if God was to be encountered in Christ, then he must be, in some sense, identical with the Torah, for that was where God was to be encountered" (p. 96).

A succinct, highly readable and recommended introduction to considering OT ethics and their relationship with modern culture today.

[Bob Breckwoldt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing. Tries to cover too much ground in such a short space and lacks depth.

[Ronan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having had a go myself, I am always keen on efforts to talk sensibly about Old Testament ethics. Oxford professor John Barton's slim volume offers a collection of his own lectures on biblical morality and does a very good job moving the conversation beyond simple caricatures of the text.

For Barton, the OT's single greatest challenge in the realm of ethics is not in some of its petty or disturbing moral provisions, it is that its world-view is so foreign and pre-modern. Take, for example, the Decalogue. Who is being addressed in the text?

The person in question has a house, a wife, and servants, and so has his neighbour. He is competent to give evidence in court and consequently needs to be warned not to give false evidence. He has a father and a mother who need to be looked after. He is, in short, a free adult male of the property-owning class.

(Not only that, he also lives in a theocracy.)

Barton calls, first and foremost, for a contextual reading of the text before any attempt is made to apply biblical ethics to the 21st century AD. Sensible. Once duly considered, a text like the Decalogue then has much to offer. For example, note how it ends: with a call for private, even secret morality -- do not covet. How can one legislate against covetousness? This is obviously more than just a legal code (if it was that at all), and serves to remind the ruling class in society of its obligations towards others, one that went beyond simply not killing or stealing from them.

Barton's thoughts on OT ecology are also useful, particularly in the way he borrows again from the contextual to consider the specific. Genesis 1's command for humans to have "dominion" over the earth has been used to justify our exploitation of the world and to accuse the Bible of a selfish anthropomorphism. But note the view of good dominion that belongs to the same ethical milieu (Jer. 22:13-17):

Woe to him who builds his palace by unrighteousness, his upper rooms by injustice, making his own people work for nothing, not paying them for their labour.

He says, ‘I will build myself a great palace with spacious upper rooms.’ So he makes large windows in it, panels it with cedar and decorates it in red.

Does it make you a king to have more and more cedar? Did not your father have food and drink? He did what was right and just, so all went well with him. He defended the cause of the poor and needy, and so all went well.

Is that not what it means to know me? declares the LORD.

Good kings are not wanton consumers. If to have dominion over the earth is to be its king, the same must apply.

These observations by a leading OT scholar are what make this small (100 pages), inexpensive ($5 used) volume worth owning.