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Who Needs the Old Testament?: Its Enduring appeal and why the New Atheists Don't Get it
Who needs the Old Testament? It might be a literary classic, but what relevance does it have today? How much of it can we believe anyway? Katharine Dell invites you to rediscover the appeal of the Old Testament for the twenty-first century. In doing so she deftly refutes hard-line attacks by writers such as Richard Dawkins; she firmly critiques the atheistic agenda of those scholars who seek to undermine the Old Testament's historical grounding; and she helpfully reassures those within the church who express doubts about its usefulness as a resource for Christian life and thought. Written by a world expert, this book will help many, both inside and outside the church, to gain a more informed appreciation of the different kinds of literature contained in the Old Testament, and a more nuanced understanding of the developing vision of God to which they witness.
"Dell confronts the 'New Atheists' head-on, demonstrating how their reading of the Old Testament ignores its cultural context and misrepresents its account of God, the world, and humankind. With equal rigour, she examines the conflicted intersection between Church and Academy, where scholarly skepticism seeds a growing clerical reluctance to preach and teach the Old Testament. . . With the skill of a scholar and the passion of one committed to the work of the church in the modern world, Dell demonstrates why and how the Old Testament offers a rich and realistic account of life in all its messiness. As she puts it, the Old Testament 'can be our friend, even if a challenging one at the end of the day'." --Samuel E. Balentine, Professor of Old Testament, Union Presbyterian Seminary, Richmond, Virginia
Katharine Dell is Reader in Old Testament Literature and Theology, and Fellow, Tutor, and Director of Studies in Theology and Religious Studies at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. A world expert on the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament, her most recent books include Ethical and Unethical in the Old Testament (2010), Opening the Old Testament (2008), and The Book of Proverbs in Social and Theological Context (2006).
"Dell confronts the 'New Atheists' head-on, demonstrating how their reading of the Old Testament ignores its cultural context and misrepresents its account of God, the world, and humankind. With equal rigour, she examines the conflicted intersection between Church and Academy, where scholarly skepticism seeds a growing clerical reluctance to preach and teach the Old Testament. . . With the skill of a scholar and the passion of one committed to the work of the church in the modern world, Dell demonstrates why and how the Old Testament offers a rich and realistic account of life in all its messiness. As she puts it, the Old Testament 'can be our friend, even if a challenging one at the end of the day'." --Samuel E. Balentine, Professor of Old Testament, Union Presbyterian Seminary, Richmond, Virginia
Katharine Dell is Reader in Old Testament Literature and Theology, and Fellow, Tutor, and Director of Studies in Theology and Religious Studies at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. A world expert on the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament, her most recent books include Ethical and Unethical in the Old Testament (2010), Opening the Old Testament (2008), and The Book of Proverbs in Social and Theological Context (2006).
268 pages, Paperback
Published June 30, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 25, 2020
Dell is a Reader in Old Testament Literature and Theology, and a Fellow and Director of Studies in Theology and Religious Studies at St. Catherine's College. She has extensive expertise in various aspects of the Hebrew Bible and Jewish studies and has written or edited quite a few books on these themes.
The subtitle is, "Its Enduring Appeal and Why the New Atheists Don't Get It." This is really the heart of the book. Dell's contention is that some New Atheists (NA) like Dawkins and Hitchens have cherry picked certain portions of the Hebrew Bible in order to make it look as bad as it can be. Dell's response is to 1) show that one can cherry pick other portions and show that there are some really good things said, so that it's not all bad; 2) that one can accept critical biblical scholarship and still see an enduring appeal of the Hebrew Bible, despite its problems. I think in the main that Dell was successful in her response. As someone who is a nonbeliever and was at least for a time sympathetic to New Atheism, I saw first hand how many NAs handled and cherry picked the Bible to make it look evil and horrible. But I knew that their portrayal was one sided. Dell helps with giving a more balanced and nuanced view.
I found chapter 9 on "Questioning the history of Israel: sceptism within the academy" the most interesting. There she discusses the intersection of archaeology, ancient Israel, and historiography. Obviously there are a great many issues and debates regarding these issues. Here she pushes back on the NA for simply accepting the side of the "minimalists." Without going into any detail the minimalists argue that essentially there is very little history regarding ancient Israel. For the interested reader one should read the minimalists like Israel Finkelstein, Niels Peter Lemche, Philip Davies, and Thomas Thompson. But one should also read those who fall more towards the "maximalists" like Kenneth Kitchen, James K. Hoffmeier, and Iain Provan and also those who tend to be more centrist like William Dever.
I didn't always agree with everything that Dell said especially since her audience is geared towards believers and as a nonbeliever some of those didn't always sit well with me. Then again that's to be expected. Probably the biggest thing that I disagreed with was in the first chapter where she discusses Marcion and categorizes one Christian scholar as being a modern Marcionite. That scholar was Eric Seibert. She's based her accusation on his book The Violence of Scripture: Overcoming the Old Testament’s Troubling Legacy. I have not read this one, but I did read his earlier one, Disturbing Divine Behavior: Troubling Old Testament Images of God of which the second one was meant to be an expansion. I did not ultimately agree with Seibert's solution (you can see my review of his book on Amazon) but didn't find him in any way dismissing or cutting off the Old Testament in any type of Marcionite manner, so found her claims a bit odd and unwarranted.
All in all I found this to be a very good book, not just simply as an answer to Dawkins and Hitchens, but as an introduction to some of the issues of the Hebrew Bible and how modern scholarship handles them.
The subtitle is, "Its Enduring Appeal and Why the New Atheists Don't Get It." This is really the heart of the book. Dell's contention is that some New Atheists (NA) like Dawkins and Hitchens have cherry picked certain portions of the Hebrew Bible in order to make it look as bad as it can be. Dell's response is to 1) show that one can cherry pick other portions and show that there are some really good things said, so that it's not all bad; 2) that one can accept critical biblical scholarship and still see an enduring appeal of the Hebrew Bible, despite its problems. I think in the main that Dell was successful in her response. As someone who is a nonbeliever and was at least for a time sympathetic to New Atheism, I saw first hand how many NAs handled and cherry picked the Bible to make it look evil and horrible. But I knew that their portrayal was one sided. Dell helps with giving a more balanced and nuanced view.
I found chapter 9 on "Questioning the history of Israel: sceptism within the academy" the most interesting. There she discusses the intersection of archaeology, ancient Israel, and historiography. Obviously there are a great many issues and debates regarding these issues. Here she pushes back on the NA for simply accepting the side of the "minimalists." Without going into any detail the minimalists argue that essentially there is very little history regarding ancient Israel. For the interested reader one should read the minimalists like Israel Finkelstein, Niels Peter Lemche, Philip Davies, and Thomas Thompson. But one should also read those who fall more towards the "maximalists" like Kenneth Kitchen, James K. Hoffmeier, and Iain Provan and also those who tend to be more centrist like William Dever.
I didn't always agree with everything that Dell said especially since her audience is geared towards believers and as a nonbeliever some of those didn't always sit well with me. Then again that's to be expected. Probably the biggest thing that I disagreed with was in the first chapter where she discusses Marcion and categorizes one Christian scholar as being a modern Marcionite. That scholar was Eric Seibert. She's based her accusation on his book The Violence of Scripture: Overcoming the Old Testament’s Troubling Legacy. I have not read this one, but I did read his earlier one, Disturbing Divine Behavior: Troubling Old Testament Images of God of which the second one was meant to be an expansion. I did not ultimately agree with Seibert's solution (you can see my review of his book on Amazon) but didn't find him in any way dismissing or cutting off the Old Testament in any type of Marcionite manner, so found her claims a bit odd and unwarranted.
All in all I found this to be a very good book, not just simply as an answer to Dawkins and Hitchens, but as an introduction to some of the issues of the Hebrew Bible and how modern scholarship handles them.
May 11, 2026
the last chapter where she encourages clergy to actually preach the old testament (snaps) and where she calls the old testament a friend is nice
January 31, 2018
This book aims to challenge the simplistic interpretations put on Old Testament passages by the 'New Atheists' such as Richard Dawkins, which have caused them to dismiss the Bible as irrelevant and even abhorrent to today's culture. This is a laudable aim. Unfortunately Katharine Dell's approach seems to be rather muddled; I'm not sure it would convince anyone who didn't want to be convinced. It didn't even convince me, and I was on her side! There are much clearer and better argued refutations of Dawkins et al.
April 16, 2019
To state my bias to begin with; I agree with the author that Dawkins' and Hitchens' exegesis of the Old Testament is utterly lacking in literary, philosophic, or historical sensibility and is entirely motivated by the conclusion they wish to draw therefrom i.e. that religion is evil. Given this, it should be easy to demonstrate the superficial engagement with the texts that characterises these authors, and yet somehow Dell fails to do so convincingly. Her main argument against their condemnatory attitude to the content of the episodes of the Old Testament that she covers is to simply repeat the idea that the cultural context of ancient Israel makes these episodes more understandable, but that they should not inform modern moral thinking. She then effectively distracts our attention by pointing out more laudable passages of the texts in question.
I cannot help but feel that this approach does not go nearly far enough; the reader is rarely left with a sense of what is valuable about the texts in question, of how or why they have inspired generations of Christians and Jews, and how they have provided the foundation of a culture which eventually developed ideas like human rights and the sanctity of human life. Rarely are interesting counterfactual scenarios explored; would it be better if a less realistic and more epic/heroic philosophical anthropology were present in the OT, or is there actually something really important about the fact that it is one of the defining characteristics of the OT that all of its heroes are deeply flawed? Many other similar issues could be broached; how do normative arguments in narrative form differ from normative arguments in philosophical form? What is the difference between art and ethics? What does it mean to write a text that is supposed to be meditated upon for extended periods of time? How is irony and ambiguity used by the authors of the OT? Is this valuable?
We are left with the feeling that, in context, the New Atheist judgement of specific texts is unfair, but in the broader scheme of things the difference in context is precisely what might be said to make the Biblical narrative irrelevant to modern readers; indeed, this is another plank of the New Atheist platform! This is a real shame, because there is a lot to be explored in the avenues briefly alluded to above. Poor show.
I cannot help but feel that this approach does not go nearly far enough; the reader is rarely left with a sense of what is valuable about the texts in question, of how or why they have inspired generations of Christians and Jews, and how they have provided the foundation of a culture which eventually developed ideas like human rights and the sanctity of human life. Rarely are interesting counterfactual scenarios explored; would it be better if a less realistic and more epic/heroic philosophical anthropology were present in the OT, or is there actually something really important about the fact that it is one of the defining characteristics of the OT that all of its heroes are deeply flawed? Many other similar issues could be broached; how do normative arguments in narrative form differ from normative arguments in philosophical form? What is the difference between art and ethics? What does it mean to write a text that is supposed to be meditated upon for extended periods of time? How is irony and ambiguity used by the authors of the OT? Is this valuable?
We are left with the feeling that, in context, the New Atheist judgement of specific texts is unfair, but in the broader scheme of things the difference in context is precisely what might be said to make the Biblical narrative irrelevant to modern readers; indeed, this is another plank of the New Atheist platform! This is a real shame, because there is a lot to be explored in the avenues briefly alluded to above. Poor show.
October 11, 2018
I have a great respect for the value of the Old Testament now. This book is a worthwhile read for a Christian wanting to increase his or hers knowledge of the Bible. Katherine walks the talk.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews