Basics of the Old Testament - Lesson 4

Welcome to this next lecture for Basics of Old Testament with Biblical Training. We continue to work through our introduction to the Old Testament and in this lecture we're going to talk basically about two things, the history of Israel, that is when did all the events in the Old Testament take place historically, and then the covenants that God had with Israel during this time. So the history of Israel and the covenants of God with Israel during this period of time.

By way of review, it's helpful, we've already covered kind of the biblical books and the main players in those books. So we had, for example, in the book of Genesis, Adam and Eve, Noah, and Abraham, Abraham's sons, Isaac, Jacob, and Jacob's 12 sons, specifically kind of Judah and Joseph are focused on in Genesis. In the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, we have Moses, Aaron, and Miriam, with a guest appearance of Pharaoh, the king of Egypt.

In the book of Joshua, Joshua is the main character, along with the 12 tribes of Israel. There are 12 judges in the book of Judges, six major judges that you want to take a look at, they're Othniel, Ehud, and Deborah Barak, and then Gideon, Jephthah, and Samson. In the books of Samuel and Kings, we have Samuel the prophet, who anoints Saul the first king of Israel, David, the famous second king of Israel, his son Solomon, and then all the kings of the northern and southern kingdoms.

We didn't mention this in our previous lecture, but while you're in Samuel and Kings, especially the book of Kings, watch out for these two prophets, Elijah and There are major players there as well. Then we have Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther in the books that bear their names. In the poetical books, we've talked about the book of Job, and Job is the main character, but there is Satan, his three hobbit friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, with Elihu at the end.

With the poets, David is the primary contributor to the book of Psalms, and then Solomon is the author or major collector of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs. Finally, in the prophetical books, the names that appear as the title are the authors of those books, so Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve, running from Hosea all the way to Malachi. But there's one other name that we really haven't mentioned as the primary player in the Old Testament, and that's the name Yahweh.

Yahweh is the divine name of God, given to Moses in Exodus chapter three, and you can look, there's some other stuff in Exodus chapter six. Yahweh is the covenantal name for God, and it's a name that appears all throughout the Old Testament. In fact, the covenantal name of God, the Tetragrammaton it's called, appears 6,828 times in the Hebrew Bible, so let's just say 7,000 times.

Additionally, the designation Elohim, the name for God, Elohim, appears another 2,600 times, and then you've probably heard the term Adonai. Adonai is another name for God, it means Lord, and it appears another 400 plus times, meaning that at approximately 10,000 times in the Hebrew Bible, God is mentioned as the main speaker and main player. Just by way of reference, the name Israel, either the person or the tribe, appears 2,500 times, and the name David, the next most common proper name, is only 1,000 times.

So you're talking about 1,000 times for David, 2,500 times for Israel, but 10,000 times for the creator of heaven and earth. So the main player in the Old Testament, in addition to all these other names, is Yahweh, Elohim or Adonai, the God who created heaven and earth, who has redeemed his people Israel, redeemed his church as well in the New Testament, and so we're looking at, we're looking at, in some sense in the Old Testament, we're looking at the history of the acts of God and the words of God in the life of his people. Let's then take a look at a slide here that covers the history of Israel.

Now one of the great things about this, I make my seminary students memorize these dates, but basically with one page of information, you can have at your fingertips the entire history of Israel, the entire history of Israel. So this will be available through biblical training for you to download, and perhaps you can study these dates and kind of put them in your mind as a grid for when the people, when you're reading the books and you're talking about the people in the Old Testament, you know approximately when they occurred, okay? Now the earliest date that we have in the Old Testament, as you can see on our slide, is 2100 BC with Abraham being called out of Ur of the Chaldees to journey into the promised land that later his children will inherit, okay? Which means the dates for Genesis 1 through 11, we don't really have specific numbers. We don't know the date for when God really created the heavens and earth.

We don't know the date for the flood. We just know it's an ancient days past. In fact, one of the things that I think that's helpful for someone who's new to the Bible and new to the Old Testament to think about is this.

The Old Testament and the Bible in general is very selective in terms of what it talks about, right? Of all of the things in the universe that God could tell us, it's a very small slice, right? In fact, in the New Testament, it says if all of the words and deeds of Jesus were recorded, the world couldn't contain the books. So how much more all of the historical freight that goes before him, okay? So I want to give you this piece of advice and some wisdom when reading, for example, Genesis 1 to 3. God does not tell us everything we want to know, but he does tell us everything that we need to know in order to trust him and to know who he is and who we are. And that's the point of the text.

And so knowing what God has intended helps you to appreciate the type of literature we have. But we do have a date. In approximately 2100 BC, God calls Abraham out of his paganism into a life of faith to come to the promised land and enter into a covenant with him.

And so we have the so-called patriarchal era, we call it, from 2100 to 1875 BC. And this is when Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jacob's 12 sons, the tribes of Israel, exist, okay? This is when they come into being. And you can read those stories in Genesis 12 to 50.

So there's a lot of history that takes place in the book of Genesis, okay? We move on from that, and now we're in the book of Exodus. And the book of Exodus, you can think of it this way, runs from, Exodus through really Deuteronomy, runs from 1446 to 1406. In 1446, Israel kind of crosses the Red Sea and enters into the Sinai wilderness to enter into a covenant with God at Mount Sinai called the Mosaic Covenant.

Then they have a period of 40 years of wilderness wandering until they enter into the land of promise with Joshua in 1406 BC. And so that covers basically the period of 1446 to 1406, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy cover 120 years.

It begins with the birth of Moses and ends with the death of Moses. That's 120 years. In kind of three 40-year slots, Moses, while he was a prince of Egypt, Moses while he was in exile in the wilderness, and then Moses as he was leading the people of God in that wilderness after he led them out, those 120 years.

There's only one year covered between Exodus 19 and the middle of Numbers, like Deuteronomy Numbers 10. So there's a big historical focus there on that period of time from Exodus 19 to the book of Numbers, where Israel is camped at Mount Sinai, entering into a covenant with God. So things really slow down historically during that time.

And when things slow down historically, that means something important is going on. From that period of time, we move into the book of Joshua. And from 1406 to 1400, Joshua leads Israel into Canaan to conquer the Canaanites and to possess the land according to the promises that God made to Abraham back in Genesis 12 and 15.

So if you want to understand what Joshua is doing in the book of Joshua, you go back and read Genesis 12 and Genesis 15, where God promised to give the land of Canaan to Israel as their inheritance. Following the conquest with Joshua, we have the period of the judges. We've talked about that, the book of judges.

There are 12 judges in the book of Judges, six major judges and six minor judges based on the length of their narratives. And that period of time runs from 1360 to approximately 1084. The period of judges is the period that exists between the leadership of Joshua and then Israel's monarchy with Saul and David and Solomon.

There was that interim period. God had always intended a king to rule over Israel, but there was a period of waiting before that time occurred. And that's the so-called period of judges.

You can almost think of it as a time of interim waiting for God to install his king in Jerusalem. Then you can see here, we've got the kings of the United Monarchy listed. We've got Saul and David and Solomon listed here.

In 1050, Saul becomes the first king of Israel, and he's the king that the Israelites wanted. They asked in the early parts of Samuel that God would give them a king like all the other nations, because they had rejected Yahweh as their king. They didn't want to trust in God anymore.

They wanted a human king like all the other nations to lead them out to battle. And so God gave them exactly what they asked for in Saul. And I mentioned this earlier, Saul means, his name means what was asked for.

Okay. So that's what they get. His ministry was a failure.

His kingship was a failure. And then God installed his own king over Israel. In 1029, he anointed David as king of Israel.

And you can read about that in 1 Samuel 16. Following that, we have the reign of David from 1011 BC all the way to 971 BC. And the reign of David really occurs in two parts.

God will have Samuel anoint David, but then Saul's still king. And so there's a period of time where Saul's the king, but David is the anointed heir. And you're going to read in those narratives in Samuel, the conflict between Saul, the reigning king, and David, the anointed king.

And that's what's going to happen. And so, and then David reigns those last 40 years, first in Hebron, and then in Jerusalem. And in 2 Samuel 7, God enters into a covenant with David regarding the nature of kingship and Messiah.

After David comes David's son Solomon, who is the son of David and Bathsheba, that very famous event in the Old Testament. And he reigns from 971 to 931 BC. And the account of the reign of Solomon is in 1 Kings 3 to 11.

But it even begins a little bit earlier from 1 Kings 1 to 11 is kind of the preliminary business with Solomon, but his reign runs from 1 Kings 3 to 1 Kings 11 and terminates in kind of the climactic demise of kingship. Solomon's kingship marks the high water point, the high water mark of Israel's kingdom or theocracy, as they say in biblical studies, theocracy meaning the reign of God on this earth, with the building of the temple, the dedication of the temple, and then Yahweh's presence coming to dwell in the temple as the king of Israel in that particular time and space. Then in 1 Kings 11, Solomon leads God's people into idolatry.

He does that which is evil in the eyes of the Lord. The Lord's anger burns against him and he rips 10 of the tribes from Solomon and makes them the northern tribes of Israel. And so then you'll have Rehoboam and Jeroboam after Solomon running over the north and the south.

That precipitates a very long period of time called the divided monarchy. So with Saul and David and Solomon, we talk about a united monarchy, meaning all of Israel together. After Solomon with Rehoboam and Jeroboam and all the kings of the north and south that follow, we call this the divided monarchy.

When the tribes of Israel, the tribes of Israel, which were one nation become two nations, the north and the south. Over the period of time, the divided monarchy, the north and the south, will fall into idolatry and spiritual demise. And God will eventually bring those two nations to an end.

And so the first one is this. In 722 BC, which we have recorded in 2 Kings 17, the northern 10 tribes called Samaria fall. The nation of Assyria under Sennacherib, the king of Assyria, comes and destroys the northern tribes and sends them into exile.

Not too far after that, in 586 BC, Babylon comes under the leadership of Nebuchadnezzar, the king, and destroys the southern kingdom. He destroys the temple, he destroys Jerusalem, and he takes the king and all of the nobles into exile into Babylon, when we'll have people like Daniel and Ezekiel going into Babylon and Jeremiah fleeing down into Egypt into exile. That's what's happening at that time.

And God's people will be in exile for a significant period of time until 538 BC, when God enables the king Cyrus, the Persian king Cyrus, to make a decree that God's people, if they want, can go home. God's people, if they want, can go home. And this is recorded in Ezra chapter 1 and 2 Chronicles 36.

After that decree, there are some returns that do happen. We call this the first, the second, and the third return. The first, the second, and the third return.

The first return of God's people from exile occurs in 536 BC with a guy named Zerubbabel. Okay, and that's recorded in Ezra 1 to 6. The second return appears in 458 BC under the leadership of Ezra, and that's accounted for in Ezra 7 to 10. And then the third return from exile comes under the leadership of Nehemiah, and that appears in Nehemiah 1 to 10.

In the midst of those first, second, and third returns, there is the building campaign to begin rebuilding the temple in 520 BC, and you can see that in Ezra 3 and the prophet Haggai, one of the 12 minor prophets. And then in 516 BC, you have the dedication of the temple. Now, just a quick theological statement here about the dedication of the temple.

When the temple is dedicated in Ezra 6, all of the people celebrate the dedication and run out to the east gate where God should have come back in in his glory and presence to dwell in that new temple, just like he did in the tabernacle in Exodus 40, just like he did in the temple in 1 Kings 8. But in this instance, at the dedication of the temple, I want you to understand this. God's glory did not return to the temple at that time, and it remained empty. All right? So, this is not the return from exile that the prophets anticipated, where the temple of the next generation, that is the temple after Solomon, would be greater than Solomon's temple, which was as great, humanly speaking, as you could get it, and then God would dwell in it forever.

All right? So, there's absence. In some sense, there's the great celebration in Ezra 6, and then all you hear at the end of it is crickets in the temple. There's no fire and smoke and theophany of God's presence.

And so, it reminds us then that when the Old Testament comes to a conclusion, we're looking for another temple, and we're looking for God's presence to dwell in that temple. Okay? That's kind of a brief summary of the history of Israel. It runs from 2100 BC all the way to 445 BC.

I like to think about it this way in my brain. I need round numbers. And so, you can think of the history of Israel from Genesis chapter 12 all the way to the end of the Bible, Old Testament Bible, like you could say Malachi in the English Bible or Chronicles in the Hebrew Bible, runs from 2000 BC to 400 BC.

It's a history of some 1600 years that is accounted for in the Bible. Now, we've talked about the books of the Bible. We've talked about the major players in the Bible.

Here's a basic summary of the dates and the history of what's going on in the Bible. The last thing we need to cover in this particular lecture then is just briefly the covenants that appear and structure that history of Israel. Remember this, God relates to his people Israel covenantally.

Well, God relates to all of humanity covenantally. In fact, in Romans 5, it says all of humanity is in covenant with God either in Adam or in Christ. So, no one is outside of covenant with God.

And in Genesis chapter 9, even the world, like the globe, the waters and the animals are in covenant with God. He relates to everything covenantally. And so, just before we end this lecture, I would just like to take you through those covenants.

And you can study, I have a handout for you. You can study the handout that biblical training will have available to you. But let me just say this about it.

A covenant is defined as a binding agreement initiated by God and entered into with his people. It establishes the terms of their relationship. That is how God and his people relate.

And it includes promises, obligations, and consequences for either obedience or disobedience. We call those blessings and curses. It's one of the central concepts for understanding how God not only relates to humanity throughout the Bible, but how God brings his word to us.

You could think of the entire Bible as God's covenantal word of the history of how he relates to his people. Okay? So, we need to, as a part of our introduction to the basics of the Old Testament, to understand what covenants actually exist in the Bible. Okay? Now, this is a weighty topic and it could take up an entire course.

And so, my job here is to just, in some sense, excite you about the possibility of studying more about the covenants. And we cover those more in the 10-hour and the 20-hour Old Testament course with biblical training. So, I could point you there.

So, it means I'm not leaving you without resources to understand this more. I'm just going to kind of excite you about it. Let me just put it this way for you.

This is one of many ways to understand the covenants of the Old Testament. Okay? One of many ways. And there are basically two.

Just think of it this way. There are basically two covenants in the Old Testament. The covenant of works, right? Between God and Adam.

And Adam is the representative of all humanity. And then there's the covenant of grace, right? Between God and the second Adam. And that second Adam is the representative of all humanity.

Okay? Covenant of works and covenant of grace. The covenant of works between God and Adam. And Adam broke that covenant, right? And all of humanity was plunged into sin.

And then God, in Genesis chapter 3, initiates what's called the covenant of grace with the second Adam in Genesis 3.15, where he promises that he will have the offspring of the seed of the woman one day crush the head of the serpent and therefore eliminate sin and death and all of the curse that comes with covenant breaking. We call that the covenant of grace. We call it the covenant of grace because no longer do we have to obey the terms of the covenant, but someone has to obey those terms on our behalf.

Does that make sense? Both covenants have work principles. Adam failed to achieve work in the first covenant, but the second Adam, who will be Jesus according to Romans 5, will be successful in his obedience and he will achieve obedience for us. Okay? Now covenant of works, covenant of grace.

Now the covenant of grace, as you can see here on my chart, has a number of different things that follow it. That is, there's one covenant of grace that allows God's people to relate to him in a blessed state for eternity by way of the forgiveness of sins and we get the righteousness of the mediator Jesus and we live forever in blessedness in the new heavens and new earth. But in order to achieve or to fulfill the covenant of grace, God initiates a series of administrations of that covenant to bring it to fulfillment.

This is called like progressive revelation or progressive covenant revelation. That is, how does God in history over time achieve his promise in Genesis 3 15 to crush the head of the serpent for us? And he does it with a series of covenants that we name according to the mediator of that covenant. So the first one is Noah.

You can see on my chart here, there's Noah 1 and Noah 2. And in Noah 1, God covenants with Noah to preserve his family through the flood if Noah will build an ark by faith and enter into that ark. And Noah obeys and he saves his family in so doing. At the end of the flood judgment episode, God enters into another covenant with Noah, his children, all of humanity over all of time, every animal, even the globe, the world, the water.

And he promises never ever to destroy the world by flood. He gives us the rainbow as the covenant sign. And so this is called the common grace covenant.

That is, the righteous and the wicked will live together, the sheep and the goats, the weed and the tares until the end. And God will never ever wipe out everyone again until the eschatological judgment in the book of Revelation where we have the new heavens and new earth. Okay.

So we're tracing the seed through Noah because this, think about this way. If God promises an offspring to come and crush the serpent's head and he wipes out all of humanity, then there's no more seed to crush the serpent's head. So he preserves one family of all the families of the earth to do it.

And that's Noah. And so all of humanity comes through that line. And so we're tracing the seed of Genesis three through Noah and then into Abraham and Abraham is identified as the family or the head of the family that will produce the Messianic seed.

And God promises Abraham, as you can see, numerous descendants, land, and that his numerous descendants or that even that one seed will be a blessing to all nations, a blessing to all nations. All right. That covenant with Abraham, my friends, is fulfilled in two stages.

In two stages, it's fulfilled first in the Mosaic covenant economy. And then secondly, in the Jesus or new covenant economy. All right.

And you'll see in our next lecture, how the old and the new testaments are the old and the new covenants map on to the Abrahamic covenant as being stage one and stage two in fulfillment. For some reason, in God's wisdom, he likes to always do things in two parts. There's the first creation, the second creation.

There's Moses, then Joshua. There's Elijah, then Elisha. There's something about there's David and then Solomon.

There's something about God who likes to kick something off one way and consummate it or fulfill it another way. There's always two steps. And we're going to see that even in the canon's design, the Bible's design.

Between those two covenants, the Mosaic and the new covenants that kind of fulfill the Abrahamic promise to create a nation that is obedient to God and a priest to all the other nations, priesthood to all the other nations, there's the Davidic covenant that identifies who will be the Messianic king that accomplishes the task of Genesis 315. All right, so you've got the kind of the Mosaic covenant and the new covenant. And right in the middle there, you've got this Davidic covenant in 2 Samuel 7 that identifies that identifies the line of the Messianic king.

So it's going to come through Noah, then through Abraham, then through Abraham is going to come through the line of Judah, one of the sons, one of the grandsons, great grandsons of Abraham. And then through the tribe of Judah is going to be David. And through David, that's going to be Jesus in the New Testament.

So when you get into the New Testament and you get into the book of Matthew, the very first thing you encounter is a genealogy, right? And that genealogy is looking for the Genesis 315 seed. And that Genesis 315 seed is identified as Jesus. So he is the seed of Genesis 315, the offspring of Genesis 315.

He's the offspring of Noah. He's the offspring of Abraham. He's the offspring of David, and he's the culmination of the Messianic seed.

So in this lecture, we've been able to handle basically three things I summarized for you quickly, all of the major players once again in the Bible. Then we talked about the history of Israel that maps onto where those individuals work in that economy. Sometimes we call this redemptive history, redemptive history.

I prefer the designation covenant history, but it's less commonly used. So we can just say for now, redemptive history. And it's redemptive because it's covenantal, right? And so then we wanted to understand what are the covenants that we have.

And there are two, the covenant of works with the first Adam and the covenant of grace with the second Adam. And that covenant of grace unfolds over time through Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and then Jesus in the New Covenant.