3 - Leading themes of the Bible

Summary

In this chapter, ten biblical themes or clusters of ideas are presented. They are central themes, and therefore a convenient entry into the Bible's world of thought; they have all been shown to have a background in the general culture of the ancient Near East and they all reflect the process of continual reinterpretation from one book of the Bible to another, which has been one of the central concerns of this book. Given our uncertainties about when and how parts of the Bible came to be written, and given the Bible's complex internal cross-references and allusions, any such presentation will be somewhat arbitrary, and disputable on many points. Only a few such points will be discussed here, and then only when some widely held opinion seems to obscure the essential continuity of the biblical tradition. The section on promise, threat and fulfilment, pp. 50–5, includes an attempt to clarify a common confusion between the apocalyptic tradition, which may have influenced Jesus (and which certainly influenced the biblical tradition about him), and the question of his outlook, or consciousness. A comparison of Spirits on pp. 74–9 a sort of appendix to this chapter, is an attempt to compare at some length a text from the Hebrew Bible with one on a similar theme from the New Testament, as an example of both continuity and transformation in the biblical tradition.