Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

Old Testament Ethics for the People of God. By Christopher J. H. Wright. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2004, 520 pp., $30.00.

This volume is a major revision of Christopher Wright's 1983 important publication, An Eye for an Eye: The Place of Old Testament Ethics Today (IVP; in the UK, Living as the People of God: The Relevance of Old Testament Ethics). This volume contains the original preface, as well as a new one for this edition.

At the time of the appearance of An Eye for an Eye there had been a long-time dearth of significant research in the field of OT ethics. The situation has changed considerably, however, in the last couple of decades. The last few years especially have witnessed the appearance of a number of thoughtful works, such as Gordon Wenham's Story as Torah (T & T Clark, 2000), Cyril Rodd's Glimpses of a Strange Land (T & T Clark, 2001), Robin Perry's Old Testament Story and Christian Ethics (Paternoster, 2004), and the volume edited by William Brown, Character and Scripture (Eerdmans, 2002). Other works are on the horizon, such as M. Daniel Carroll R. and Jacqueline Lapsley (eds.), Character Ethics and Biblical Interpretation: Appropriating the Old Testament for Moral Life (Westminster John Knox, 2006). Each of these deals with the multiple complex issues related to OT ethics in a sophisticated fashion, often utilizing other disciplines to illumine (or sometimes to question) the biblical text and probe it for insights for life.

Old Testament Ethics for the People of God enhances An Eye for an Eye in several ways. Some discussions are expanded and updated, more footnotes are included, and each chapter closes with a helpful bibliography for further reading. Wright has attached an entirely new section (Part 3, chaps. 12-14) that is heavily based on another publication, Walking in the Ways of the Lord (IVP, 1995). He also includes an appendix that engages the perennially difficult problem of the conquest narratives and the command to eliminate the Canaanites. This work concludes with an extensive bibliography, which amalgamates the earlier bibliographies, and with indices of Scripture references, authors, and subjects.

Wright understands that there are important distinctions to be made in the formulation of OT ethics. On the one hand, the actual behavior and beliefs of the general populace of ancient Israel should not be confused with what the biblical writers and other like-minded Israelites presented as the way of the Lord. On the other hand, that material must be properly situated within the fuller theological and ethical perspective of the canon. Each of these three areas requires attention. The first reveals the moral habits of Israelite society; the second is grounded in the person, word, and deeds of Israel's God and points to the proper motivations and purposes of Israel's moral life; the third is the ultimate basis for working out how to appropriate the OT for modern life.

To accomplish this last task Wright proposes a paradigm approach. He builds his study on a three-pronged matrix of God (the theological angle), Israel (the social angle), and the land (the economic angle). The laws and organization of the society that was biblical Israel, he argues, were designed to reflect enduring divine moral principles within that specific historical context. This chosen community was to be a model-a paradigm-for the surrounding nations of how God's demands for living might be incarnated in society and economic and political structures. Israel's election, in other words, was to an ethical agenda for the world. Passages such as Gen 12:1-3, Exod 19:4-6, and Deut 4:5-8 are keys for establishing this conviction. But that paradigm is not confined to the distant past; its implications continue to speak across the centuries. This scheme, accordingly, is developed with further overlapping triangles. At its broadest application (God-humanity-the earth), Wright's foundational triangle is extrapolated to offer lessons to all societies. At the same time, ancient Israel stands in a typological relationship to the Church (God-the Church-Aoinoma), and the OT's moral directives are to be fleshed out within Christian communities around the world. Finally, the model points to an eschatological future, when redemption will be complete and those ideals fully realized (God-redeemed humanity-the new creation).

Wright's method focuses particularly on the social dimensions of the OT material. Wright does devote one chapter (chap. 11) to the individual, but he rightly emphasizes that personal ethics are inseparable from and must be defined vis-à-vis the communal. He also emphasizes that his book is not concerned with resolving the ethical problems of the OT; instead, his concern is to develop a comprehensive framework for processing how to appreciate and take on its moral vision. In Old Testament Ethics for the People of God Wright accomplishes this goal in commendable fashion. He points the way beyond haphazard searches for ethical principles to deal with modern quandaries or the common tendency to reduce OT ethics to questions about the Law. Wright also deals extensively with topics of vital importance that sometimes are not handled adequately by evangelicals, such as ecology and the poor.