In the previous post, I spoke about reading the Scriptures artistically. That is to say, it has been shaped by artists as an interconnected narrative. Your first skill to read Scripture artistically is learning how to pay attention to how Scripture is organized, not just individual passages. If we can comprehend the big picture, we can better understand where we are going when we get down to the nitty gritty. Again and again, the writers of Scripture, and Jesus, seem to see patterns across God’s history of redemption. It’s that overview of patterns that we’re looking at today.
Most Christians I know think of the OT as a kind of compendium of prooftexts about Jesus. While there certainly are specific predictions about Jesus in the OT, that’s not mainly the way Jesus thought about the OT. He saw himself not in isolated verses, but in the larger shape of how all the stories fit together. To see how, we need to learn how the Hebrew Bible is structured, because it gives us a roadmap or table of contents that helps us understand how Jesus navigated them. Part of why I need to do this is that the Jewish ordering of the Hebrew Scriptures is different from how Protestants organize the Hebrew Scriptures. For that reason, we can easily lose touch with how Jesus thought about these things.
- “Therefore this generation will be held responsible for the blood of all the prophets that has been shed since the beginning of the world, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who was killed between the altar and the sanctuary.” (Luke 11:50-51; cf. Matthew 23:35)
- Jesus does not prooftext one or two verses about getting rejected. Instead, he refers to the larger shape of Israel’s history. He mentions Abel and Zechariah because in the book of Chronicles, they are the first and last martyred prophets. In the Jewish ordering of the Scriptures, Chronicles comes last as a kind of capstone book which retells the entire story of Israel. So Jesus is basically saying, “From first to last, you have been rejecting the prophets. If you knew your own story, you would be trained to see me. But unfortunately, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
- “He said to them, ‘This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.’” (Luke 24:44)
- Jesus explicitly mentions the Jewish, three-part shape of the Scriptures and hands it to his disciples as a kind of key that unlocks the string theory for how everything can be a story about him. Evidently, the design of it gives insight into the how Jesus anticipated that his story would unfold. He even says that he told his disciples about this way of reading Scripture beforehand.
- “Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. He told them, ‘This is what is written: The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.’” (Luke 24:45-47)
- If you asked me five years ago to summarize the OT, I would likely have given you a series of events (e.g., creation, exodus, kingdom, exile), which lacks key ingredients of Jesus’s summary. So my burning question is: How did Jesus come to the summary that he did? The answer is, the way that the three-part shape of the Hebrew Scriptures relate to each other unlocks the narrative pattern Jesus sees. The way the OT is organized is the prophetic voice telling us how to understand the plotline. We’re going to look at that design in the charts below.
If you were writing a book, and all the text just ran together punctuation, would it be hard to read? What do authors do to help us understand where we are going and what the point is? Table of index? Preface? Chapters? Headings? Conclusions? The editorial hand at the seams of the three-part shape is serving as “preface and conclusion” types of organization. It’s not intuitive for many modern readers to see this organization, because the Protestant Bible organizes the books differently from the ancient Jewish ordering. But if we put them into that ancient ordering, the openings and closings of the main sections are where we see the editorial hand most clearly. If you only had fifteen minutes to read a dense book before an exam, where would you focus your energy: random paragraphs in the middle, or opening and closing paragraphs? Obviously, opening and closing materials. That’s the organizing principle. It’s the same with the Hebrew Scriptures. Let’s look at a few glowing examples so we can appreciate the richness of what Jesus is inviting us into.
Tanakh (TaNaK) Scroll Order
| Torah (תּוֹרָה – “Instruction”/“Law”) Pentateuch: Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers Deuteronomy | Nevi’im (נְבִיאִים – “Prophets”) a) Former Prophets Joshua Judges Samuel (1 & 2 Samuel counted together) Kings (1 & 2 Kings counted together) b) Latter Prophets Isaiah Jeremiah Ezekiel The Twelve (counted as one book): Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi | Ketuvim (כְּתוּבִים – “Writings”) Psalms Proverbs Job Song of Songs Ruth Lamentations Ecclesiastes Esther Daniel Ezra-Nehemiah (Ezra and Nehemiah combined as one book) Chronicles (1 & 2 Chronicles counted together) |
Tanakh Organizational Highlights
| Torah (Instruction/Law) [Genesis 1-12] Opens with a story of being exiled from God’s presence, resulting in humanity’s dwelling in Babel (Babylon). God launches a plan to bring humanity back to himself through the family of Abraham, Israel. [Deuteronomy 34] Concludes with Moses saying that when he is gone, Israel’s disobedience will result in exile among the nations (Babylon) away from God’s tabernacle presence. | Nevi’im (Prophets) [Joshua 1-9] Opens with Joshua who succeeds because he is like Moses, until he has disappointing failures. The prophetic narratives end [2 Kings 24] with Israel in exile (Babylon). [Malachi 4] Closes with the prophets saying that even after their return from exile (Babylon), exile is not fully over. Malachi anticipates a Moses-like figure called Elijah who will purify Israel in preparation for exile’s true end. | Ketuvim (Writings) [Psalms 1-2] Opens with king David: a person who listens to God’s voice, and God’s son who rules the nations by God’s wisdom. [2 Chronicles 36] Closes with a retelling of Israel’s entire story, ending with an invitation out of exile (Babylon) into the restored Jerusalem. Then an unnamed figure is highlighted to lead the way. |
Let’s look briefly at the six corners of the scrolls, paying attention to how the corners illuminate each other. The first corner of the scrolls, the opening act (Genesis 1-12), anticipates the trajectory of the entire story—humanity exiled from God’s presence in the garden, leading to all of humanity living in Babel (which is a word play on Babylon). God’s solution to this exile is to call out a man named Abraham who will found a nation who will bless all nations, including Babylon. In the second corner of the scrolls, we hope that Israel will fulfill its calling to bless all nations, but Moses says Israel’s story will follow the pattern of the human story—exiled from God’s presence in Babylon. If God is going to solve the problem of humanity’s exile, he will have to solve the problem of Israel’s exile. Then the voices that shaped the final ordering of the stories use Moses as a measuring stick, saying no one has ever come along like Moses (Deuteronomy 34). It makes us watch all the following figures, anticipating someone like Moses who can lead Israel so that it can fulfill its calling to bless all nations.
In the third corner, as we look for someone like Moses, we see Joshua. At first, he is very much like Moses and succeeds because he meditates on God’s word. Eventually, though, he fails to live up to Moses’s standard (Joshua 1-9). Eventually, Israel ends up in exile in Babylon, like the garden story foreshadowed and like Moses anticipated. The fourth corner of the scrolls concern Israel after returning from exile, speaking honestly to the truth that though they are in Jerusalem again, exile is not fully over. They still experience foreign oppression under Rome, and the sin that brought them into exile still runs deep in their hearts. To remedy this ongoing exile, the prophets speak of a Moses-like figure called Elijah who will purify Israel and relaunch their story (Malachi 4). Remember the logic of the larger story: God must fix Israel’s exile in order to fix humanity’s exile.
In the fifth corner of the scrolls, we encounter another major figure standing in Moses’s shadow, king David. Psalms 1-2 function like a double-door entry into the main themes of all the psalms (and in a certain sense, final collection of scrolls). Psalm 1 presents an ideal person who always listens to God’s voice. It nods its head to both the Moses and Joshua scrolls: remembering how humanity had the chance to prosper beside a river and a tree of life if they had but listened to God’s voice, and remembering how Joshua and Israel succeeded precisely when they listened to God’s voice. Then in Psalm 2, this ideal person who listens to God’s voice is connected with David, or one of his sons, whom God adopts as his own son to rule the nations. There is a tension in the OT between how a Davidic king ruling the nations connects with God’s purpose to bless the nations (a tension that the NT intentionally plays with). In the sixth corner of the scrolls, after king David is presented at his best, an unnamed figure is called to go up to restore Jerusalem (2 Chronicles 36). Who is this Moses-Joshua-David figure who will restore Israel and bring blessing to the nations?
To summarize: in the finished collection of scrolls, Moses serves as a template: he casts a shadow over everything that follows. Joshua, Elijah, David: they all fit within the shadow of Moses. In the Torah (Instruction), he’s the ideal leader—so ideal in fact, we’re left watching for another figure just like him. The Prophets (Nevi’im) anticipate a leader called Elijah who will, like Moses, purify Israel and (re)launch their story. The Writings (Ketuvim) recall the Moses and Joshua stories by highlighting a ruler like David, setting us up for the moment when king of Persia pronounces blessing on an unnamed figure who is worthy to go up to lead the new Jerusalem. Taken together, the three sections of the Tanakh show God keen on solving humanity’s exile problem by first solving Israel’s exile problem through a leader like Moses.
When you step back and pay attention to the voices that have shaped the ordering of the stories so that they illuminate each other, it becomes less surprising that Jesus saw himself as carrying the Moses story forward to completion. And if you remember how exile in this story is often equated with death, it’s even less surprising that Jesus finds a story about an anointed ruler passing through death and coming out the other side so that a message of repentance and forgiveness can be preached to the whole world beginning at Jerusalem. Once you see the framing—the headings and chapter titles, if you will—it’s hard to un-see. Jesus is reading the Scriptures the way they were shaped to be read, and inviting us to do the same. As an artists, I find the decisions to organize the collection of scrolls deeply artistic.