Old Testament Origins and the Question of God seeks to explore what happens to Old Testament studies if we take God and his action in the world seriously.
As I often tell people, the OT occupies ¾ of the Bible. It is foundational in all sorts of ways and if we seek to open the Bible afresh today for our cultures then we urgently need to find ways of unmuting the OT.
For years I thought that we needed something like N. T. Wright’s Christian Origins and the Question of God series in OT studies. Eventually I plucked up courage to submit a proposal and it moved quickly to the contract stage with SPCK. Wonderfully, Baker Academic then came on board as the American co-publisher. At the outset we agreed on four volumes of more or less the same size!
The first of four volumes has already been published as The Old Testament and God (2022), in which all the foundational aspects of the project are explored. The long section on the worldviews of ANE nations required exceptionally heavy lifting and was only possible because of my time as a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity International University as part of their Templeton-funded creation project. TEDS has fine Semitics scholars and again and again they helped point me to the best, contemporary sources.
The second volume is entitled Moses and the Victory of God. My wager is that as YHWH comes back into focus so too does Moses. I am enjoying working away on the person of Moses and plunging into the challenging area of OT law. My hope is to submit this volume by the end of 2025.
A related project: A. J. Culp and I are working on The Pentateuch: A Theological Introduction for IVP Academic, USA. This is a companion volume to my and Ryan O’Dowd’s Old Testament Wisdom: A Theological Introduction and my and Heath Thomas’s The Minor Prophets: A Theological Introduction, all with IVP Academic.
