Exploring the Old Testament Vol. 1

Exploring the Old Testament, Volume 1: A Guide to the Pentateuch

The Pentateuch, or Torah, is the charter document of Israel's covenant faith, the foundation of Scripture and the key to understanding the biblical story. The themes that are first struck in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy resonate throughout the Bible. To understand the message of the Pentateuch is essential to interpreting what follows. No serious student of the Bible can shortcut a mastery of these "five books of Moses." Yet many introductions to the Pentateuch are uninviting and tend to obscure the vast mural of the Pentateuch with the scaffolding of scholarship.

Gordon Wenham has devoted much of his scholarly career to understanding the Pentateuch, and in this volume he reliably guides students through the corridors of the text, pointing out its features and explaining its difficulties. The result is a clear overview of the Pentateuch as we have it. But Wenham also helps us comprehend the historical and textual questions modern scholarship has posed and the answers it has proposed. And where historical evidence supports or illumines the text, this too is skillfully blended into the discussion.

Wenhams's textbook is up to date, balanced, clearly organized and reliable. And it brims with helpful classroom features: discussion ideas and questions, suggestions for research and debate, essay topic lists and recommended further reading. Here is a critically informed, textually sensitive and theologically illuminating introduction to the Pentateuch. It offers the instruction of a premier evangelical Pentateuchal scholar in the interactive and reader-friendly format that is the hallmark of the Exploring the Bible Series.