OT: the Law

Genesis 1-11 is prehistory. It deals with the beginnings of the human race and explains, in a series of powerful stories, why we are as we are. God created a good world, but it was spoiled by sin, and the whole of human society is hopelessly corrupt as a result. As a consequence, God judges the world three times: He ejects Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, destroys Noah’s generation with a flood, and punishes the builders of the Tower of Babel by confusing their language.

The recorded history of God's people begins in chapter 12 of Genesis. God chose Abraham and called him to leave everything safe and familiar (home, family, culture, religion) and put himself completely in God’s hands, in return for the promise of a new homeland (which he himself would never own) and a son of his own (his wife being infertile). (Genesis 12:1-7) Abraham committed himself to God, purely on the basis of God’s promise, and thus laid the foundation not only of his own relationship with God, but also everyone else’s. (Galatians 3:6-9)
Abraham later had a son, Isaac, who became the father of Jacob. These three are sometimes referred to as ‘the patriarchs’. Jacob had twelve sons, whose descendants became the nation of Israel. (This is why the Bible talks about the 12 tribes of Israel – founded by Jacob’s 12 sons.) Jacob and his family were forced to relocate to Egypt because of a famine, and Genesis ends with them settled in Egypt.

Exodus 1 tells us that the Israelites spent about 400 years in Egypt, eventually becoming slaves to the Egyptians. Then God chose Moses to rescue them from Egypt and lead them to the `Promised Land'. At Mount Sinai God made a covenant (that’s a kind of solemn legal agreement) with them: He had rescued them from Egypt, so they now belonged to Him and had to live differently from the rest of the world. (Exodus19:3-8) The people agreed to this and so God gave them His law (beginning with the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20), which they agreed to keep. However, they broke it almost straight away (Exodus 32:7-9). The rest of Exodus contains the instructions for building God’s first sanctuary, the Tabernacle. This was a portable tent (for obvious reasons), but its layout and furnishings were highly significant, as the writer to the Hebrews makes clear (Hebrews 8:1-5)

Leviticus deals with how sinful people can relate to a holy God: the rules for offering sacrifices and the principles of personal holiness (Leviticus 20:26, e.g. Leviticus 19:18).
Numbers contains the rest of the Law, interspersed with some of the events that took place in the wilderness. The Israelites reached the border of Canaan in Numbers 13, but they refused to enter the land, so God punished them, making them wait in the Sinai peninsula for a whole generation (Numbers 14:26-34). Then He led them up the eastern side of the Dead Sea, to approach Canaan from the east side of the River Jordan.

Deuteronomy is Moses’ final address to the Israelites before his death on the east bank of the Jordan. It contains a summary of the Law (so the Ten Commandments crop up again, in chapter 5), with some additional explanations and encouragements. And because it was addressed to the new generation (the children of those who had left Egypt), it also contains a number of exhortations to personal commitment: Deuteronomy 6:4,5