The prophetic books do not come last so as to lead into the New Testament, but follow the Torah (the books of Moses) as commentary on it. There is little emphasis on “salvation,” if that is understood in otherworldly terms as “heaven,” and much more stress on the life of God’s people under the covenant. There is no grand narrative in the Hebrew Bible, certainly not one that would culminate in the coming of Jesus, but more a collection of individual stories, sayings and teachings that together constitute a tissue of instructions on how to live a good life as a Jew. Much more central is God’s call of Abraham to be the father of a great nation, and a blessing to the whole world through his obedient following of God’s way. The story of Adam and Eve is a minor theme. As the Jewish scholar Moshe Goshen-Gottstein put it, where Christians see the Bible as a story about God, humanity and salvation, Jews read it as being about God, people and land. What a shock when Christians encounter a Jewish mode of reading these same books. It is the “natural” way of understanding the Bible. To anyone who has grown up in a Christian-dominated culture this way of reading the Old Testament seems simply obvious.

It tells of the loss of innocence in the Garden of Eden, a consequent history of human disobedience throughout the stories related in the narrative books, and a promise of coming redemption and salvation in the books of the prophets, leading naturally into the New Testament, where we learn how God’s planned rescue of the human race came to effect in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Old Testament story is about a disaster and a planned rescue mission, Paradise lost and Paradise regained. Christians think that the Old Testament tells a story, which goes on to find its completion in the New Testament.

The new testament and its world