The year 587 BC was a
turning point for the peoples who wrote the bible. The Babylonia Empire invaded
their land and Jerusalem fell. Worse, they were taken as captives to Babylonia
and treated as slaves.
Until this
point the 12 tribes of Israel had had a powerful sense of identity thanks to
their oral and written traditions in which they had seen themselves as God’s
people. Now, however, they had all ended up as slaves, not as the chosen race. It
is easy to imagine that dismay and disbelief set in through this fall from
grace. In order to retain their own identity in the midst of slavery they had
to reaffirm it. The exiles did this by setting down their beliefs in a
book: the Bible.
The core
belief of the Israelites was that they had a special relationship with God. It is this
link which structures the book they wrote to preserve their identity. The main
theme of the book then, became the covenants, or testaments, between themselves
and their God. This is what we know as the Old Testament and its purpose
was to revise their own history and reaffirm Israel as the people of God.
The first
five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, were probably written down during the Babylonian exile; others were added after Cyrus, the
Persian, released the Israelites from their Babylonian exile in 538 BC.
Recognising
this covenantal structure of the Bible allows us to divide the whole book into
seven different Covenants: The Adamic covenant; Noah’s covenant; the covenant
with Abraham; the covenant with Moses; David’s covenant; the Restoration
covenant and finally, in the New Testament, that of Christ.
(View the outline of the 7 Covenants on a one-page mind map.) to be continued...
