Note: The following is my attempt to organize Biblical history, mostly for my own edification. If you're reading this, it's important to understand something. I take the Bible to be infallible and inerrant. That does not mean that I am a Biblical literalist in the same way that some people use the Bible to insist the earth sits on literal pillars or that it is flat. I do my best to employ a grammatical-historical hermeneutic. In short, I take the Bible to mean what the writers of the Bible intended for their readers to take it to mean. If it's written as history, then that's how I take it. If it's poetry, then there's going to be metaphor.
The thing about most people's knowledge of the Bible is that it comes in the form of disconnected stories or the perception that it's simply a list of rules. There are certainly lists of rules and there are absolutely stories, but it all fits together into one big, all encompassing tale with an overarching plot. Christians tend to call these plot points "Creation, Fall, Redemption" and the Bible concludes by pointing to a future "Restoration (or Consummation)."
Within the plot points "Creation, Fall, Redemption," God acts through a series of covenants. These covenants (agreements between God and man) are critical to understanding the Bible and not understanding the covenants is a root cause of all the inane questions Christians get about "why are you against gay marriage but okay with eating bacon wrapped shrimp while wearing polyester blended fabrics?"
A critical note about how the Bible is structured: it is NOT (for huge portions of it) put together chronologically. Books are often grouped together more by type of book (e.g. Isaiah and Jeremiah go together because they are prophetic, Esther and Job are next to each other because they are narratives) than they go chronologically (e.g. Esther and Job were probably 1000s of years apart).
Most people are familiar with the basic two part subdivisions of the Bible, the Old and New Testament (these are in reference to two major covenants). Some people refer to the OT as the Jewish scriptures or Hebrew Bible which is true to an extent. There have been efforts by some in the Christian tradition who have discounted the need to study the OT. They view it as inferior to the NT and irrelevant to Christians. I'm going to argue that you can't fully understand the significance of Jesus and the NT without the OT.
Jews call their scriptures the Tanakh (they also have the Talmud, which is a collection of rabbinical commentary on the Tanakh). They see it as divided into three sections: the Torah (instruction), the Nevi'im (prophets), and the Ketuvim (writings). I think Western people are most familiar with the word Torah. Christians call this the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy). It's the first five books of the OT, and it sets the stage for understanding the whole of scripture.
We all know how Genesis starts. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth..." Genesis lays out the plot. God created everything (Genesis chapters 1 and 2). And it was good. He put Adam and Eve in a garden and communed with them unobstructed. This is where the first covenant was established: the Adamic Covenant (some people divide this into an Edenic Covenant [prior to the Fall] and the post-Fall Adamic [Covenant]). God created man. He gave them dominion over creation and told them to fill the earth and subdue it. But they could not eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
But once again, we all know what happened. The serpent (understood to be Satan) came along and tempted Eve. He asked the first question in the Bible, "Did God really say?" And Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit. We're only into chapter 3 of the first book of the Bible, and we're already to the Fall. This means that the rest of the Bible is going to be about Redemption.
The first act of redemption is act of mercy on God's part. The curse for eating of the forbidden fruit was supposed to be instant death, but God stayed His hand. But there were still consequences for breaking the initial covenant. Work was cursed. Marriage was cursed. The whole of creation now cursed. Death came into the world. But even in the first death, God used it for good. In the first sacrifice, God took the skins from animals to make clothing to cover Adam and Eve in their shame and nakedness and to protect them as they left the shelter of the Garden.
And as Adam and Eve were ushered out of the Garden, another promise was made. God promised in his curse to the serpent that the seed of the woman would crush the serpent's head, even as the serpent would bruise his heel. This somewhat enigmatic line is the "proto-evangel." The first gospel. As with subsequent prophecies to come, it has a twofold meaning. There's a general truth here. Snakes and people don't usually get along. They bite us, and we crush them. But the deeper promise is that there will be a specific descendant of Eve who will come along and deal the death blow to Satan.
What happens at the Fall is critical to understanding the rest of the Bible. Adam acted as a representative for all creation. This is "Federal Headship." This becomes a theme repeated throughout the Bible. As the head goes, so goes the body. As the king goes, so goes the nation. This idea seems foreign to our highly individualistic western cultures, but once you understand it, you see it everywhere in the Bible.
After the Fall, Genesis continues with what is now the long slow story of redemption. Eve starts having kids. Cain kills Abel. The population grows. People fall farther away from God. Things get bad. They get bad enough that God intervenes with a hard reset. This is the story of Noah. Obviously this is one of the most well known stories in the Bible. Every Sunday school child has heard it, although I can't imagine most teachers focus on the death and destruction of 99% of all living creatures. If you're calculating time as a hard Biblical literalist, there was close to 2000 years between Adam and Eve and Noah. It may have been longer. But regardless, this is the first big intervention since the Garden, and it results in the Noahic Covenant.
The Noahic Covenant echoes the Adamic Covenant. Noah and his sons are told to be fruitful and multiply. God isn't done with humanity. He still has a plan for them and wants them to start afresh.
From Noah, we wait another 400 years before Abram (Abraham) comes along. In the meantime, men had gathered and attempted to build a tower to Heaven (the Tower of Babel), and God had confused their languages. This results in the great dispersion of peoples away from what we now call the Middle East. One of the resulting tribes had settled in Ur which was believed to be somewhere in modern day southern Iraq. This is where Abram was when God called him.
God's speaking directly to Abram is the first recorded incident of direct communication from God since Noah. There isn't any record of God talking with anyone between Cain and Noah. So for two millennia, God has generally left people alone and observed their wickedness.
The calling of Abram can be seen as the first active step God takes toward bringing about the "proto-evangel" he promised to Eve. It is in the Abrahamic Covenant that God makes a promise to a single person to establish him as the father of a specific nation through which blessing will come to the whole world.
And I've been going on too long, so this will have to resume in Part 2 "The Second Part"
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