Select Parameters of Theology for the Old Testament

The Old Testament comprises a lot of writing compiled over more than a thousand years. Old Testament theology for some seems generally to mean developing a way to address, approach, understand or interpret the Old Testament-as if a particular method was correct rather than just reading the books. The application of a structured hermeneutic to the Old Testament obviously poses certain risks of prejudgment and error. In some respects reading and learning the Old testament directly and letting it speak to-oneself permits the Bible as inspired literature to inspire for-itself directly informing one's own spirit with the living word of God.

Certainly accurate translations of the Old Testament are a concern in-themselves. Contemporaries may emasculate the truthful meaning and use terms of political correctness perhaps to render political offensive passages dead. One might anticipate evolution of Sodom and Gomorrah into cities destroyed simply to end a pitiful slave-condition of homosexuals or the concentration of wealth rather than sexual immorality of homosexuality and pervasive amoeba-like sharing of bodily fluids with everyone. Even so one may set aside the translation concern and consider that one has a decent Bible to move to consider that some insight from trusted, learned scholarship can help to inform one of the nature and circumstances of the composition and meaning of scripture. That might be called theology even though it includes history, philosophy, linguistic, archaeology, cosmology, sociology and numerous other fields of research. One can use theology yet with a certain reserve trusting foremost in scripture in-itself.

It is possible that one may take an overly-academic approach to Old testament writing and perhaps subjectively ossify the content for-oneself with academic technique. While one may enjoy abridging Toynbee or memorizing the Constitution and even deconstruct Shakespeare a little comparing him to Marlowe and his method to play-packaging construction with blank verse workshop apprentices and hired ghost-scriveners under his direction, that would tend to be an over-academicized demythologizing theoretical approach to the Bard of London and Stratford honored with the title though he wasn't Irish. More like some sort of German-ancestry pretender to a stone throne of Celtic muse.

One must be cautious about assuming that an abstract reduction and summary of Biblical text academically brings out a more full or better understanding of the content of the O.T. Each word and each book is an integral part of the whole. I

Consider the numbers; each has a place in a field even of two dimensions. If one makes an abstract of the set of natural positive whole numbers it may comprise a learning tool, yet that tool cannot in any way substitute for the content. While there are innumerable positive whole numbers that one does not know and has never heard of, select abstract concepts allow one to understand the nature of those unknown numbers, and of course one has trust that they really exist though it may be impossible to prove that abstract positive whole numbers really are infinite and do not actually end someplace for some reason-even it is simply at the point of being the highest number that was actually ever reached, of numbers exist only in fact and never actually in theory-that is if numbers are of existential character rather than of a Platonic realistic nature.