In Old Testament Ethics for the People of God Christopher Wright has thoroughly revised his 1983 Living as the People of God, adding material from his 1995 Walking in the Ways of the Lord. The revised edition is thus a compilation of his thoughts on the subject of Old Testament ethics over the last twenty-five years. Readers familiar with his work will recognise his hermeneutical framework of the God-Israel-Land triangle that in Part 1 is developed into the theological, social and economic angles. After these introductory chapters, he moves on in Part 2 to discuss various ethical themes in Old Testament thought, including ecology, economics, poverty, land, politics, legal systems, culture, family and individual morality. He concludes in Part 3 with three chapters on the study of Old Testament ethics, giving surveys of historical approaches and contemporary scholarship and an essay on hermeneutics and authority in Old Testament ethics.

Wright challenges Western ethical thinking on a number of different points. First, he intentionally emphasises the social aspect of ethics as opposed to the individual aspect. The Old Testament starts with a vision of how a society should be, ‘a holy people’, and only then instructs individuals on how they should behave so as to live into a godly society. Thus, Wright devotes seven of his eight chapters in Part 2 to social issues. One unfortunate result of this emphasis is that the wisdom literature appears to get short shrift compared with the Law. Second, he pays less attention to ‘family ethics’ (emphasised to such a great extent in the United States) than to larger social issues of land, economics and politics. It is not that the individual and the family are not significant in Wright's understanding of Old Testament ethics. The extended family of the Old Testament is highly significant and in fact occupies a central place in Israel's life. Rather, Wright's point is that one must never lose sight of how the family and the individual fit into the larger social, economic, political and theological system. Coming from a British evangelical perspective, this book will pose an interesting, and I think needed, challenge to American evangelicals.

Old Testament Ethics for the People of God ought to be very useful as a textbook on the subject at both universities and seminaries, in both Old Testament and ethics courses. One of its strengths is the application of different hermeneutical models. In addition to his God-Israel-Land framework, Wright applies paradigmatic, eschatological and typological methods of interpretation. He brings these two frameworks together in the chapter ‘The Land and Christian Ethics’ and summarises them with a clear diagram on p. 196. He also interweaves the themes of creation, fall and redemption throughout the work. The value of this approach is that students can engage Wright's hermeneutical models, discussing their merits and limitations as well as the possibility of applying them to areas of Old Testament theology in addition to ethics. Moreover, the individual chapters in Part 2 can launch discussions and debates and prompt questions for essays and further research. To this end Wright has helpfully included a ‘Further Reading’ bibliography at the end of each chapter. Finally, students interested in the wider debates about the usefulness of the Old Testament in ethical deliberation will find his bibliographic essay on contemporary scholarship a valuable tool.

One concern involves the placement of ‘Hermeneutics and Authority in Old Testament Ethics’ as the last chapter of the book. This chapter raises the methodological problems of ‘getting there from here’ and the ideological problems of the return trip. Wright asks the difficult questions about balancing the great diversity of Old Testament voices with the ‘massive ethical phenomenon’ of the canon itself (p. 445) and the extent to which a scholar's construction of Old Testament ethics is conditioned by his or her personal faith and attitude towards the Old Testament as Jewish or Christian scripture. Then, using Oliver O'Donovan's Resurrection and Moral Order, he articulates an understanding of authority as ‘the predicate of reality, the source and boundary of freedom’ (p. 456) and develops various ethics predicated on the reality of ‘this God’, ‘this story’, ‘this word’ and ‘this people’. The problem is that Wright has specifically written this book with general readers in mind, readers for whom the question of the authority of the Old Testament for ethical thinking looms large. Although he has largely avoided theological jargon throughout, he has given this critical chapter a jargon-loaded title and buried it behind ‘contemporary scholarship’. My concern is that this thoughtful essay on the authority of the Old Testament for ethical thinking and the Christian life will not receive the reading it deserves.