Walter Moberly has made his name as a theological interpreter: a patient, close reader of the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture. His writings share a common approach. They linger with individual biblical texts, engaging them with ‘full imaginative seriousness’ not only as artefacts of ancient times but as existential resources for present-day life with God. As such, Moberly respects the Bible's historical situatedness; critical scholarship informs his negotiations of Hebrew language and literary genre. But his foremost interest is the ongoing spiritual generativity of these texts for worshipping communities, especially Christians, though he also keeps a Jewish readership in view. Since criticisms of the Bible's ethics jeopardise its usefulness to Christians, Moberly's readings often respond to them; or, since modern literature (or film) can exemplify the existential stakes of one or another insight, Moberly's readings draw on them to explain how the Bible bears on life.
Moberly's latest book continues very much along these lines—and, given the rarity of these hermeneutical coordinates in contemporary biblical studies, this fact alone guarantees the book a lively and long reception. At the heart of The God of the Old Testament is a series of close readings, organized into six chapters. What distinguishes The God of the Old Testament from Moberly's other recent outings, however, is its thematic and theological focus, perhaps reflecting its origins as the 2020 Hulsean Lectures at Cambridge. Per the main title, and per the first line of its introduction, ‘this is a book about God’ (p. 1; by contrast, Moberly's Old Testament Theology (2013) is relatively more seriatim; his The Bible in a Disenchanted Age (2018) compares Daniel and the Aeneid to argue for the Bible's religious credibility).
As a book about God, each chapter of The God of the Old Testament takes up a different facet of the divine character. Chapter titles thus connect an attribute of God with a biblical text: Proverbs 8 with ‘The Wise God’, Exodus 3 with ‘The Mysterious God’, Psalm 82 with ‘The Just God’, Genesis 4 with ‘The Inscrutable God’, 2 Kings 5 with ‘The Only God’, and a triptych of texts (Psalm 46, Jeremiah 7, Micah 3) with ‘The Trustworthy God’. Moberly does not intend comprehensiveness, whether textually or theologically. But he does intend a certain primacy. These book chapters do not say all there is to be said about God, but they do articulate enduring touchpoints for speech about God – ‘ground rules’ (p. 1). Moberly even marshals the term ‘grammar’: his book sets out aspects of a ‘grammar of God’ (pp. 1, 249).
If God, ‘the doctrine of God’ (p. 1), and ‘grammar’ sound abstract or formal, Moberly's treatment is anything but. Although at one point he situates his work vis-à-vis the systematician Katherine Sonderegger's—agreeing with her concentration on the unity rather than the triunity of God (p. 239)—Moberly's book faces towards concrete human life. He assumes a deep reciprocity between divine and human profiles, and, though mostly oriented towards observant readers, his account has an apologetic pique (cf. The Bible in a Disenchanted Age). God becomes meaningful, even intelligible, through the quality of lived faith. A few lines from Psalm 100, prayed daily by Anglicans, guide Moberly's exegesis (pp. 2, 180, 239): ‘Know that the Lord is God / it is he that made us, and we are his’ (v. 3). The knowledge in question is a matter of ‘epistemic and existential assurance in relation to God’ (p. 181).
Several moments in The God of the Old Testament stand out to me as examples of this real and road-tested assurance—insights which, firmly rooted in the relevant Hebrew texts, could arise only within a hardy practice of faith. Moberly's fourth chapter on ‘The Inscrutable God’ addresses the story of Cain and Abel. Moberly navigates away from dead-end questions about Cain's wife, or the existence of human settlements from which Cain wanders. With critical scholarship, Moberly judges that the Genesis story is that, a story, originally independent of its current canonical position, but not for that reason unworthy of serious imaginative attention. Moberly carefully exposits the text and reframes it as an instance of ‘differential divine decision’ (p. 153). In response to God's inscrutable distribution of favor and disfavor, humans can only choose how to respond; whether or not to heed the instruction God gives to Cain, ‘you must master it [sin]’ (Gen. 4:7). Moberly summons Viktor Frankl as a witness to what this ‘mastering’ entails: a ‘creative consent’ to unfair circumstances and a determination nevertheless faithfully to shape one's own attitude and fate. Yet more poignantly, Moberly points to the life of Maïti Girtanner, a pianist and French resister during the Second World War, whose hands the Nazis mutilated. ‘She was unable to return to the piano, but she resolved to make a gift of what had been taken from her’; to ‘build on new foundations’, patterned after Christ (pp. 162–3). Girtanner fulfilled Cain's charge as he did not.
Moberly's readings are finely-observed, humane, and ranging in their interlocutors. Relative to his other recent books, I find The God of the Old Testament more intensively engaged with the Hebrew; lexical comments and cross-references proliferate in the footnotes, and technical asides appear as inset, small-print discussions, a device that Moberly's Old Testament Theology introduced, but The God of the Old Testament uses more frequently. This is partially a function of vexatious texts (like Exodus 3), but partially programmatic. I also take its theological focus as a welcome intervention in recent discussions about the ‘theological interpretation of Scripture’; too often such conversations stall out on meta-issues and say little at all about what God is like. That said, Moberly's chapters do subsist at varying degrees of integration with its overarching ‘theological pattern’ (p. 2). This, too, likely reflects the varying biblical texts at hand. Finally, the prominence of Jewish interpreters, historic and present, increases as Moberly's publications continue. And I do hope they continue, not least so that Moberly may fill an omission from this book that is his ‘prime regret’: Exodus 32–34, the golden calf story, a true lodestar for Old Testament theology (p. 246).
