The Development of God in the Old Testament: Three Case Studies in Biblical Theology

In this volume, Witte presents three case studies on biblical theology and demonstrates how the ways of speaking and thinking about God in the Old Testament constitute the religio-historical and theological basis for the discourse on God’s acts in the person of Jesus Christ in the New Testament. The theology of the Old Testament and that of the New Testament are inseparably connected, even if discrete theologies of the Old and New Testaments can be identified. The first study traces the development of the understanding of God in the Old Testament through the Hebrew divine title, El Shaddai, and one of its most important Greek equivalents, pantokrator. The use of the title El Shaddai, its ancient Near Eastern religious background, its transfer into Hellenistic Judaism, and its theological significance reveal fundamental aspects of a biblical theology that is equally indebted to comparative philology and to the history of religion. The second essay discusses justice as a central theme of the theology of the Old Testament and as an essential category in defining the relationship between God and humanity through a selection of different texts from the canon of the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint. The third study offers a short literary-historical biography of Yahweh as the creator of the world, the master of history, the guarantor of justice, and the donor of wisdom. It takes into account the approach of the first essay, which presents theology as a sort of religio-historical onomastics, and reflects, on the basis of the second essay, the traditio-historical presentation of images of God and his anointed in the Old Testament as a background for theology and christology in the New Testament.