" intended to reveal God's designs for the Kingdom of Israel and for the Jews, his Chosen People. Indeed, all through the Old Testament, the theme (according to the authors) seems to be that God (Yahweh), disappointed and disgusted at Man's essential weakness and ingratitude, as epitomized by his Fall in the Garden of Eden, should be brought back to the spiritual state of Adam through Revelation, which unfolds slowly, but nevertheless communicates God's ultimate plan for mankind in general, and the Jews in particular (11).
Canon law, far from starting with the Christian (Catholic) Church, began with the Hebrews. The authors state that the old Testament includes four distinguishable steps in the writing of the canon law of the Hebrews: authoritative utterances; documents; collections of writings; and a fixed canon (18). The two languages of the Old testament, Hebrew and Aramaic, are "Semitic" languages, that it, belonging to the Semitic "family" of languages, the original Semites seemingly having come from the Arabian Peninsula (26).
One of the chief problems of biblical scholarship has been to determine the exact form of the original writings of the Old Testament (called the "autographs"). The major problem seems to be that during the Christian Era, there have been any number of attempts to "standardize" the text, thereby creating many errors and omissions which would not have existed if the Old Testament had remained a Hebrew text alone. The Christianizing of the Old Testament has, indeed, led to many problems facing biblical scholars in getting to the heart of the interpretations intended by the writers of the scriptures themselves (33-34).
An interesting point made by the authors is that one of the major reasons Israel was "in the news" so often during the period wr
...