A collection of essays originally published in the Dictionary of Scripture and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), this book makes some of the most pertinent articles available to students, pastors and laypeople. The contributors teach at a variety of institutions, but the editors note that they all consider the Bible normative for faith and ethics today. Although contemporary culture and issues are not identical to those in OT times, the contributors believe that the Bible gives guidance for moral formation and ethical reasoning that Christians should strive to follow. In addition, this book seeks to provide a needed corrective to the misappropriation and mishandling of Scripture in relation to ethics by way of flawed methodology or ignorance.

The excerpted articles fall into discrete book-by-book and topical sections. The book begins with a few articles that address OT ethics as a whole, and then moves to articles that examine each OT book as well as the Apocryphal/Deuteronomical books in terms of the major ethical issues addressed. The topical portion of the book highlights various themes and their relationship to OT ethics, including biblical accounts of creation, the Dead Sea Scrolls, exile, priestly literature, law, poetic discourse, and the Ten Commandments.

The comprehensive treatment of each OT book, including all of the Minor Prophets in separate sections, gives a wholeness and comprehensiveness when compared to solely theme-based books such as Christopher J. H. Wright’s Old Testament Ethics for the People of God (Downers Grove: IVP, 2004). When looking only at overarching ethical themes, one runs the risk of missing the texture and complexity present in each individual book, as well as the possible tension between various OT books on certain ethical issues. As a result, this book is a helpful corrective to this tendency. In addition, the individual essays clarify that more is going on in the OT than simply theology and history, as each contributor has an ethical agenda and viewpoint and brings different questions to the text. For instance, L. Daniel Hawk’s essay argues that the book of Joshua does not actually make the Israelites out to be ethnically superior to Canaanites, but showcases the humanity and sinfulness of both groups within the bigger ethical picture (p. 67).

However, this diversity of authorship and method also leads to a lack of canonically sensitive summaries, both in the OT overall and specifically for the section on the Prophets. Further, some concluding comments would have been helpful to reflect back on the introductory discussion on methods for relating the OT to Christian ethics. In addition, the various contributors’ focus on asking ethical questions of the text sometimes leads them to make incomplete or unwarranted claims. For example, David A. DeSilva’s essay on the Deuterocanonical/Apocryphal books notes that they appear to suggest that the ends justify the means (p. 143), which would contradict the OT witness on this matter. Similarly, Bruce C. Birch claims that there is no “single, unified ethic” in the OT (p. 20). Yet without this, readers are left wondering about the reasons that this book should be written or read in the first place. Without defining what is meant by normative through Scripture, some of the foundational presuppositions of the various contributors open up the possibility that Scripture itself is not completely normative.

Thus, the multi-author nature of this book has both strengths and weaknesses. While different approaches are healthy and necessary, individual contributors do not always identify which hermeneutical method they are using. Often, it is hard to compare ethical results between entries because the approaches used are too dissimilar. However, the variety of ethical grids also exemplifies different options of how to ask ethical questions of a text, even when it may seem initially that no ethical usefulness can be found. Even if the reader disagrees with the ethical conclusions of the authors, the individual discussions in this book will be profitable and provocative. In the end, the book reflects the ethical diversity found within the OT itself, with a variety of authors working with different methods, but seeking the same purpose and in harmony with each other overall.

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