Perhaps the greatest obstacle to reading the Hebrew Scriptures is a widespread confusion over the purposes for which these texts were written. That these purposes are so poorly understood is largely a consequence of the fact that the Hebrew Scriptures have for so long been read in light of the writings of Jesus’ apostles in the New Testament. Today, many readers automatically read the aims of the Gospels and of Paul’s letters back into the Hebrew biblical texts. And this is the case even if they have not themselves read much New Testament. The apostles’ conception of what “Scripture” is all about is simply part of the cultural background in most Western countries, and it’s hard to avoid picking it up. This means that if we want to identify the purposes that stood before the eyes of the Israelite prophets and scholars who wrote the Hebrew Bible, these will have to be carefully disentangled from the concerns of the New Testament texts, which were written centuries later and, by and large, with very different aims in view.

In this chapter, my goal will be to do exactly that. I’ll begin by trying to get a picture of what it is the principal works of the New Testament were written to achieve. I’ll then distinguish these purposes from the ones that can be seen as having motivated the composition of the primary Hebrew biblical work, the History of Israel. Finally, I will consider the purposes of the editors who assembled the corpus of the Hebrew Scriptures as a whole.