An articulation of the Missio Dei in relation to the cultures that surrounded Ancient Israel, the society that produced the Hebrew Bible. The course surveys different major themes in Ancient Near Eastern societies, such as creation, kingship and the relation of individuals to deity through domestic religion and analyze similarities and differences between those and the Hebrew Bible’s message on the subject in their historical context. It does this with the goal of analyzing God’s work in societies around Israel and to see existing points of contact for missional witness.
1) The Student learns about major themes that the Hebrew Scriptures share with the cultural reserve of the ancient societies surrounding Israel. 2) The student learns how to analyze ANE history and its interaction with Ancient Israel. 3) The student broadens their conviction concerning God’s mission toward all societies. 4) The student exercises skills in developing contextual theology to engage in effective Gospel witness.
God is at work in the world at all times, reaching out to it, and God’s people partner with God in his missional activity. Ancient Israel had sufficient cultural contact with the nations around it that their mode of worship Yahweh and accompanying ethics could be engaged in by its neighbors.
The course explores the Hebrew Scriptues in order to discover bridges between ancient Israel’s faith in Yahweh and the religious practices and institutions of their ANE neighbors.
The study is missionally-driven by its goal to explore how Israel and its neighbors shared similar ideas and institutions that would allow meaningful communication of the worship of Yahweh between them.
Israel and its neighbors lived in a similar cultural context that makes it plausible that meaningful communication of ideas concerning God, worship and ethics was possible. The course explores that context and the ideas and institutions that the entities in that context shared.
Ancient Israel’s faith was intercultural in that it had a number of commonalities with that of the nations around it, and an element of God’s missional work was to have people of all nations come to worship at Zion.
The students apply the knowledge gained in the course by developing skills in analyzing cultures and applying biblical material in contextual ways to Gospel witness.
Students are measured on their comparison and contrast of the ancient Near Eastern culture with similar phenomena in the Hebrew Bible and their beginning articulation of contextual theology for Gospel witness to a contemporary culture.
