Two years ago, a great light went out. The light was David Noel Freedman, who died at 85 years of age, on April 8, 2008. He was a Jewish Presbyterian who long ago dreamed of the kind of Messianic Judaism we espouse. What for him was a dream is for us a reality. He taught at the University of Michigan, and also at San Diego State University. At the former school, MJTI President Mark Kinzer was one of his students. And Freedman was the Grand Old Man of Old Testamental scholarship.

He authored and edited over 300 scholarly books. In his final two decades, two of his books, The Unity of the Hebrew Bible (1991) and The Nine Commandments (2000), treated the same subject—his fascinating conjecture as to why the Hebrew Bible tells Jewish history the way it does.

Freedman identifies Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings as Israel’s primary history. He suggests that these books were put in this order some time late in the Babylonian Captivity so as to answer the question the community struggled with: How did we end up here, in Babylon? After all, the Bible begins in Babylon, because that’s where Eden was, and of course the story of the Tower of Babel, which was where Abraham started out too. So how come the people of promise were evicted from the land of promise, finally back where it all started?

Freedman finds the answer foreshadowed in the stories of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel. In both stories we see the pattern of commandment, violation, exile. Freedman shows how this is precisely what happened to Israel. God gave his commandments, epitomized in the Ten Words, but Israel violated the commands and ended up in exile. And Freedman shows how the books of the Hebrew Bible were ordered so as to chronicle Israel’s breaking of the Ten Commandments, in turn.

So in Exodus, we read of the Golden Calf, violating the commands against having no other gods before him and not making a graven image. In Leviticus we have the strange story of the blasphemer in the camp, and in a similar story in Numbers of sabbath breaking. Each command is broken by Israel, and each in turn.

Weaving throughout this story, one could chronicle the history of Israel as the rising of the house of David and thus the fortunes of Israel, and their decline in exile. This is why it is so fascinating that the New Testament begins with a genealogy stressing the rising, the falling, and in Yeshua, the rising again of the house of David. In Yeshua, Israel’s quandary is solved: in him, the exile is reversed. And through him, all Israel will finally return home: “and so all Israel will be saved; as it is written, ‘The Deliverer will come from Zion, he will banish ungodliness from Jacob’; ‘and this will be my covenant with them when I take away their sins’” (Romans 11:26–27).

Published in Issue Six / Volume Two / June 2010
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Stuart Dauerman

Stuart Dauerman

Stuart Dauermann, Ph.D. is Senior Scholar at Messianic Jewish Theological Institute and the Rabbi of Ahavat Zion Synagogue in Beverly Hills, California. Congregations.

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