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?