In Chapter 6 of Volume 2 of his OT theology, Humanity, Goldingay discusses who we are as human beings and what is our task and situation. Essentially, “Humanity is made in God's image and is addressed by God with a commission to rule the created world on God's behalf. God is committed to humanity, and humanity is under obligation to God, to serve God and serve God's world.” (517) Humans are created for the purpose of relationship with God. We are all made in His image to reflect Him and relate to Him in the world whether we like it or not. We are under obligation to God to work (and to rest) in service as he has designed.
To be human is thus to be responsible to God for fulfilling the creator's commission...Man is not sufficient to himself. Life is not meaningful to him unless it is serving an end beyond itself, unless it's of value to someone else...The transactional dynamic also confronts the notion that human beings are defined by their rights. Rather they are defined by their responsibilities. 522
As their master, God commissions, provides and protects; as servants, human beings do not do what they like but seek to fulfill God's expectations. Being created to be servants of a kind master also implies a deep security; human beings are not designed to serve any human master. 526
Neither Israel nor other peoples needed to be told that they should worship; worship is built into being human. Israel worships in fulfillment of a vocation that applies to all humanity. 527
People are created to be in community. It is our nature to be connected with one another. There is no such thing as an independent person. Thus, it is important that each person is valued and values others within the community. Faithful actions within the community lead to its prosperity. God has wired the universe so that generosity and service to others lead to one’s own prosperity. Government on a small (city) and large (nation) scale is responsible to foster the prosperity of all its members.
So to try to understand human nature without reference to a human being's relationship with other human beings, without an attitude that treats other people as neighbors, is to skew the study from the start. Sin lies in a rejection of this attitude. 529
People who think about others and behave in extraordinarily self-giving ways toward them, and/or stay faithful to them when they have ceased to deserve that, find that this rebounds on them. For instance, the people to whom they give themselves do respond, and/or other people are moved to relate to them in generous ways. 533
The legacy of ancient Israel provides us with no distinctive politics and with no template for translating culture and religion into a viable polity. Nor has another people improved on their efforts. Perhaps its significance is to model for us the wrestling with insoluble questions that is required of every people. 535
Goldingay also sees the family unit, nuclear and extended, as a “key good” and an important component in human happiness and in fulfilling our responsibilities to God. Birth shows us that we are dependent on family from the beginning. Parents are responsible to the younger generation for discipline and provision. There is no concept of single life in the OT. Everyone is part of a family. Marriage is another key part of the family covenant. It has an important role in the social and economic life of the community but is also a way that the image and love of God is expressed.
The psalm's (139) language is more violent than it sounds in NRSV. Emerging from the womb is not a gentle event. God does not merely draw a person delicately from the womb, but pulls a person out kicking and screaming...God then gives a baby no choice but to rely on its mother's milk... Life may be much less secure outside the womb than inside, so from the beginning of our lives we are thrown onto God. 539
The First Testament's implications are less patriarchal than we might have thought. Men and moment were interdependent, with women as well as men being involved in the management of the family's work and life. The society was relatively egalitarian. A wife was not simply her husband's property. More likely we should see her as a kind of extension of her husband, part of his person, the two of them form one social and legal unit (cf. Gen 2.24). 546
The First Testament assumes that it is not the case that what consenting adults do in private is their own business. A major concern of the attitudes to sexual relationships in a traditional society is the protection of the family. 547
The Old Testament does not so much see The Person as a spirit or soul with a body, but as a holistic unity of the immaterial and material. Without either we are not fully human. “Soul and body are the visible and invisible aspects to the same person.” The heart is the inner center of the person and its character is made known though the deeds of the body. Wrongdoing damages both the inner and outer person and both are in need of renewal by God’s Spirit. Human beings live within time and so the “good life” is a long one with basic needs met and peaceful relationships within the community.
Body and soul live in perichoretic union, like the Father, Son and Spirit, "a relationship of mutual interpenetration and differentiated unity," without structures of domination. They form a gestalt, in mutual covenant, a gestalt formed by the creative divine Spirit. 553
Holy points to the distinctive uncreated divine transcendence. Spirit points to the distinctive dynamic divine energy...Yhwh is the one that makes things firm. Perhaps the implication (in Psalm 51) is that the human spirit needs the divine, holy spirit to continue to be operative on it for its energy to be steadfastly in the proper direction. 558
Life is a great thing, a great gift from the living God. R Norman Whybray suggests twelve aspects to "the good life" as the First Testament sees it: security, a land to live in, power, food and sustenance, a long life, wealth, family, justice, laws, wisdom, pleasure, and trust in God 562
Section 5 discusses the issue of human Responsibility. “freewill is a key aspect of what it means to be human” and people must use their freedoms to be responsible to serve God and one another. We belong to communities and our actions effect others as theirs effect us. It is even possible for the faithful actions of a few to save a whole faithless community. Even though we act in the now as individuals our actions affect future generations even as we are affected by what has been done before us. God’s forgiveness can enable us to make decisions which escape the consequences of the past, but each generation is responsible to repent and secure their possession of God’s blessings.
The First Testament recognizes the reality of individual responsibility from the beginning; it is the presupposition of the earliest regulations of the Torah as of the latest. At the same time, alongside this it recognizes throughout the reality of the people's or a family's communal nature and communal responsibility, both horizontal (in relation to our contemporaries) and vertical (in relation to earlier generations). 564
Sin is as natural to us as breathing. But none of this means we are not challenged to accept responsibility for our lives. 573
Yhwh does not have any problem about forgiving people their sin if they have turned from it. Ezekiel (33) does not imply that their new faithfulness makes atonement for their wrongdoing, though neither does he make clear how this process does work...the father's instinct is to welcome him back; the wrongdoing ceases to matter. Ezekiel assumes it is so with God. 575
“Wisdom is a quality all humanity is designed to possess,” although it is rare and it does not always assure success in this life. God makes wisdom available through learning from God’s revelation and from the wisdom of the past. Tragically most people seem to want to be stupid. One who is ignorant needs learning but there is not much hope for the one that refuses to learn. An important foundation for wisdom is to learn to reverence and worship Yhwh. There are “two ways” to go in life and faithfulness to God is the only wise way. The wise person also understands that different situations require different solutions, sees the “big picture,” understands that human wisdom is limited, and that trust and submission to God are the only wise way to live because we do not understand all the mysteries of life.
In the Western understanding, we think in terms of each individual's unique life journey.In Proverbs, the journey is one we take in the company of others... Both (paths) are walked by groups of people and we decide which group we walk with...We keep deciding which group we belong to. 585
It is trust, acknowledgement and faithfulness that will make our paths turn out straight and make things go well for our bodies. Trust, acknowledgement and faithfulness are wise in a practical sense. 593
We do not reach a point where we "understand" creation or the problem of evil or the nature of God or the nature of our relationship with God. What wisdom does is help us along in the process of reflection on these deep and mysterious realities...youth likes straight and uncomplicated answers and is intolerant of enigma and mystery. It is this aspect of wisdom that maturity puts people into a position to utilize. 596
What does the OT say about How Life Works? God has set up the universe to make it work for people who trust Him. We have to work wisely within the natural forces that God has set up. God has made the universe to make things work out (eventually) for the faithful and punish the faithless. Yhwh is acting, both within and above the natural processes to do this. Yhwh is directly involved in the lives of individuals to protect and deliver and to guide and direct. This extends even beyond death.
What is it that gives you pleasure and enjoyment, makes you relax and laugh? This is a key question, because what gives you pleasure and makes you laugh is likely to reach deep into you as a person; it points to the wellsprings of your life. For a fool it is wrongdoing; for a person of insight it is wisdom (Prov. 10.23). 599
In creating the world, Yhwh set limits to dangerous and threatening powers such as the sea and the darkness, ensured that other dangerous and threatening forces such as hail, storm, lightning and thunder are under Yhwh's control for use in battle, and set in place the planets and stars to determine the orderly passing of the seasons (Job 38.8-38). Those facts provide the evidence that Job's private world cannot be the victim of uncontrolled chaos in the way that it seems, even if Job cannot see how that is so. 609
Both aggressors and their victims are inclined to think that the former will be in power forever, but both need to remind themselves that is not so. Human beings can look weighty but actually lack substance. Death is the great leveler. (Ps 62.9, Prov. 11.7) 615
There is a balance to the previous section as the OT explains How Life Does Not Work. Often it seems like life does not work in a moral way. There are exceptions to the above as in the story of Job. Both Job and Ecclesiastes focus on these exceptions. “The moral rules do not always work.” Wisdom does not always work. Sometimes suffering is corrective and/or testing. Sometimes suffering is a “world-shattering,” “death-experiencing,” hope-removing event that drives a person into a deeper understanding and experience of God. It shows that God is the only safe refuge.
Wisdom thinking is Israel's equivalent to the social sciences. Its rules involve looking for patterns in events that in reality are all unique. Yet if wisdom truly involves acknowledging how life actually works, it has to be realistic about the "exceptions" to its rules as well as about the rules. It therefore involves both the kind of generalizations that especially characterize Proverbs and the insistence on the exceptions that especially characterize Job and Qohelet. Neither the generalizations not the exceptions would constitute wisdom without the other. 616
Elihu's thesis resembles that of the despised Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar in combining insight, danger and irrelevance. It suggests insight because suffering can indeed make people examine the nature and bases of their lives, change their minds, their attitudes and priorities and draw them back to God... But it is notably hard to find Scriptures that declare that God sends suffering to this end as opposed to harnessing it to that end. 623
No, you cannot understand what is going on, says Yhwh near the end of the book (Job). And I am not going to tell you. You have to live without knowing. 628
Death is also a universal part of being human. Long life is seen as a blessing, but mortality is accepted in the OT as a normal part of life. The OT very rarely refers to any kind of after life. Death is seen in the OT as both an enemy and a welcomed sleep. Death is seen as an “emptiness” and the end of hope. It is not until much later in the OT (though there are hints as Jesus argues from Exodus) that the Bible begins to speak explicitly of bodily resurrection (Daniel 12).
"A covenant with death" (Is 28.15) "is the ultimate absurdity, since death alone brooks no compromise; yet every post-edenic human endeavor is an attempt to make a deal with death." Therefore the first task of every religion is to provide an answer, an oracle, in the face of death. 633
The fact that we do suffer means that it would be wiser to see health as "a subjectively ascertainable attitude" to one's fluctuating condition, "the strength to be human." That strength lies in "the acceptance, the affirmation, and the love of frail and mortal life." 634
Christians' frequent failure to take this life seriously shows God's wisdom in delaying the revealing of the resurrection, and it points to the necessity to keep living by the First Testament's emphasis on this life as well as by the New Testament's evidence for the resurrection. 646
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