Reading the Canon

One thing I have been trying to understand is how the expectation for a Davidic ruler unfolds and develops throughout the Old Testament. To this end I picked up Stephen Dempster’s Dominion and Dynasty, which makes a great argument for reading the entire Bible as one, connected story. Here was the crucial summarizing statement for me:

“Just as an individual book within the canon can be read as a text with a beginning, a body, and a conclusion, with the various parts related to the whole and vice versa, so the canon should be read in the same way.”

Stephen G. Dempster, Dominion and Dynasty: A Theology of the Hebrew Bible (NSBT 15, IVP, 1993), 42.

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