The discipline of Old Testament (OT) theology is a rather recent development, barely going back further than the beginning of the nineteenth century. The very name "Old Testament" theology designates it as a particularly Christian enterprise; the conversation with Jewish scholars has been limited. The earliest investigations of OT theology (OTT) started in recognition of the changing social, political, and religious conditions in which the various OT books were written. But a history-of-religions approach to OT theology soon met the obstacle of deciphering exactly when specific theological concepts developed and re-emerged. It was not until 1787 that
Johann Philipp Gabler made a distinction between dogmatic and biblical theology. Until then the OT was viewed in a systematic sense and only in relationship to New Testament (NT) understanding. Gabler began to study the OT in a critical sense looking at how the theology of ancient Israel would have been reflected in the OT books. This was a new way to look at the OT, as Robyn Routledge wrote in Old Testament Theology, “The OT was not written as a theological document, and a systematic approach necessarily involves imposing an alien order and structure on it.”
Walther Eichrodt wrote his two volume OTT, published in 1933. His approach was similar to Gabler’s in that they both looked for the historical context of the books, but differed by systematizing it. Eichrodt thought that the OT must be read in the way that the ancient Israelites would have, but there is one theme that acts as a “glue” that keeps all the theology together. The theme he saw was the Sinaitic Covenant. He saw other themes as well, but this was the core of the OT. He picked themes that, he thought, came up naturally in the OT, i.e. God and the people, God and the world. When
Gerhard von Rad his OTT in the 1960s, he rejected Eichrodt’s views on a systematic OTT and one central theme in the theology of the OT. He instead emphasized the dynamic nature of the Israelite faith. Von Rad argued that the events of the OT are based on historical events, but the final draft of the OT conveys the events which fit the needs of a new generation. He argued the OT recorded the
Heilsgeschichte, a word he coined, which is the story of salvation viewed through the eyes of faithful Israelites. In the 1970s
Phyllis Trible pioneered a
Christian feminist approach to OTT, using the approach of
rhetorical criticism developed by her dissertation advisor,
James Muilenburg. In 1987 the Jewish biblical scholar
Jon Levenson published an essay,
Why Jews Are Not Interested in Biblical Theology, which challenged the findings and methods of the fields of biblical theology and
historical criticism, which has subsequently been widely discussed. In the late 1990s his body of work as of that time was reviewed by
Marvin A. Sweeney and put in the larger context of the field of biblical theology; Sweeney wrote: "A great deal of his work focuses on the seminal question of identifying the role that Christian theological constructs have played in the reading of biblical literature, even when the reading is presented as historically based objective scholarship, and of developing reading strategies that can remove these constructs in order to let the biblical texts 'speak for themselves.' Work of this kind naturally paves the way for the development of Jewish biblical theology." ==Approaches==