Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 24:3 (Fall 2020)
Article: From A Smoking Canon To Burning Hearts: The Making Of The Hebrew Bible
Author: Stephen G. Dempster

SBJT 24:3 (Fall 2020) p. 25

From A Smoking Canon To Burning Hearts: The Making Of The Hebrew Bible1

Stephen G. Dempster

Stephen G. Dempster teaches Old Testament and Hebrew language at Crandall University, Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. He earned the BA degree at Western University, London, Ontario, Canada, and a MAR and ThM at Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and a MA and PhD at the University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He has published many articles in the area of Biblical Theology, and Old Testament Canon. He has written Dominion and Dynasty: A Theology of the Hebrew Bible (Apollos/InterVarsity Press, 2003), and Micah: A Theological Commentary (Eerdmans, 2017). He is currently working on a book on the Kingdom of God and a commentary on Genesis. Dr. Dempster and his wife Judy have six children: Jessica (Alex), Joanna (Anwaz), Nathan (Justine), Michael, Holly and Victoria. They also have five grandchildren: Colby, Lexi, Braelyn, Caden, and Henry.

I begin with three quotes which reflect a crying need for a colloquium on the Bible like this one.2 The first is from a biblical scholar who wrote a text for students of the Bible, published at the end of the last millennium. After four chapters of setting the stage for her book she concludes this major section as follows:

… we have proposed that that there is no such thing as a “Bible,” in terms of there being one coherent book; no such thing as a “biblical theology” in any uniform sense; no such thing as a “biblical canon” in the sense of one universally acknowledged collection of biblical books, and finally no such thing as one standard “biblical text.”3

SBJT 24:3 (Fall 2020) p. 26

Then she writes what is perhaps the understatement of the millennium: “It may be that the conclusions of these first four chapters appear to be unduly pessimistic about the nature of the Bible.”4

The next quote is the conclusion of a study on Scripture by two biblical scholars:

… The discipline of biblical studies lives and thrives today as never before. That is so even though “the Bible” does not exist, if by that we mean a canonically and textually defined entity held in common by all interpreters throughout the ages. There are only Bibles, and they all include texts which exhibit a great deal of diversity in their family history.5

Now it is important to note that rarefied studies ...