Review
Title: Approaching Holiness: Exploring the History and Teachings of the Old Testament
Editors: Krystal V. L. Pierce and David Rolph Seely
Publisher: BYU Religious Studies Center
Genre: Religious Non-Fiction
Year Published: 2021
Number of Pages: 405
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 9781950304202
Price: 27.99
Reviewed by Conor Hilton for the Association for Mormon Letters
Approaching Holiness: Exploring the History and Teachings of the Old Testament is a great resource for folks who want a more scholarly, yet firmly faithful, engagement with the Old Testament. The book is a collection of 20 essays divided into an introduction and six sections: Jesus Christ and the Old Testament, Worship, Pentateuch, Temple, Psalms, and Prophets. The essays are not quite evenly distributed across the sections (“Pentateuch” and “Prophets” each have five essays and the other sections have two or three), but all contain interesting insights.
I found Approaching Holiness to be insightful, if sometimes difficult to grasp onto the specifics—the essays tend to be fairly sweeping in their scope, which is compelling in some ways but also hindered my ability to see exactly what was being discussed. This is perhaps due to my own bias towards a more narrative, literary analysis approach to scripture and other texts, while these essays tend to be a blend of textual analysis (looking at translation and specific words across the Hebrew bible and usage elsewhere) and comparative historical work, drawing on historical information to inform the reading of the text. My familiarity with the Old Testament is a bit rusty and my knowledge of Hebrew and the relevant historical information is close to zero, so I sometimes felt a little lost as the essays moved forward. That said, the essays do almost always shift towards the practical at the end, offering some key takeaways that relate to the religious and spiritual lives of latter-day saints, which offers the take-home message of the information in clear terms.
I wish each essay had a brief note before it began that highlighted the relevant passages of scripture for its argument. That would make the book more accessible for readers like me that may not know all these ins and outs of the Old Testament (and would have allowed me to use it more easily as a reference book in a future study of the Old Testament). The Index will serve some of this purpose, but a more precise, chapter and verse guide would have been wonderful!
Now, some specific insights that I found valuable.
In “The Marriage of Adam and Eve: Ritual and Literary Elements” by RoseAnn Benson, there’s a fascinating reading of Adam and Eve’s relationship. I don’t agree with all of Benson’s assumptions that undergird her argument here, but I did find her engagement with the idea of Adam and Eve being married quite intriguing. Benson offers a brief overview of some existing scholarship, setting up her intervention, before turning to a closer reading of some passages from Genesis, related to what she calls a ‘covenant paradigm’. Benson explores how these early chapters of Genesis illustrate a covenant paradigm that is revealed more thoroughly throughout the Hebrew Bible. She uses this insight to think about Adam and Eve’s marriage and relationship.
Jacob Rennaker’s chapter “Approaching Holiness: Sacred Space in Ezekiel” was fascinating. Rennaker focuses on Ezekiel’s vision in chapters 40-48 of Ezekiel. I was not very familiar with this vision, but I loved Rennaker’s engagement with it and the scholarship surrounding it. Rennaker argues that there are two predominant and competing interpretations in the scholarship—one that privileges a vertical relationality and one that privileges a horizontal relationality (the vision is about the temple and the way that humanity should relate to each other and God). Rennaker suggests that the power of Ezekiel’s vision is actually that it promotes both views. He arrives at this conclusion through a comparative analysis of the vision and a Lamassu statue, which looks different head-on and from the side, but you can see both perspectives from a slant. Rennaker suggests that what Ezekiel’s vision means is that we need both of these ideas about relationality, but in different times and spaces, that the tension between them is the point.
The final essay I wanted to draw some more attention to is Joshua M. Sears’ “‘O Lord God, Forgive!’: Prophetic Intercession in Amos”. The title is fairly self-explanatory. Sears explores Amos’ prophetic role as representative of humanity before God. I love this aspect of prophets in the Hebrew Bible and am glad to have another example to point to and think about when I talk with others about what prophets are meant to do.
While I have some quibbles with Approaching Holiness, I think it is quite a valuable resource for folks that want a firmly faithful and scholarly engagement with the Old Testament. Particularly if you are interested in learning from scholars that have clear academic chops and share your faith tradition, and some of the beliefs and practices of it inform the readings offered here. I’d recommend taking your time reading the essays, moving slowly through them, maybe even pulling up the biblical text(s) they are referencing, and exploring the footnotes. Such an approach will aid you in understanding the arguments and ideas better than I did this time through.