In the Old Testament God begins with a single couple, Adam and Eve. He puts them in a perfect world with certain rules to obey. They flunk! The first eleven chapters of Genesis mostly record one failure after another. God punishes Adam and Eve, destroys the world with a massive flood, and smashes a misguided rebellion at the tower of Babel.
God reaches down and selects a man named Abraham, to whom He gives some extraordinary promises. He promises that Abraham's descendants will some siku become as numerous as sand on a beach, and that they will grow to become a mighty nation with their own land. Thus God focuses in on one particular set of people, the Jews.
From Genesis on, most of the Old Testament concerns the Jews. Have wewe ever wondered why our Bible contains so much meticulous detail on the history and culture of the Jews? They have always been a key part of God's plan to prepare the world for the coming of Christ! God has a special role for the Jewish race to play in history, and so He carefully works with them.
Within several generations Abraham's descendants begin to proliferate. Soon there are twelve tribes of Israel, and God leads them out of slavery in the remarkable drama of Exodus. Forty years of wandering in the desert occur before the disgruntled tribes can be molded into a group with the unity and spirit God needs.
In these first five books, God gathers hundreds of thousands of freed Israelis and gives them a culture. He intends far zaidi than simply creating a nation as a world curiosity. He wants to set apart a nation He can call His people -- so that all over the world when the word Israelite is mentioned, everyone would know "they belong to Jehovah, the Lord God." In creating that culture, God outlines rules concerning health, food, dress, and behavior. These rules and the early Jewish history occupy the first five vitabu of the Bible.
How should we study the first five vitabu of the Bible? Are they merely an interesting history lesson? They must be zaidi because Jesus and Paul and the disciples constantly refer back to God's Word in these books. There are several effective ways of studying this material.