The student will craft a brief three page essay that summarizes and explains the message of the Torah. The three pages do not include the cover page (nor bibliography if you include one).
In this essay, you are not to list what happened in that part of the Bible. Instead, you are to define the author’s message to the reader: what is the author telling the reader about what happened? As such, your goal is to explain the author’s message by describing most of the book and its most important parts. Each essay must not be any shorter or longer than three double-spaced pages and must be written in Times New Romans 12 Point font with appropriate 1 inch margins. Each essay will have a proper introduction and conclusion that will state and restate your thesis of that section’s message. In addition, each body paragraph will provide evidence from the biblical text and, if needed, additional sources to defend your thesis. The student must employ an academic writing style with appropriate citation according to the Turabian manual. Please submit your papers in Blackboard as .doc or .docx files.
As you consider your topic, please remember that the assignment is not to tell me the setting of the Torah. Its setting is clearly the Old Covenant. Instead, your task is to define what he is telling his readers about the Old Covenant. That is, what message (lesson, instruction, insight) and hope does he give to the reader as he examines life under the Old Covenant in the Torah?
As such, you will advance a thesis that claims what the author intends to communicate with the shape of his book. That is, you are now asked to argue what the author is offering as the book’s hope. How does the author answer his dilemma? What hope does he offer? Is his hope for the reader the law codes themselves? Or, is his hope based upon something or someone other than the law codes? If so, what does the author have to say about the law codes? Therefore, there are the two main approaches to the message of the Torah that most of your papers will follow: 1) the law codes themselves and the necessity of obedience are the book’s hope (the law codes solve the book’s problems) or 2) the law codes are part of a larger strategy to point to a hope that will only come in the end of the days through the seed of Abraham. The first approach essentially contends that the book is written to persuade the reader that the Mosaic Covenant is an everlasting covenant that will eventually overcome the book’s dilemma. On the other hand, the second approach presents the law codes as something that is good for the reader but does not solve the book’s dilemma. That solution will come in the end of the days through the arrival of the One promised to Abraham. The key to deciding between these approaches is to think though what the book presents as its primary dilemma and its primary (or exclusive) solution. You need to consider what prompted the author to actually sit down and write this book. Why is it significant that he tell his grand story from Adam and his land all the way to Israel and Moses waiting outside of the land?
Essay Outline
Introductory Paragraph
After an introductory sentence or two that provides a brief explanation of the importance of the question that your essay answers, you will write a final sentence that clearly declares your thesis. This thesis statement should be the final sentence of this paragraph and is also your claim. Your purpose in crafting this paper is to prove your claim about the message of that part of the Bible.
Body Paragraphs
In each body paragraph you should begin by stating a warrant (reason, defense) that helps to prove your claim (thesis). The rest of each paragraph should clarify, explain, develop and deepen this warrant and (if needed) refute one or more opposing theses by this same reasoning.
Concluding Paragraph
Restate your thesis (claim) and its warrants in one or two sentences. The final sentence(s) should draw to a close by providing one final application or implication of your thesis being correct.
Step One
Determine the message of the book. What is its dilemma, and what is its hope? The message should highlight the book’s hope (solution) in light of its dilemma (problem). Your goal in crafting a thesis statement is to explain most of the book and its most important parts. How do you define these most important parts?
- Consider the beginning and the ending of the book.
- Consider the book’s major patterns—how do the parts fit together?
- Consider the different types of literature in the book and how they relate to each other:
- Narrative
- Poetry
iii. Law Codes
- Genealogies
- Consider key repetitions throughout the whole Torah. What does the author repeat a lot? Why does he repeat these items?
- Consider what Deuteronomy as a whole does to explain the rest of the Torah, especially the law codes and Mt Sinai.
- Consider what Deuteronomy’s final eight chapters (27-34) say about the rest of Deuteronomy and the outcome of Joshua’s conquest. What will happen after Moses’ days, and what will happen even later in the end of the days?
Step Two
Craft a thesis statement that makes a defensible claim about the message of the book that the rest of your paper can defend. Your thesis statement needs to make a claim that is specific enough to defend and yet broad enough to explain most of the book and its most important parts. You are asked to reduce all of the words of the Torah into one really well-designed sentence
- Key ideas to crafting a good thesis statement:
- Begin your thesis with the phrase “The message of the Torah is that …” What follows after that is your claim.
- Only use one complete sentence for your thesis. Do not use two. Also, please note that your thesis sentence should be the last sentence of the introduction.
iii. Only use an active verb for the claim.
- The sentence parts must be connected into one claim.
- Samples: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
Not good:
The message of the Torah is that God is good.
What are the problems with this thesis?
–Passive “is.” The claim is a state of being not an action: “God is good.”
–Too vague. What does it mean that God is good? You have no idea what you need to defend with this thesis.
Better (but not good enough):
