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This week we reach the end of our journey through the books of the Old Testament. In this final lecture, Professor Christine Hayes from Yale University takes a look at Esther and Jonah, and offers some concluding reflections on how to read and understand the Hebrew Bible today. I am enormously grateful to Professor Hayes for allowing us to sit in on her Yale course.

Concluding the course, she writes: "The literature of the Hebrew Bible relates the odyssey of Israel from its earliest beginnings in the stories of individual Patriarchs worshiping a Canaanite deity to its maturity as a nation forced by history to look beyond its own horizons and concerns. The Israelites were lifted up to become something greater than they could ever have planned. They came to see themselves as God's servants to the world, at the same time that they struggled and argued with their God and criticized themselves for their very human weaknesses and failings."

"From another vantage point, the Bible can be seen also as an anthology that struggles against great odds to sustain a peoples' covenantal relationship with God . . . Do all these books contradict each other? No more than I contradict myself when I say that today I feel happy, but yesterday I felt anxious. Israel's relationship with God has always been a dynamic and a complex one. To each of these books there was a time and a purpose in the past, and as countless readers of the Bible have discovered over the centuries these books offer continued teaching and inspiration in the shifting moments of every age."

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