The Pentateuch as Narrative by John H. Sailhamer
Essentials in Biblical Theology Series
The Pentateuch as Narrative: A Biblical-Theological Commentary by John H. Sailhamer[1]
The scholarly work of John Sailhamer (1956–2017) has had a marked influence on the discipline of biblical theology. Either directly or indirectly, many evangelical scholars, pastors, and other students of Scripture have been shaped by his approach to the Bible and the OT in particular. Of the monographs, commentaries, and articles Sailhamer published, perhaps the most important representative of his overall scholarly contribution is his commentary on the first five books of the Bible, titled The Pentateuch as Narrative: A Biblical-Theological Commentary.
Earlier publications meaningfully added to scholarly conversations on Hebrew exegesis, OT theology, the canon, history in biblical interpretation, and other areas related to hermeneutics and biblical theology. His later works proved influential as well. Introduction to Old Testament Theology: A Canonical Approach,[2] which came out shortly after publication of the Pentateuch Commentary, offers a thorough treatment of some of the hermeneutical and methodological concepts covered in more summary fashion in Pentateuch as Narrative.
Then, several years later, he expanded on earlier publications in The Meaning of the Pentateuch: Revelation, Composition, and Interpretation.[3] This substantial volume synthesizes his interpretation of the Pentateuch and his understanding of its composition. Indeed, it marks the culmination of his career of scholarship by drawing together various threads and explaining what he calls a compositional approach to biblical theology.
One other contribution is worth mentioning before summarizing The Pentateuch as Narrative. In 1999 Sailhamer gave the presidential address at the national meetings for the Evangelical Theological Society. In this presentation, “The Messiah and the Hebrew Bible,” which would be published in the following spring’s issue of the ETS journal,[4] Sailhamer charged evangelicals to recognize the question of the Messiah and the OT as the key question facing evangelicals and the church at the time (and today too, perhaps). This question, he asserted in agreement with Walt Kaiser,[5] is essentially a question of “whether the NT interpretation of the OT text is in fact the meaning intended by the OT author.” His own contention was that the OT authors intended to write about the Messiah. Indeed, this is the “reason the books of the Hebrew Bible were written.”[6] This was the perspective for which he relentlessly argued throughout his scholarly career. Much of his life’s work was invested in demonstrating from the text of the OT, especially the Pentateuch, how the Hebrew Scriptures were intentionally and strategically composed to shine a messianic spotlight forward to reveal the coming of Christ and the identification of Jesus as the Messiah in the NT.
If a student or other interested inquirer wishes to be introduced to this argument and Sailhamer’s approach to biblical theology, they would do well to engage with any of his written works. Nevertheless, The Pentateuch as Narrative is probably the best starting point. The introductory chapter in particular provides a sweeping, though relatively accessible, synopsis of his overall approach to the Pentateuch as a piece of divinely inspired literature; and the commentary itself puts into practice these hermeneutical commitments by offering careful, if somewhat brief, exegetical insights on Genesis through Deuteronomy.
The summary overview that follows here will primarily overview the commentary’s introduction, highlighting the key hermeneutical points he addresses there. These insights inform the commentary and also most readily expose readers to the characteristic aspects of Sailhamer’s overall biblical-theological approach.
A detailed outline of the Pentateuch precedes the book’s preface and introduction (v–xvii), and this twelve-page, small-font outline is itself a valuable resource. Then, having identified his overall aim to trace the Pentateuch’s narrative strategy, he articulates a foundational principle at the outset: the Pentateuch is a book, a written text (1). This principle has three subpoints that will guide all that follows, both in the hermeneutical explanations of the introduction and in the subsequent commentary itself. First, the so-called books of Genesis–Deuteronomy were composed as one unified piece of literature. To miss this and approach each “book” of the Pentateuch separately is to miss much of the intended meaning that is discerned only when the Pentateuch is interpreted as one book.
Second, the Pentateuch has an author (3). By this he fully embraces the notion of dual authorship, and he is adamant to clarify that dual authorship does not entail a distinction between the divine and human purpose or intention in what is written. Divine authorship, he asserts, “does not mean that though the human authors may have meant one thing, God intended another.” Rather than pitting human and divine authors against one another, he understands texts like 2 Tim 3:15 and 2 Pet 1:21 to envision a process of authorship whereby Scripture’s human authors wrote what they did, intending what they intended, as moved by God through his Spirit, not contrary to the meaning intended by God. This important conviction is foundational to Sailhamer’s hermeneutics, and it relates closely and significantly to the question of the messianic intention of the OT as it has been strategically composed. This also has obvious implications for biblical theology more broadly, and the question of intertextuality/inner-biblical exegesis and the NT use of the OT.
The third corollary principle is related to the notion that the Pentateuch is a book: as a written work of literature, it should be interpreted with attention to its literary nature and features. Much of the rest of the introduction, and the commentary as well, will be devoted to unpacking the literary nature of the Pentateuch. For Sailhamer, it is of primary importance to approach the Pentateuch, and any part of Scripture for that matter, not as a collection of “hastily written documents or mere historical records,” nor as “merely the literature of a bygone era and people” (3). Rather, the Scriptures were written and composed with great attention to detail, and we will understand their intended meaning and theological message most clearly when we are attentive to the literary details the human authors, under the inspiration of the divine Author, have included in the text of Scripture.
The understanding of the Pentateuch as a book also informs the format of the commentary. Because he is most interested in tracing the literary shape of the Pentateuch, he felt it important to attend to overall structural features and developments in his comments on the text, and to pay attention to the different parts and how they relate to one another. He demonstrates this priority by treating parallel accounts, passages that cover the same general content, in their own respective contexts. One example will illustrate this point. Rather than combining explanation of the two accounts of the Ten Commandments (Exod 20:1–17, Deut 5:6–22), he deals with each passage separately and considers how and why the author has composed these two similar but distinct passages (283–288; 436–438).
The introduction goes on to explain and further elaborate on implications related to the underlying principles of the Pentateuch’s unity, its authorship, and its textual character as a piece of narrative literature. He addresses the question of the Pentateuch’s historical background, briefly offering a few observations related to the Pentateuch’s setting and compositional history that will orient subsequent discussion (4–7). He then explores further the relationship between the Pentateuch’s historical background and the meaning of the text. A key aspect of his purpose here is to clarify the point that historical events, those recounted in the biblical text, are quite different from the texts themselves. His ultimate purpose is “to turn our attention to the texts themselves and their unique depiction of the events of biblical history” (15).
This sets the stage for what is one of the most distinctive emphases of Sailhamer’s hermeneutics and approach to biblical theology. In a section titled “Revelation in Scripture (Text) and in History (Event),” he makes a concerted effort to show the apparently subtle yet real and important distinction between the events that lie behind the biblical accounts and the biblical accounts themselves. “Evangelical scholars,” contends Sailhamer, “have not always been clear on this point. Although holding to a view of Scripture as God’s revelation, they have tended to interpret the formula ‘revelation in history’ in such a way that the term history refers not to the text of Scripture but rather to the past events themselves” (17, emphasis original).
While he makes clear his affirmation that God did reveal himself in history and that the biblical text is indeed a true account of that history, he sees it as a profoundly important principle to identify the locus of inspired meaning in the text itself, not in the events to which the text refers. If this basic principle is true, and Sailhamer believes it absolutely is, then it should consistently govern the way interpreters and exegetes operate hermeneutically. He fears this is not the case. Driving home the point, he laments that a confusion on this point can amount to a “biblical” theology that is merely either a philosophical treatment of history or an expounding of the meaning of historical events, rather than an enterprise in interpreting the inspired Scriptures themselves (18–22).
This section is followed by a brief engagement with the question of the Pentateuch’s authorship and the sources underlying its composition. A key point here is that Sailhamer acknowledges the general Mosaic nature of the Pentateuch, pointing to later biblical authors and their comments at least generally attributing to Moses its authorship. That being said however, he also wishes to account for the “fact that the Pentateuch itself comes to us as an anonymous work and was apparently intended to be read as such” (23). He points to Luke’s process of gathering and compiling sources for his Gospel account (Luke 1:1–4) and suggests something similar may account for the unity of the Pentateuch along with a “noticeable lack of uniformity” (24). Later in the introduction, when he considers further the composition of the Pentateuch, he will have more to say about the way the author appears to have interacted with various sources.
One detail noted in the commentary may provide a helpful illustration here as well. In his comments on Deuteronomy 34, Sailhamer remarks that the last chapter reads as though it was written at a much later time. “By the time this last chapter was written, the burial of Moses was so far in the past that the location of his grave was uncertain to the writer: ‘To this day no one knows where the grave is.’ (v. 6)” (478).
The introduction continues with a section in which he offers further insights on the literary form of historical narrative. Here he introduces another momentous point that will continue to arise throughout this commentary and in his other works. He identifies the Sinai covenant as the central and “most far-reaching theme in the Pentateuch” (27). This observation is neither new nor profound, however. What he highlights distinctively, though, is that “while the Pentateuch is about the Sinai covenant, it is not the document of that covenant.” Instead, the Pentateuch gives a textual depiction of the events of Sinai and the covenant the Lord made with Israel there, and as a narrative piece of literature—a book—its purpose is to give an appraisal of that covenant. The Torah, or Pentateuch, evaluates the Sinai covenant and Mosaic law “as an object under consideration,” and it looks ahead to the coming of another covenant. In this way, the Pentateuch’s vision is oriented to a future hope; it is eschatological in its perspective.
A section overviewing the structure of the Pentateuch builds on this notion. Here he moves into a more extensive development of the Pentateuch’s purpose as it is discerned based on the structure. This is where he explains what he means by “compositional analysis.” For Sailhamer, what matters most in analyzing the composition of the Pentateuch is not discerning the literary strata underlying the text as we have it. Rather, our focus should be on the strategy of its final composition, discernible by attending to the features of that composition (45).
He observes several features of the Pentateuch’s literary design, things like the pattern of narrative, poetry, and epilogue that can be seen at the smaller levels of the early chapters of Genesis and at the broadest level of the Pentateuch as a whole. The poems in this pattern are most notable, and especially the large poetic sections of Gen 49:1–27; Exod 15:1–17; Num 23:7–10, 18–24; 24:3–9, 15–24; and Deut 32–33 (34). These poems mark macrostructural junctures, or seams, and in the case of three of these poetic compositional seams, the key announcement that frames the poem orients the readers’ perspective in terms of what will happen at “the end of days” (36). This, says Sailhamer, is a crucial feature informing the overall vantage point of the Pentateuch. It appears “that one of the central concerns lying behind the final shape of the Pentateuch is an attempt to uncover an inherent relationship between the past and the future” (37). The Pentateuch begins “in the beginning” (Gen. 1:1), and its author has strategically composed the overall work to look ahead to the days to come.
Much more could be said to summarize this work’s introduction, not to mention the commentary itself. Further sections of the introduction go on to trace the broad structure of the Pentateuch, flying over at a high level and touching down on some of the features Sailhamer sees as most important to the overall shape and message of the Pentateuch. One final large section considers the role of the Mosaic law in relation to the Pentateuch’s theological message (59–78), and this section itself is worth careful attention.[7] Following some aspects of Hans-Christoph Schmitt’s argument,[8] Sailhamer suggests that one of the goals of the Pentateuch is to contrast Abraham and Moses as representatives of two different ways to live in relation to the Mosaic law (61). Abraham, who lived before the law was given, exemplifies keeping the heart of the law by faith (Gen 15:6; 26:5), while Moses and the people of Israel, for whom Moses serves as a representative, demonstrate what it looks like not to trust God, to fail at keeping the law, and to miss out on the blessings of the Promise Land as a result (Num 20:1–13). Sailhamer concludes this section, and the introduction, by asserting that, if his description of the Pentateuch’s compositional strategy is accurate, then it uncovers “an initial and clear indication of the Pentateuch’s view of the Mosaic law. The view is remarkably similar to that of Jeremiah 31:33ff” (77). The author of the Pentateuch sees the law in essentially the same way as the Prophets when they look ahead to the new covenant to come. The Pentateuch’s message is eschatological.
The main body of the commentary is necessarily selective, which Sailhamer acknowledges. Space is lacking to give extensive analysis at a granular level. His comments on Genesis–Deuteronomy follow the outline given in the book’s front matter and introduction; he traces the narrative’s strategic composition and draws out the meaning as it is expressed by the author. Sailhamer is unswervingly attentive to the text itself and the meaning that arises out of it. Any pastor planning to preach from the Pentateuch and any Bible reader who wants to know God through his word would do very well to work through this important volume.
Josh Mathews
Gateway Seminary (October 2025)
TL;DR
The Pentateuch as Narrative by John Sailhamer is a commentary on the whole Pentateuch. This work, particularly its introduction, is especially helpful in exposing readers to the essential elements of Sailhamer’s thought and approach to biblical theology.
Sailhamer highlights the central importance of interpreting the Pentateuch as a book. It is meant to be read as a five-part, unified work; it was composed by a human author whose intention is not different from that of the divine author; and as written text it should be interpreted with attention to its strategic literary design.
The locus of biblical meaning is the text of Scripture, not the events to which the text refers. This basic yet important and often-neglected distinction informs Sailhamer’s approach at every point, in this commentary and in his broad body of scholarly work.
Sailhamer views the Sinai covenant and Mosaic law as central narrative themes in the Pentateuch. However, he goes to extensive lengths to demonstrate that the Pentateuch itself gives an appraisal of the Sinai covenant that is not optimistic.
Sailhamer understands the Pentateuch’s perspective to be eschatological. It looks ahead to a new covenant that will surpass the Sinai covenant.
Sailhamer’s hermeneutical framework and interpretive insights, in this commentary and elsewhere, help shape Christian readers to approach the Bible on its own terms and to understand and respond to its unified messianic message.
[1] John H. Sailhamer, The Pentateuch as Narrative: A Biblical-Theological Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992).
[2] John H. Sailhamer, Introduction to Old Testament Theology: A Canonical Approach (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995).
[3] John H. Sailhamer, The Meaning of the Pentateuch: Revelation, Composition, and Interpretation (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2009).
[4] John H. Sailhamer, “The Messiah and the Hebrew Bible,” JETS 44.1 (2001): 5–23.
[5] Walter C. Kaiser Jr., review of The Lord’s Anointed: Interpretation of Old Testament Messianic Texts, eds. Philip E. Satterthwaite, Richard E. Hess, and Gordon Wenham, JETS 42.1 (1999): 99–102.
[6] Sailhamer, “Messiah,” 23.
[7] This section is a distillation of an earlier article, John H. Sailhamer, “The Mosaic Law and the Theology of the Pentateuch,” WTJ 53 (1991): 241–61.
[8] Hans-Christoph Schmitt, “Redaktion Des Pentateuch Im Geiste Der Prophetie: Zur Bedeutung Der ‘Glaubens’-Thematik Innerhalb Der Theologie Des Pentateuch,” Vetus Testamentum 32.2 (1982): 170–89.
