Typology: Understanding the Bible’s Promise-Shaped Patterns Study Pack

by James M. Hamilton Jr.

Publishers:

Zondervan Academic; Zondervan

, 2022

Overview

Read the Bible with Fresh Eyes as You See Scripture’s Promise-Shaped Patterns

When you read the Bible, have you ever noticed parallels between certain people, events, and institutions?  Should we understand Noah as a kind of new Adam, and if so, does that somehow point us to the second Adam? How are we to interpret these similarities?

In Typology-Understanding the Bibles Promise-Shaped Patterns, author James M. Hamilton Jr. shows that the similarities we find in the Bible are based on genuine historical correspondence and demonstrates how we recognize them in the repetition of words and phrases, the parallels between patterns of events, and key thematic equivalences. When read in light of God’s promises, these historical correspondences spotlight further repetitions that snowball on one another to build escalating significance.

This book stimulates fresh thinking on the relationship between the Old and New Testaments and will help pastors, preachers, and students better understand the dynamics of inner-biblical interpretation. It explores several of the “promise-shaped patterns” we see in the Old Testament including:

• Adam and New Adam
• Prophets, Priests, and Kings
• The Righteous Sufferer
• Creation
• Exodus and New Exodus
• Marriage

Hamilton shows that the prophets and sages of Israel learned to interpret Scripture from Moses and his writings. And by tracing the organic development of subsequent biblical patterns, he explains how these patterns created expectations that are fulfilled in Christ. Jesus himself taught his followers to understand the Old Testament in this way (Luke 24:45), and the authors of the New Testament taught the earliest followers of Jesus how to read the Bible through a typological lens.

Typology-Understanding the Bible’s Promise-Shaped Patterns equips pastors, bible teachers, students, and serious Bible readers to understand and embrace the typological interpretive perspective of the biblical authors. You will learn to read the Bible as it was intended by its original authors while cultivating a deeper love and appreciation for the Scriptures.

Key Features

• Stimulates fresh thinking on the relationship between the Old and New Testaments
• Helps pastors, preachers, and students better understand the dynamics of inner-biblical interpretation
• Explores several of the “promise-shaped patterns” we see in the Old Testament

Praise for Typology

This book is an astonishingly rich exploration of the contours and textures of the overarching message of the whole Bible. Jim Hamilton painstakingly assembles a veritable mountain of evidence for the argument that the biblical writers, under God, knew exactly what they were doing, and that from the beginning, they were consciously paving the way for the Christ to come. Every page deserves careful study, for so much ground is covered in such stimulating (and sparkling) detail.

—Gary Millar, principal, Queensland Theological College

Jim Hamilton has written a clear and theologically rich work on typology, demonstrating how the scriptural story of redemption is anchored in God’s promises of the Messiah. Typology: Understanding the Bible’s Promise-Shaped Patterns shows forth both the unity of Scripture and the beautiful layers of its truths, and best of all it provides fresh lenses for beholding the glories of our Savior.

—L. Michael Morales, professor of biblical studies, Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary

Hamilton continues to help readers become biblically literate by sensitizing them to the micro-level clues as to the nature of what the Bible is all about. As God’s declaratives (“let there be”) shape the created order, so God’s promises shape redemptive history. Discerning typological connections between these promises and their fulfillment in Christ, and the meaningful pattern they create, is part and parcel of coming to have a biblical worldview–seeing God, God’s world, and God’s people from the perspective of the biblical authors.

—Kevin J. Vanhoozer, research professor of systematic theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School