Answer:
What a shock when Christians encounter a Jewish mode of reading these same books. As the Jewish scholar Moshe Goshen-Gottstein put it, where Christians see the Bible as a story about God, humanity, and salvation, Jews read it as being about God, people, and land. The story of Adam and Eve is a minor theme. Much more central is God’s call of Abraham to be the father of a great nation, and a blessing to the whole world through his obedient following of God’s way. There is no grand narrative in the Hebrew Bible, certainly not one that would culminate in the coming of Jesus, but more a collection of individual stories, sayings, and teachings that together constitute a tissue of instructions on how to live a good life as a Jew. There is little emphasis on “salvation,” if that is understood in otherworldly terms as “heaven,” and much more stress on the life of God’s people under the covenant.
