In many ways it was like a marriage. There were promises—covenants they called them. And a sheer determination to make the marriage work—to make it last forever. Yet, this particular marriage was like no other; it was the marriage of a God and His people—of the Hebrew God Yahweh with the children of Israel. You might say that the Hebrew Bible, known to Christians as the Old Testament, provides the recorded history of this ancient marriage. It traces the love story between Israel and her God, a story that continues today in the lives of all those who look to the Holy Scriptures for inspiration, peace, and guidance.
The Old Testament could be described as the written story of the making, breaking, and renewal of God's love covenant with His people. The first holy man to make a covenant with Him was Abram, the father of the Hebrew nation. In the land of Mesopotamia, almost nineteen centuries before the birth of Christ, God promised Abram a beautiful land to the southward, where he and his children could establish a great nation that would someday extend to the far corners of the earth. Literally transformed by his encounter with God, who renamed him Abraham (or the "Father of Many Peoples"), he obediently journeyed to the land of Canaan and settled there, teaching his family to love and follow the God who had appeared to him.
For generations to come, Abraham's tribe passed down by word of mouth the story of their family's mutual promise and commitment to God. But over the centuries, the covenant with God was all but forgotten by Abraham's descendants when they migrated to Egypt to save themselves from starvation. In Egypt, as in Canaan, they were tempted to be unfaithful to the God of Abraham—and to worship instead local fertility gods and the Pharaoh King god. Eventually enslaved and oppressed by the Egyptians, the Israelites longed to be reunited with their God and to return home as a free people.
