It is pleasing to see the often-ignored contribution of OT stories to biblical ethics given pre-eminence in this new book by Mary Mills. Mills organises her book around a very helpful three-layered model that aims to open up the interlocking dimensions of person/character, community and cosmos in biblical narratives in order to cash out their ethical value.

The book explores the three levels through the study of particular narratives. Section 1 examines person/character through case studies in Abraham, David and Esther. Section 2 looks to the stories of Ruth, Jonah and Joseph for clarity on the place of community in morality. Section 3 expounds the cosmic dimension through a study of time and space in Genesis 1–11, Daniel 1–7 and Job. Mills sums up a wide range of recent studies on these texts and this makes the chapters quite helpful for those who wish to get a feel for the diversity of contemporary interpretations of the passages in question. Unfortunately she rarely, if ever, appears to want to disagree with anyone and thus all interpretations are simply set alongside each other as equally legitimate or plausible. One upshot of this is that she feels her study has demonstrated that ‘morality, in any given text, is not a single message but consists of a plethora of interpretations, some contradictory to others’ (243). To some extent I agree. However, the problem here is that although many biblical stories are indeed ambiguous, the breath of ethical readings Mills tolerates is achieved in part by blurring any distinction between interpretations which aim to explain the narratorial perspective of the text and those which aim to critique the text from a contemporary ideology unknown to the author. In part the breadth of interpretations is achieved by allowing, what seem to me, implausible and perverse interpretations to stand unchallenged.

Perhaps the study of Abraham can illustrate some of my concerns. Such is the ambiguity of character representation in biblical narrative that Abraham, we are told, can legitimately be viewed as pious man, comic character, trickster, tragic character, savage parent and unworthy husband. When all the Abraham stories are read together we see him presented as a man of faith but if each story is read in isolation from its context then he emerges as a more ambiguous character (31). But to read these stories isolated from their literary context is no longer to read the book of Genesis and one has a recipe for distortion. The model of Abraham as pious man has been the dominant one in commentaries and rightly so as the structure of Genesis foregrounds it but one does not need to fragment the narrative to achieve Mills’ goal of perceiving Abraham as ambiguous. One can be a model of piety without being a model of perfection (a point Mills acknowledges, p. 34). However, with Mills, I want to recognise Abraham as having some ethically dubious character traits (e.g., trickster and imperfect husband) I find some of her discussion, especially of Genesis 22, unhelpful. For instance, following Mills, God and Abraham are two hostile males who reach the climax of their conflict at Moriah where both have to admit defeat (poor Isaac as a mere pawn in their battle of testosterone)! Or, following Delaney, Abraham is the brutal parent whose willingness to sacrifice Isaac imposes ‘a cultural paradigm of violence which leads to the crying out of children against their domestic abuse … over and over children are sacrificed to the will of the father(s)’ (43). But as Walter Moberly points out in his excellent discussion of Genesis 22, no Christian or Jew has ever used the story as a justification for child abuse because they always read it in canonical context (The Bible, Theology, and Faith, Cambridge, 2000, p. 129).

A final observation: Mills outlines a range of ways one can interpret the ethics of OT stories but the question of how OT stories can function in Christian ethics is never touched upon. The Christian reader will bring their own set of theological presuppositions to the interpretation of such stories (not least the desire to read them in canonical context) that will constrain what is to count as a legitimate Christian interpretation. Some of the interpretations in Mills’ book are interesting examples of what one can do with a story if one has different philosophical starting points but they are of limited help for the Christian seeking to appropriate OT narratives in the modern world. Though Mills’ book does not set out to do Christian ethics (and I am not criticising it for not doing so) Christian readers need to use it discerningly for this reason.

Nevertheless despite such criticisms, I actually found a considerable amount of material in Mills book with which to agree and welcome its restoration of narrative to the centre of biblical ethics.