The OT record shows God's dealing with his people time and again in the form of a covenant. William Dumbrell demonstrates God's developing relationship with his people and concludes that after the exile, Israel's understanding of her relationship with God demanded nothing short of a new covenant and a new creation to achieve his purpose.

The last word on Covenant Theology in Genesis Brilliant.

In “Covenant and Creation”, W.J. Dumbrell undertook an ambitious feat to weave the Noachian, Abrahamic, Sinai, Davidic covenants, and the New Covenant pointed to by the pre-exilic prophets into one cohesive covenant theology of the Old Testament. Although there is no separate chapter on the covenantal relationship between God and Adam (a relationship which Reformed theologians typically called ‘Covenant of Works’), Dumbrell offered an excursus on the topic. In that he ascribed the covenantal relationship to God’s very act of creation itself, thereby critiquing the traditional Reformed treatment as unsatisfactory.

There might be no lack of insightful vignettes in this short work; the achievement was severely hampered by Dumbrell’s penchant for convoluted sentence structure and profusion of relative pronouns. The readability of the book fell victim to opaque meanings in imprecise language.

As a case in point, on page 117, this sentence appears:

“In such a favoured relationship Israel might have been expected to have enjoyed the blessings which would have surely been associated with the notion of the divine presence in what has been defined in Exodus terms as a sanctuary.”

Or, on page 145:

“The immediate military antecedent which had posed a final threat to David’s complete occupancy of Palestine had been the Philistines who had been defeated in a campaign which had been divinely controlled …”

For an accomplished educator, such proclivity for complex sentences is astonishing.

The length of the book does not do justice to the weighty subject Dumbrell tried to expound. However, his treatments on pre-exilic prophets, particularly his corporate understanding of the Isaianic servant songs, are less than cogent. ( )