What kind of God?

We believe that the Torah also provides revelation for Christians today. As we have noted, however, since the Torah is situated in the ancient world, in the covenant with Israel, and in the context of sacred space, the revelation that we receive (we could call it the canonical revelation) takes on a different focus. The purpose of the Torah was to give Israel—and through them, the nations—an understanding of their God. If we want to understand the value of the Torah today, we might ask what our understanding of God would be if we did not have it. Imagine what Moses might have thought if confronted by Jesus and the New Testament writers in the second millennium BC. Without any further resources, he would have assumed that the God Jesus was claiming to be was more or less the same as the gods he knew from his culture—self-interested and exploitative, expecting Israel to provide for his needs but willing to offer benefits in exchange.—Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah, 215