Before we look briefly at individual books we should be clear about certain viewpoints in Biblical writing. First, the writers of the Biblical books, from beginning to end, affirm the reality of God and the reality of God's relationship with mankind. Unlike many modern people, the Biblical writers never question whether God exists or whether, if he does, he is concerned with what happens in the world. A person may find himself rejecting or questioning what a Biblical writer has said, but to be fair to the writer, his viewpoint needs to be understood.

Secondly, Biblical writers were in the situations of their own times and wrote from those situations, which may have been very different from anything we have experienced. To reach what is of permanent value to people of all times, we have to try to understand the writer's original thinking and aims in writing so that we can distinguish between what related mainly to a specific cultural and historical situation and what continues to relate to human experience today.

Thirdly, we can describe the history of the people of Israel as salvation history. We need to understand one thing about history in general, that there is no history without interpretation of selected events. It is not difficult to understand this if we look at events of our own times. The same event, such as the struggle in Zimbabwe, can be interpreted in different ways by different people involved in it.

So the history of the people of Israel in the Bible is not just a record of good and bad rulers, battles, defeats and victories such as we might expect to find in the history of any nation, but an interpretation of God's action and intervention in Israel's life. In the Old Testament the word 'salvation' is often used simply with the idea of the people of God being saved from the attacks of their enemies, both national and personal, by their God. In the New Testament it takes on a deeper meaning of being rescued from the judgement of God, although this idea occurs in the Old Testament as well. The salvation history of the whole Bible presents the picture to us of the loving God who takes the initiative to rescue mankind from their sin and ignorance of him. God's intervention in human affairs begins with the people of Israel but moves towards the reconciliation of all mankind with himself, in and through Christ.