Critical Review of Dempster’s Dominion and Dynasty

Though it  has great value, Dominion and Dynasty is beset with a great weakness. Stephen Dempster’s attempt to read the whole Bible literarily fails to consider what the OT is and the contribution its nature and structure make to the question of the OT’s unity. By seeking the unity of the OT in a narrative plot unpacking the themes of dominion and dynasty, Dempster forces the OT into a procrustean bed, failing to adequately reckon with the unity given by its structure. That is, by adopting his bipartite narrative-commentary schema, Dempster ignores the significant external and internal evidence that the OT has a tripartite structure and gives undue priority to the narrative sections of the OT, resulting in several significant oversights. In this paper I argue that the tripartatite structure of the OT is to be preferred on both internal and external evidence, from this I derive the above criticisms of Dempster’s work.

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