In The Friendship of the Lord, Deryck Sheriffs works his way through major blocks of the Old Testament developing a rich spiritual theology. He brings key themes such as the metaphor of friendship and walking with God to the fore. Sheriffs recognizes the hermeneutical challenges of working with Old Testament passages today and tackles them thoughtfully.

Sheriffs’ spirituality is earthy and encompasses the full range of human emotion. He uses the experience of Job and Jeremiah to teach how “in dialogues with God, a whole spectrum of emotions comes into play—anger, hurt, despair and bitterness—expressed in accusation, plea and questioning” (210). Commitment to God is not some ethereal thing, but rather something that “involves an unreserved and wholehearted commitment made from the inner being” (110).

There are some significant problems with Sheriffs’ work. In places he imports modern concepts anachronistically. He speaks of the “‘secular’ and ‘sacred’” (164) as if the author of Proverbs had this distinction in his mental framework. In the chapter which analyzes Ecclesiastes, he points out that “Qohelet did not take the route of absurdity to atheism.” No one would have. The idea of atheism simply didn’t exist in Qohelet’s time.

Another problem is structural. In the introduction, Sheriffs states that “[t]he overall sample of topics draws on major blocks of the Old Testament and is roughly representative of what the Old Testament has to offer without attempting to be complete” (xii). Yet, with the exception of a brief excursus into Jeremiah’s complaints, Sheriffs completely ignores the prophets. He left the ‘Na’ out of the TaNaK.

While Friendship of the Lord has many insights into Old Testament spirituality and human nature, Sheriffs’ “Old Testament Spirituality” feels hollow with a full third of the Hebrew Bible missing from the conversation.

Sheriffs, Deryck. The Friendship of the Lord: An Old Testament Spirituality. Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 1996.