Tradition must give way to the clear statements of the Scripture

    “This is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, ​whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood’.” Pope Leo on Palm Sunday, Vatican City   Do not all the peoples loathe iniquity? And yet it is spread by them all.  Does not the fame of truth issue from the mouth of all the nations? Yet is there a lip or tongue which holds to it? Which nation likes to be oppressed by another stronger than itself, or likes its wealth to be wickedly seized? And yet which nation has not oppressed another, and where is there a people which has not seized [another]’s wealth? Geza Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, Revised and extended 4th ed. (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 272.  It is precisely humanity’s complete dishonesty and the nations’ struggles...

 Moses’s interpretation of redemptive history will become the normative pattern that later biblical authors embrace. Adam and the covenant of creation are prototypes, molds that shape and give meaning to the future biblical story line. As the Pentateuch develops, we find numerous “seeds” patterned after Adam , what we might call ectypes. Each ectype advances redemptive history and God’s reclamation of humanity from sin while also f alling short of total restoration , usually on account of each figure repeating an Adam-like “fall.”   Thus, each instantiation in the pattern creates further expectation of a coming fulfillment. These repeated patterns and the corresponding promises of eschatological salvation (e.g., Gen. 3:15; 5:29; 12:1–3; 17:1–8; 49:8–12; Num. 24:17–19) show that Moses sees Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Israel as prophetically foreshadowing a greater antitype in the future—one who will recapitulate the patterns of the past while not succumbing to the failures of the...