This study of fourteen Old Testament stories was written for a North American audience. It is part of a series called Faith’s Horizons, which aims to correct a mis-understanding of stewardship in some churches. The faulty view is a somewhat natural one, that when the church leaders start talking about stewardship, what they really want is more money from the members. Vallet wants to promote the idea that to be a steward means far more than that. All our time, talents and expertise should be at God’s disposal, as well as our money. Church members need to broaden their perspectives. The series thus helpfully challenges the mental image of the church being like a bus, in which the driver sets the direction and chooses the route, and the passengers sit passively and contribute money as requested.

Each chapter of the book ends with discussion points to allow the book to be studied by small groups. There are also dramas and choral readings by Wanda Vassallo for use in larger groups. Vallet clearly wants his readers to ponder the issues of stewardship thoroughly.

In his treatments of the OT stories, there are so many quotations from other writers that the author’s own view is not prominent. The range of authors quoted is also small, suggesting a corpus of ‘sound’ commentators whose view can be safely adopted. (I distrust this idea.) Vallet’s reluctance to promote his own view was frustrating. I appreciated what he had to say, but had to search quite hard to find it. In some cases it was his personal stories relegated to the footnotes which were the most interesting. Perhaps Vallet felt out of his depth in commenting on Scripture. In this respect, there is a serious error on page 83—Jacob is not the same as Jabbok in Hebrew (Gen. 32). This suggests that his insights from Hebrew are not always first hand. Beware of writing on subjects you do not understand!

I was also uncertain of the value of trying to highlight the theme of stewardship in the OT. The notion is prominent in Jesus’ parables, but the attempt to find it in OT stories felt more like imposition than exposition. Some of the stories survived the burden better than others. Trying to make the Bible say what we want it to say is not a good idea, even if what we want to say seems helpful.

My final reservation was with the attempt to breathe new life into the theme of stewardship itself. After all, Jesus did not call his followers to make stewards of all nations. Not only is the effort to make people into true disciples more Christian, and therefore more appropriate for churches, but also it will lead them into being good stewards without the word itself needing to be mentioned.

With these caveats in mind, this book has a place in opening the Old Testament to those unfamiliar with it, in a group setting, where stewardship is part of the church tradition.

---