While the field started out as a Christian endeavor written mostly by men and aimed to provide an objective knowledge of early revelation, in the twentieth century it became informed by other voices and views, including those of feminist and Jewish scholars, which provided new insights and showed ways that the early work was bound by the perspectives of their authors.
[1] The discipline of Old Testament (OT) theology is a rather recent development, barely going back further than the beginning of the nineteenth century.
This was a new way to look at the OT, as Robyn Routledge wrote in Old Testament Theology, “The OT was not written as a theological document, and a systematic approach necessarily involves imposing an alien order and structure on it.” Walther Eichrodt wrote his two volume OTT, published in 1933.
Eichrodt thought that the OT must be read in the way that the ancient Israelites would have, but there is one theme that acts as a “glue” that keeps all the theology together.
He argued the OT recorded the Heilsgeschichte, a word he coined, which is the story of salvation viewed through the eyes of faithful Israelites.
[5][6] In the late 1990s his body of work as of that time was reviewed by Marvin A. Sweeney and put in the larger context of the field of biblical theology; Sweeney wrote: "A great deal of his work focuses on the seminal question of identifying the role that Christian theological constructs have played in the reading of biblical literature, even when the reading is presented as historically based objective scholarship, and of developing reading strategies that can remove these constructs in order to let the biblical texts 'speak for themselves.'
"[7] Some theologians base their theology solely on observation of the presentation of God found in the sacred documents, a descriptive approach.
"The use of Biblical typology enjoyed greater popularity in previous centuries, although even now it is by no means ignored as a hermeneutic".
It does observe that the God of the OT exhibits grace persistently, undeterred by the lack of human obedience or response.
Then careful textual, linguistic, literary, historical, semantic, and philosophical exegesis must establish the basic foundational themes and aspects of any OT theology.
Anthropology, sociology, psychology, poetics, and linguistics offer helpful insights to mine the riches of these ancient revelation documents.
Paul D. Hanson observed, "the rich diversity of traditions found in the Old Testament does not yield a chaotic theological picture, but one that is both dynamic and unified.