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Spiritual Forensics

Wednesday, February 13th, 2013 | Author:

But examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good.  1 Thessalonians 5:21  NASB

Examine everything – It is more difficult to unlearn than to learn.  The problem is that as we grow older we discover that a great deal of what we learned has to be unlearned before we can gain new insight.  Paul’s audience was like us.  They already “knew” many things, but what they knew stood in the way of what they needed to understand.  Therefore, Paul tells them to examine everything (panta dokimazete).  So must we.  The only question is how to do that.

“The desire for explanations is a very understandable human need.  We want to hear the truth, and we want to understand why and for what purpose a certain thing happened.  However, we also have another, simultaneous wish: we expect this truth to be easily understood.  These two wishes are, in most cases, mutually exclusive.  Our assumptions about our ability to understand are often quite presumptuous.  Often, when we do get an explanation, we are unable to understand it. . . . That does not mean, however, that we ought not to question.”[1]

So the first thing in our quest is the question.  Our answers are useless if we do not know the question.  Why did Paul say this?  What did Paul mean by each term?  How did Paul’s exhortation fit into his own cultural view?  Who were the people he addressed?  Questions, questions, questions – all needing to be answered before we can say anything certain about Paul’s message.  This is the role of spiritual forensics (thank you Karen Chin for this wonderful phrase).  That means, among other things, that we can’t pretend that Ruth is an Old Testament version of West Side Story.  It isn’t even a version of East Side Story.  If we want to understand God’s Word, we will have to dig through the words He used to communicate to us long before we can start applying the meaning to our lives.

Paul’s exhortation implies one other crucial assumption.  There is a standard.  Paul uses the Greek verb dokimazo.  It means “to examine, to prove, to test.”  But all examination, all testing, implies a standard by which something is tested.  There has to be an answer key in order to score an exam.  There has to be a measuring stick in order to calculate distance.  And there has to be a system of government in order to live in a Kingdom.  The biblical standard is Torah.  There can be no doubt about this.  Everything Yeshua does and everything his disciples do after Him is measured by the standard of Torah, the assumed guide of all orthodox Jewish behavior.  If you pull Torah out of the mix, you cannot understand anything in the New Testament documents.

With that in mind, we can list the ten principles of spiritual forensics:

1. Revelation is spoken before it is written – it was manifested in the authors before it was communicated in written form.

2.  The meaning of the manifested message must be understood according to the culture, time, place and circumstances of the original audience.

3.  Grammar – the whole system of the language, Syntax – arrangement of words and phrases, Morphology – the form and inflection, Phonology – the sounds, Structure – consonants as integral components of meaning, and Idioms must all be considered.

4.  Hebrew has layers of meaning and each layer must be understood in order to grasp the full manifestation – PaRDeS plus exegetical intricacies like letters + pictures.

5. If the meaning we supply to the text could not be understood by the original audience, then our interpretation of the text is probably wrong.

6. A contemporary application of the text can be supplied only after we have determined as best as possible what the original audience would have understood.

7. Understanding the author’s motivation is crucial to understanding the original meaning and the contemporary application, if any.

8. Ignoring the cultural and historical setting of the text allows the contemporary audience to read into the text what the cultural presupposition of the current reading audience assumes to be true.

9. Scripture is one.  No interpretation of the text that either adds to or subtracts from the original meaning in contradiction of the whole text can be legitimate.

10.  NO interpretation of the text is a matter of personal revelation alone.  The interpretation of the text is always a function of the believing community, not of any particular individual.

And you thought that reading the Bible was easy?  That’s another cultural myth.  We all want easy answers, but God often gives us parables that are difficult to understand.

Topical Index:  exegesis, spiritual forensics, 1 Thessalonians 5:21, examine, test, dokimazo

[1] Adin Steinsaltz, Simple Words, pp. 94-95

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Exegetical Exercises

Wednesday, December 12th, 2012 | Author:

“but this is what was spoken of through the prophet Joel:”  Acts 2:16  NASB

This is what – Most of us are quite familiar with Peter’s exegesis on the day of Pentecost.  Christian theologians often cite this passage as the transitional text from Judaism to Christianity as if the Church really began with the tongues of fire.  Careful scholars of Jewish literature and culture know better, but that doesn’t seem to make much difference to popular belief.

Rather than entertain an argument about the ecclesiastical intention of Peter’s statement, I want to look at a few words that are often overlooked.  They are (in Greek) touto estin – “this is what.”  These words seem so innocent, yet a little reflection reveals that Peter’s declaration is anything but obvious.  The fact is that Joel’s prophecy is not about the event of Pentecost at all.  Joel’s prophecy is about the time of the destruction of the Temple.  Joel’s prophecy is about events in the 6th Century BCE.  Joel’s prophecy has nothing to do with tongues of fire, speaking in foreign languages or the announcement of Yeshua’s sacrificial death.  That’s why these little words are so important.  They teach us something about the way the Jews understood the interpretation of Scripture.  And what they teach us is radically different from the way we as Western believers understand Scriptural exegesis.

Why do we need to pay attention to this lesson from Peter?  Because nearly every author of the New Testament, and Yeshua Himself, uses the same technique.  In other words, the writers of the Ketuvim Netzarim do not handle the Tanakh as most seminarians or preachers handle the Old Testament.  The writers of the New Testament look for pattern applications, not historical and cultural context.  They pay attention to connection points, sometimes quite obscure and sometimes quite contrived, in order to tie one part of Scripture to another.  They rarely pay attention to the place, time and historical circumstances of the passages.  Peter’s declaration is but one of dozens of examples.  The historical and cultural reality is that Joel has nothing to do with Pentecost.  But Peter doesn’t care about the historical and cultural reality.  He only cares that his insight shows him a way to connect something Joel said with a current event.  Peter’s exegetical method is Midrashim – the application of one idea to the context of another idea.

Go back and read the gospels.  Each gospel author does the same thing.  Midrashim!  Not Western exegesis.  When you investigate most of the passages that begin, “As it is written,” or something similar, you will discover that the original passage has very little to do with its prophetic application.  In fact, quite often the author changes the original to fit what he wants it to say in the new context.  And he still considers his changes to be “the word of the Lord.”

What lesson can we draw from these curious linguistic facts?  Perhaps it isn’t enough to simply realize that Scripture was written from an Hebraic perspective.  Perhaps we must also read it from an Hebraic perspective.  Perhaps our ideas of proper exegesis need to be revised if we are going to understand the use of the Tanakh in the New Testament.  Perhaps we are the ones out of joint rather than the authors who played so “fast and loose” with the text.  Perhaps we need to rethink what we mean by words like “plenary inspiration,” “inerrancy” and “exegesis.”

Topical Index:  Acts 2:16, Joel 2:28, exegesis, midrash, this is what, touto estin

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Through the Looking-Back Glass

Monday, July 09th, 2012 | Author:

For now we see in a mirror dimly. But then face to face; now I know in part, but then I shall know fully just as I also have been fully known.  1 Corinthians 13:12  NASB

In a mirror – Following his famous summary of the power of love, Paul comments on the human condition of partial understanding.  He compares our present situation with that of a child who inevitably increases comprehension with age.  His imagery of the mirror has inspired many sermons about the wonders of heaven when we will know in full.  But perhaps there is a more immediate application that will assist us in exegesis.

The first thing we need to know about the Greek word esoptron is that it is an idiom.  That means a word-for-word translation probably won’t capture the author’s intention.  In this case, the idea of a “mirror” isn’t like our mercury-backed glass but rather about the imperfection of the image.  The use of a related word (katotrizomai) in 2 Corinthians 3:18 demonstrates that this “glass” makes visible what was otherwise invisible.  The emphasis is not on the reflected image but rather on the clarity or lack thereof.

With this in mind, we may notice that historical perspective operates in precisely the same way.  Paul might have said, “For now, as a result of our limited historical insight, we don’t apprehend clearly.”  Paul’s “mirror” is the lack of 20-20 hindsight.  In other words, what we really want is a looking-back glass, a way of seeing the meaning of things as if we had true historical perspective in the present moment.  But, of course, we don’t.  And that’s the important caution.  If our exegesis depends on having a looking-back glass, then it probably isn’t an exegesis that fits the time and place of the author simply because human beings don’t understand what events mean as they happen (see Ecclesiastes 8:7). http://skipmoen.com/2011/11/23/the-cutting-edge/

This implies that answering the question, “What did this mean to the audience that first heard it?” cannot begin with our insights, hindsight or foresight.  We can add these factors after we examine the time and place of the author, but we must be aware that these factors are additions to the text.  It is an unfortunate fact that most sermons treat the Scriptures as if our context is the right context.  No matter how spiritual or uplifting the message, if it relies on understanding that comes after the event, it imports meaning.  By the way, this is exactly what the New Testament authors do with citations from the Tanakh.  They add meaning to the words of the prophets because, from their perspective, they see with a “looking-back” glass.  It is perfectly legitimate for them to do so, but it is not legitimate to claim that this was the original meaning of the prophets’ words.  We face exactly the same situation today.  We “see” more than Paul saw.  When we interpret Paul’s words in terms of our historical hindsight, we add to his understanding, and that is not the same as saying, “This is what Paul meant.”  Exegesis requires examination of the present circumstances of the author, not the reader.

So, how do you read your Bible?  Are you using a “looking-back” glass?

Topical Index:  mirror, esoptron, exegesis, 1 Corinthians 13:12

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Reading What You Want It to Say

Thursday, July 05th, 2012 | Author:

“You serpents, you brood of vipers, how shall you escape the sentence of hell?”  Matthew 23:33 NASB

Brood of vipers – Do you read the Scriptures with an ear toward what you want it to say?  Do you read with your past associations, instruction and cultural background as the interpretive pattern?  Or do you read Scripture as if it were written to you like today’s newspaper?  Don’t brush off these questions too quickly.  If you don’t begin by attempting to understand the words of Scripture in the historical and cultural setting of their authors, you will end up with outrageous and erroneous conclusions.  Let me give you an example.

Shmuley Boteach purports to have written an accurate analysis of the real Jesus.  In his book, Kosher Jesus, he examines Jesus’ declaration recorded in Matthew 23:33.  He concludes:  “There are many reasons to believe that this verse is a forgery.  First of all, common sense dictates this doesn’t sound anything like the Jesus we know.  These poisonous words, ‘You snakes!  You brood of vipers!  How will you escape being condemned to hell?’ seem utterly inconsistent with the beautiful teachings on ethics in the Sermon on the Mount about the meek and humble inheriting the earth.  Was Jesus really prone to such vulgar outbursts and temper tantrums?  Indeed, this later, interpolated Jesus sounds like a man with serious anger issues who can’t control his rage.”[1]

What can I say?  Apparently Shmuley has the inside track on what “fits” the vocabulary of the “correct” Jesus.  His comment makes you wonder if Mahatma Gandhi ever uttered an invective against the British or if Mother Teresa ever said an unkind word toward the uncompassionate Christian leaders of her own Church.  What’s worse is that Shmuley doesn’t seem to understand the power and indictment of the Sermon on the Mount either.  In his view, all of Jesus’ words must be peace and light.  Otherwise, they are forgeries.  Of course, he is the proper authority to tell us when a forgery has occurred.  How does he know?  Because “forgeries” don’t fit the way he wants the text to read.

Boteach seems to ignore the fact that Yeshua is speaking about hypocrites and that He is quoting John the Baptist, who also addressed his remark to unrepentant inspectors.  Boteach apparently doesn’t realize that this is an idiom from the first century, an insult used by others in antiquity.  Boteach requires Yeshua to meet his standards of self-control which, of course, can never include emotional outbursts in the face of self-serving depravity.  Apparently Boteach hasn’t read Essene literature either.[2]  One thing is quite clear.  Boteach is a contemporary liberal.  He might be Jewish by birth, but he seems to have forgotten the outrage of YHWH found throughout the Tanakh.

I beg you not to make the same mistake.  It is so easy to read the text the way we want to read it, to understand the word according to our definitions.  It is so easy to be “offended” by Scripture because it doesn’t fit our ethical view.  But that is like dismissing Tolstoy’s War and Peace because it doesn’t accurately describe tactical nuclear weapons.  Context matters!  Dismiss the context and you can make the text say whatever you wish.

Topical Index:  brood of vipers, Matthew 23:33, Matthew 3:7, Boteach, exegesis


[1] Shmuley Boteach, Kosher Jesus, p. 130.

[2] The community of the Essenes referred to unfaithful Israelites as “dragon’s venom and viper’s poison.”

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Pattern Paradigms

Sunday, May 06th, 2012 | Author:

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.  Mark 1:1  NASB

Son of God – “What the sages have done with Scripture then becomes clear.  They have taken its narrative and discerned a pattern within it, and this pattern then has guided them in thinking about the present.  Whatever happens finds its place within the paradigm, or the model, that they have formed of Scripture’s narrative.”[1]  Neusner notes that this is the basis of rabbinic exegesis.  It is not exegesis based on cultural-historical-linguistic analysis as we find in contemporary Christianity.  It is exegesis based on repetition of patterns in Scripture, patterns that may have no apparent historical or linguistic connection.  Unless we realize that this is what guides the authors of the New Testament, that they are the product of rabbinic Judaism, we will attempt to make their statements conform to our view of proper exegesis and in the process torture their efforts to communicate hidden patterns.

We can clearly see the influence of this rabbinic background in the genealogy of Matthew.  Matthew pays some attention to historical personages, but he deliberately manipulates the sequence and the names in his genealogy in order to produce a particular gematria – a pattern of three sets of fourteen generations.  Why does he alter the history to fit this pattern?  Because the pattern is more important than the actual historical record.  The name “David” has the numerical value in Hebrew of 14, and Matthew’s Hebrew gospel uses this numerical value in the construction of his artificial genealogy in order to demonstrate that Yeshua is the promised Davidic ruler.

If Matthew uses pattern paradigms in his writing, what makes us think that the other New Testament authors don’t do the same thing?  Daniel Boyarin, a contemporary Jewish rabbinic scholar, argues that the term “Son of God” is part of a pattern paradigm.  Drawing on Daniel 7, Boyarin demonstrates that Judaism already contained the concept of a second divine person called the Son of God in its pattern view of prophecy.  According to Boyarin, the term “Son of God” was already part of the idea of the Davidic Messiah as king of Israel.  “The Messiah-Christ existed as a Jewish idea long before the baby Jesus was born in Nazareth.  That is, the idea of a second God as viceroy to God the Father is one of the oldest of theological ideas in Israel.”[2]

Forget the mistake about the birthplace and the name of the infant and notice what Boyarin, a completely orthodox Jew, is saying.  He is saying that the authors of the gospels were pattern-conscious Jews who wrote within the cultural context of theological thinking of their day.  They recognized patterns from the Tanakh that fit (with some help) events they were experiencing in the present.  They did not write new theology.  They wrote stories that emphasized and elaborated these patterns because they believed that the ancient patterns were repeating and that the key to understanding the world was found in the examination of these repetitions.  Imagine for a moment what impact this has on our view of interpreting the Bible.  We see Scripture as a collection of historical sequence, cultural information, legislation, ritual and cultus.  But if the actual authors don’t view Scripture that way, that means that the way they use Scripture will be entirely different than our examination procedure.  How then are we supposed to understand what they meant if we bring the wrong interpretive scheme to the text?  It’s like bringing a shovel to the garage to take apart a carburetor.  Wrong tool for the job.

The interpretation of Scripture within Judaism is built on the idea that “events form patterns, and patterns govern what is going to happen in the future.”[3]  If we don’t look for the intentional pattern elaboration in the New Testament authors, are we really reading what they have to say?  If Neusner and Boyarin are right (and they are, after all,  Jewish), then what have we been doing all these years by trying to force the Jewish view of Scripture into the Western box of analysis?

Topical Index: exegesis, paradigm, Son of God, Mark 1:1, gematria


[1] Jacob Neusner, Judaism When Christianity Began, p. 81.

[2] Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ, p. 44.

[3] Neusner, Judaism When Christianity Began, p. 80.

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That Was Then

Thursday, December 03rd, 2009 | Author:

“But this I admit to you, that according to the Way which they call a sect I do serve the God of our fathers, believing everything that is in accordance with the Law, and that is written in the Prophets;” Acts 24:14

Everything – Brevard Childs was a very influential teacher at Harvard.  His approach to biblical interpretation has affected many professors today.  Childs believed that the way to understand the Scripture was to read it through the eyes of the Church.  He called this “canonical” theology.  What it means is this:  each generation must reinterpret the meaning of the text in contemporary application even though the words of the text are understood in their historical-culture context.  In other words, the key is what does the Bible mean to me.  I’m guessing that you have heard this type of interpretation many times.  In fact, you may even unconsciously read the Bible in this way.  Childs’ influence permeates hundreds of pulpits.

Of course, this raises an enormous problem.  What standard do I use to determine the correct interpretation of the text.  It simply cannot be how I feel about the text since personal feelings are notoriously bad judgments of truth.  This is why Childs suggests that the Church tradition sets the standard.  It’s not one person.  It’s the history of many people, all wrapped up in the Creeds, doctrines and dogmas of the Church.

Scot McKnight’s book, The Blue Parakeet, follows Childs.  McKnight says that “ordinary people need to learn to read the Bible through tradition or they will misread the Bible.”[1] “We may learn to read the Bible for ourselves, but we must be responsible to what the church has always believed.”[2] He cites the Nicene Creed, the Apostles’ Creed and the doctrines of the Reformation as examples of the standard.  Did you notice the sleight of hand here?  The “church” did not always believe these things.  The “church” only began believing the content of the Creeds after it tossed away its Hebrew heritage.  What the “church” believes today is based on doctrinal formations that were developed after 300AD when the church was well on its way toward Greek metaphysics.  Childs, McKnight and many others have ignored what the text actually says.  Paul believed everything in accordance with Torah, not in accordance with the popes, the bishops and the church councils.  Paul believed what the Hebrews taught, not what Tertullian, Irenaeus and Chrysostrom taught.  Paul was a Jew, not a Greek.

If you learn to read the Bible through the interpretive history of the church, you will read it as a Greek.  You will incorporate centuries of Greek thinking into your view of Scripture.  You will apply “universal” principles to contemporary society without considering the eternal commands of YHWH found in Torah.  So, you will say things like “the first Jewish Christians probably kept kosher.  That’s not for today.”[3] Really?  Says who?  The “church”?  The idea that there were Jewish Christians in the first century is itself an anachronism.  How many other instructions of Torah have we put on the shelf because the “church” no longer believes what Paul believed?  Are we going to be people of the Book or people of the pew?

Topical Index:  everything, Torah, interpretation, exegesis, Childs, McKnight, Acts 24:14

[1] Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet, p. 29.

[2] McKnight, p. 31.

[3] McKnight, p. 28.

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Chain Letter

Tuesday, October 06th, 2009 | Author:

and all the brethren who are with me, to the churches of Galatia: Galatians 1:2

Churches – When you read the Bible, do you pay attention to the proper context, culture and historical circumstances behind the text? Or do you read the Bible as if it was written for you yesterday? This is not a trivial question. I wrote about this on April 16, but it is worth repeating many times. Nothing is more important for understanding God’s Word!

One of the biggest problems in Christian practice is the lack of a proper understanding of Biblical exegesis. More theological mistakes occur due to a lack of proper exegesis than any other methodological errors. Why? Because a great number of believers treat the Bible as though it has no cultural bias and was written in its entirety last week. Neither of these assumptions is true. Just like any other document, the Bible comes to us in a cultural context (in fact, in several cultural contexts) and it is the progressive revelation of God over the course of thousands of years. These facts must become part of any attempt to interpret the text.

Imagine trying to understand the meaning of The Iliad without any reference to Greek history, mythology or culture. Imagine reading The Iliad as if it were written last week, applying it to today’s issues without any attempt to understand what the original audience received. That would be equivalent to how most Christians treat the Bible. We have this tendency to pull a verse from some book, make a direct application to our lives and act as though God’s Word was written for us and no one else. This is the “God spoke to me” variety of exegesis. This is naïve and dangerous (just ask any woman of God who has been told that Scriptures teach she cannot preach or teach men).

Walter Kaiser emphasizes one other critical point about proper exegesis. The Scriptures are progressive revelation. That means they were not all available at the same time. The fact that we have all the books now doesn’t mean the authors had all the books available when they wrote their volumes. Kaiser’s point is that if we are going to understand the writing of any particular author, we cannot use material written after the passages we want to interpret. We can’t use Revelation to help us understand what John was thinking when he wrote his gospel because Revelation didn’t exist when he wrote the gospel. But we can use Psalms, Deuteronomy, Genesis, etc. because those works were available to John when he wrote his gospel. This might seem like an obvious point until we consider the chronology of authorship in the New Testament (in Hebrew the Ketuvim Netzarim). The order of the books in our New Testament is not an authorship chronology. In fact, the order is completely arbitrary, established by some church council without any regard to events or authors. Why does this matter? Well, when we look at authorship chronology, we discover Galatians was written before any other Pauline letter. Therefore, what Paul (Rabbi Sha’ul) writes in Galatians cannot be interpreted according to what he later writes in Romans or Thessalonians. Galatians is the foundation for the rest, not the result of a long process of theological reflection from the rest. The letter to the Romans does not come first.

We know that Paul wrote Galatians with the intention of having the letter circulated among the churches in that province. And we know he wrote it after the Jerusalem council (Acts 15). We know the real issue among assemblies in Galatia is the relationship between law and grace. But what we can’t do in order to understand Sha’ul’s thinking in Galatians is to run to Romans 6-8 and use that to explain Galatians.

For a fuller discussion of this issue, go here.  But even if you don’t look at the rest of the picture, start treating Scripture as if it were a screen play. Take it in the order that it was written. Your exegesis will improve. You will be able to see the relationship between historical events and the words of Scripture. Things will make a lot more sense. And you won’t make so many mistakes when it comes to understanding the context before the application.

Topical Index: exegesis, Galatians 1:2, church, history

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Genesis, Again?

Sunday, September 27th, 2009 | Author:

Writing Today’s Word leaves me with an enormous problem.  Scripture isn’t bits and pieces.  It’s a whole unit, an extended story of God’s interaction with the world, in particular, with the people He calls Israel.  How it all fits together is really the job of exegesis.  Dealing with one tiny piece at a time often obscures the whole forest among the leaves of a single tree.  So, when I write about one small word, or one part of one small word, it might lead the reader to conclude that bigger things have gone amiss.  Where is the illumination of the cross or the blood, the glorification of God or the final victory celebration?  Where do we find the grand themes of justification, sovereignty, ecclesiology and eschatology?  They are there, but hidden from view in the microscopic detail of an individual leaf.

I firmly believe that without a deep grasp of the beginning – Genesis – we will quickly get lost in the rest of the plot.  Everything depends on what God orders at the beginning.  Everything moves from and elaborates the deep themes of the beginning.  If you can’t find it in Genesis, then you are probably looking for the wrong things.

But what a huge problem this is!  The last time I taught Genesis as a group study (not as a quick seminar) it took 18 months to go through the text, 2 hours a week.  That’s about 150 hours of study.  We could easily have doubled that, but we had to hurry!  Today’s Word could spend the rest of my life just in Genesis, one word at a time.  We would be far, far richer for the experience.  We would know our Lord much, much better.  But then what do we do with all the rest?  Wait for eternity, I suppose.

So, Today’s Word jumps around.  It picks a word here, a phrase there.  That might leave you thinking that the WHOLE doesn’t matter, or that it is disconnected from the big issues.  Please don’t draw that tragic conclusion.  The only reason Today’s Word moves across the biblical geography is to give you a little hint about the depth of every passage.  But if I had my choice, we would spend twenty years on Genesis.

Exegetically, Today’s Word deliberately commits a big mistake.  We should provide much more background.  We should look at the bigger setting of each verse.  We should do a lot more work before we pick up a single word.  But we can’t – at least not in this format.  All we can do is point.

This is extremely frustrating for me.  I want to follow a single verse, a single word, deeper and deeper into the heart of God.  Where is the time to do that, or the audience who would follow such a path?  So, if I haven’t touched on something near and dear to your heart, if you think Today’s Word wanders too much, remember that I came to point.  Look here.  See what you find.  Then go seek.

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As Greek As It Gets

Sunday, September 06th, 2009 | Author:

Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, handling accurately the word of truth. 2 Timothy 2:15

Handling Accurately – Some days I just want to throw up my hands in frustration. Here’s a perfectly good Hebrew instruction, but when it gets translated, it takes on a completely different life. Suddenly it’s changed to something about accuracy instead of intricacy. Oh, orthotomeo is a Greek verb that means “to handle correctly or skillfully,” but the King James captures the Hebrew idiom much better – rightly dividing. What’s the difference between “rightly dividing” and “handling accurately?” Let’s think about it.

What comes to mind when you think about accuracy? If you’re a well-trained Greek thinker, accuracy will lead to concepts like correct, exact, error-free and precise. The processes of accuracy include meticulous care, conscientiousness, attention to detail and work without errors. In other words, one right way, one correct answer, one perfect interpretation. The Greek-trained mind wants the Truth (with a capital T) and that means no mistakes, no debate and no “opinions.” But is this what Paul has in mind? Does Paul instruct Timothy to get to the one right answer through exhaustive exegetical methods? I doubt it.

Sha’ul (Paul) is a Hebrew thinker. That means he employs the seven principles of Hebrew-rabbinic interpretation. To “rightly divide” is to understand the intricacies of the text at all of its different levels. And some of those levels are filled with opinion, debate and tension. That’s part of what it means to “divide” the text. I have to be able to cut it apart in ways that help me see everything that’s there. I simply cannot come up with one right answer. That’s impossible. God’s Word is far more complex, far deeper and far too mysterious to allow me to discover one answer. Only Greeks wants everything neatly tied down. The Hebrew people are too busy reveling in the magnificence of God to worry about tying everything down. They have a much better appreciation for human finitude.

OK, so Sha’ul wasn’t Greek. So what? Well, it might help if we understood the seven principles of rabbinic interpretation that he used before we start plowing through the words he wrote. After all, if we really want to understand Paul, we need to read him as Sha’ul, the Jewish theologian.

So, what are the seven principles? They are nothing like the kind of principles that you will find in most seminary classes on proper exegesis. Those classes are almost universally based on a Greek epistemology (how we know things). Hebrew doesn’t work that way. Here are the seven rabbinic principles:

1. Kal va-chomer (simple and complex, literally “light and heavy”) – reasoning from something known to something less known, from something obvious to something less obvious. This principle often employs the phrase “how much more.” You can see this principle at work in Yeshua’s statements about a father who gives to his son (Matthew 7:9-11) If an earthly father knows how to give good gifts, how much more will your heavenly Father know what to give.

2. Gezerah shavah (“equally cut”) – reasoning from an analogy of inference from one verse to another. A similarity in one passage is connected to the similarity in another passage.

3. Binyan av mikatuv echad (“building a teaching principle based on a verse”) – reasoning from a verse to a main proposition. In other words, finding a larger principle on the basis of a verse.

4. Binyan av mishnaic ketuvim (“building a teaching principle based on two verses”) – reasoning from two verses to a larger principle.

5. Kelal uferat-perat vekelal (“general and specific-specific and general”) – teaching from a general principle to a specific application, or from a specific application to a general principle.

6. Keyotza bo bamakom acher (“as comes from it in another place”) – teaching based on what is similar in another passage.

7. Devar halamed meinyano (“a word that is learned from its own issue”) – something that is learned from its own subject.

When Sha’ul instructed Timothy to “rightly divide”, what do you think he had in mind? Was it Greek logic, contextual historical-tradition analysis, form or source criticism? Hardly! Sha’ul wanted Timothy, a Greek proselyte, to learn the Hebrew way of thinking, to know how to use the seven principles through the four levels of Scripture (the PaRDeS – Pashat (simple), Remez (hint), D’rash (search) and Sod (hidden)). What has happened to us? We are so Greek that we think Scriptural interpretation is about clinical exegesis.

Boy, do we have a lot to learn.

Now you have a little hint (remez), so let’s look at these during the next week.

Topical Index: exegesis, hermeneutics, seven principles, orthotomeo, 2 Timothy 2:15

From Brad Young, Meet The Rabbis, p. 169.

Category: Today's Word  | Tags: , , , ,  | 13 Comments

Speechless

Friday, July 10th, 2009 | Author:

Moses made a copper serpent and mounted it on a standard; and when anyone was bitten by a serpent, he would look at the copper serpent and recover.  Numbers 21:9

Copper Serpent – Many people believe that the common symbol of medicine, two serpents on a cross, originated with this event.  But a careful reading suggests otherwise.  There is something else going on here that is grounded in ancient cultural thinking, not in the Greek symbols of medicine. 

Notice that Moses makes a single copper serpent, not two snakes intertwined.  Furthermore, Moses’ choice of material (copper) is really a word play in Hebrew.  Copper is the word nehoshet.  The word for serpent is nehash.  Moses makes a nehash nehoshet.  Why?  Why not make it of gold or silver or any other material?  Because in the thinking of ancient Egypt, the culture where these people have spent the last several hundred years, word similarities were powerful.  It is as if the power of the real serpent can be drawn off by the word connection to the metal.  The reality behind this strange story is lodged in the culture of ancient Egypt and Semitic thinking. 

Several Jewish Targums add commentary to this text.  One suggests that God used serpents because its speechless existence as a result of the curse is now the punishment for those who speak against the Lord.  That’s why the serpents attack in the first place.  The people complain against God and God sends a cursed creature who cannot complain to test the people.  Another Targum suggests that those who trusted in God’s word through Moses were saved because they had to act on the basis of a spoken word, the very thing that brought their trouble in the first place.

Some word pictures offer additional insights.  The word picture for serpent is “what destroys the fence around life” (N-H-Sh).  The serpent is cursed because the serpent refused to acknowledge God’s boundaries and convinced Havvah to do the same.  The word picture for copper (N-H-Sh-T) is “a covenant concerning what destroys the fence around life.”  In other words, the word picture of “copper” actually removes, by covenant promise, what the serpent initiates.  Did you ever wonder why so many New Age adherents claim mystical powers for copper bracelets?  Perhaps they are more Jewish than they think.

What is the application for this little lesson in ancient cultural thinking?  First, we discover that the stories of the Bible can only be understood within the original culture.  When we pull these stories out of their original environment and language, we often inadvertently add our own cultural perspective.  Just think about Christian sermons that claim this story is about the cross of Christ.   Secondly, we find that many of our contemporary fables, mythical beliefs and practices are really rooted in ancient biblical events.  We are products of the Hebrew culture without recognizing it.  Finally, we see the hand of God, working deliberately within the cultural context of His people, to reveal Himself in ways that they would understand – ways that we perhaps no longer see without serious investigation.  If this is true of the story of the serpents, how much more diligent must we be when it comes to the Genesis stories or the miracles of the prophets?  When Yeshua taught those two men on the road about His presence in Scripture, He helped them see the world through the eyes of the ancient audience.  Don’t we need to do the same? 

The Christian church has practically given away its Hebrew heritage.  It converted the Old Testament into a platform for proof-texts about Christian theology.  Maybe it’s time to return to the roots and become citizens of an ancient Kingdom.

Topical Index:  serpent, copper, Targum, Numbers 21:9, culture

Category: Today's Word  | Tags: , , , , ,  | 27 Comments
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