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Keep Your Enemies Closer

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011 | Author:

And He said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has become a disciple of the kingdom of heaven is like a head of a household, who brings forth out of his treasure things new and old.” Matthew 13:52  NASB

Scribe – Does Yeshua take a line from Godfather 2?  Is He really suggesting that those who were so adamantly against Him should be included in the Kingdom?  You might say, “Well, don’t you see that they must first become disciples?”  But is that what He means?  Is this statement to be applied only to those who were once opposed and have now seen the light?

A scribe in normal usage in the New Testament is someone who has been trained to interpret the Torah.  We do encounter scribes in the gospel accounts, but none of them seem to be on the side of Yeshua.  They uniformly interpret Moses against Yeshua.  So how could any of them become disciples?

Commentators have suggested that Yeshua’s comment is directed toward either (1) his chosen disciples who are now proponents of a “new” understanding of the covenant or (2) the general sense of the term as writers.  Neither seems very compelling.  There is force behind Yeshua’s words.  This is a metaphor about the Kingdom, the reign and rule of God on earth.  Certainly it must have a greater application than to the small band Yeshua selected or to some anonymous group of people who took up the quill.  A little Jewish background might help.

Yeshua is called “Rabbi” by those who drew near him.  That circle was much larger than the twelve.  As Rabbi, he taught Torah.  He came to complete the understanding of Torah.  In fact, the rabbinic idea of “fulfilling” Torah was simply teaching correct interpretation.  At this, Yeshua excelled beyond all others.  If a scribe is one who is trained to correctly interpret Torah, then everyone who follows in the footsteps of Yeshua and keeps His commandments (His haggadah) would qualify as a scribe in the kingdom of heaven.  The force of Yeshua’s claim is two-fold.  First, his words claim that human pedigree has no standing in the Kingdom.  To correctly interpret God’s words, you must become Yeshua’s disciple.  He alone is the final authority of interpretation.  His statement claims that Torah interpretation is at the very heart of discipleship.  Scribes knew God’s Word, right down to the smallest detail.  They were meticulous caretakers of the Tanakh.  Yeshua tells His followers that they too must be meticulous students and practitioners of God’s Word interpreted by the Son of Man. [1]

Secondly, Yeshua’s claim challenges the official scribes of religious practice.  His words suggest that there are scribes who know Torah but do not become disciples because they do not listen to the authoritative interpretation of Yeshua.  They are not caretakers of the truth of Torah.  They are merely pall bearers of the letters.  They have no place in the Kingdom because those in the Kingdom must be disciples of the King.

There are many official scribes in our religious world.  They carry the Book around with them.  They can quote chapter and verse.  But they do not understand what it means to “keep His commandments” because they have not interpreted His words as He intended.  They have thrown away the words of God in the Torah, replacing those gifts with ethical principles of their own.  They stand on the shoulders of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Irenaeus, not Moses and Isaiah.  They think “Jesus” speaks Greek.

You and I could be among these modern-day scribes.  Everywhere we look, Christian theologians, commentators and preachers tell us that we need to “be like Jesus,” except of course, when Jesus keeps the Sabbath, the dietary laws, the instructions about charity and purity.  Apparently modern-day scribes have decided that they can do their own interpretation.  What does Yeshua say about them?  Better not read Matthew 13:47-49 if you don’t want to hear His interpretation.

Topical Index:  scribe, interpretation, disciple, Matthew 13:52

[1] The Hebrew version of Matthew clears this up: “Therefore every sofer who is educated in the kingdom of Heaven can be compared to the owner of a house  . . .”

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David’s Anatomy

Monday, March 08th, 2010 | Author:

I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; . . Psalm 139:14

Wonderfully – Believers love this verse.  It’s so majestic.  It lifts the human being to such elevated heights.  We are almost like angels.  We are special.  God made us.

But there’s a little problem.  The words ki nora’ot nifleiyti don’t seem to mean what this traditional translation suggests.  Alter writes, “Most interpreters understand nifleiyti as a variant spelling of niflei’ta, a verb whose root means ‘wonder’ and render it here as ‘wondrously made.’  But there is scant evidence that this verb can mean ‘wondrously made’ rather than simply ‘was wondrous.’  Spelled as it is with a heh and not an aleph, the verb means ‘to be set apart’ or ‘to be distinct.’”[1] Alter translates the text as “for awesomely I am set apart.”  This shifts the meaning from a statement about God’s creation of all men to a statement about God’s choice to make David king.  It is personal, not universal.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we aren’t marvelously engineered.  Genesis makes it very clear that Man is uniquely created by God.  But Alter’s point helps us adjust our filters.  Even those translations that appeal to our sense of divine connection must be carefully examined.  Maybe all that David is really saying is that he is special.  The Hebrew language here seems to suggest a far more pedestrian meaning than translators have assumed.  It makes you wonder how many other verses that appear to be about human nobility are really linguistic constructions shaped to fit a paradigm rather than careful transmission of the original meaning.  Fortunately, there are scholars like Robert Alter who won’t let a word or two slide by.

Once again we are reminded that Scripture comes clothed in context.  David doesn’t always speak for all human beings.  His relationship with the Lord is personal and his songs of praise often come from his own personal experience and reflect his own personal circumstances.  It’s not surprising that he would praise the Lord for being set apart as king.  Whenever we are tempted to remove the verse from the life situation in which it was written, we should be on guard.  Of course, there are principles and proclamations that stretch across time and culture.  But there might be far fewer than we think.  After all, Scripture is a story of God’s interactions with particular people, especially with men and women of Israel.  We can draw conclusions from this story, but that doesn’t mean the story was written about us.  One of the biggest hurdles in biblical interpretation is the latent idea that the Bible was written about me.  If I am seduced by that claim, I will read the text for what it means to me, not what the author said about life when he wrote it.

Maybe this is a good place to pause and ask yourself, “How many of my treasured verses need to be re-examined?  How many of those verses have I assumed were written as if I were the intended audience?  What do those verses mean if I remove myself from the mix?”

Topical Index:  interpretation, wonderfully, nifleiyti, distinct, set apart, Psalm 139:14

[1] Robert Alter, Psalms, p. 481

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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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Principle #4

Thursday, September 10th, 2009 | Author:

Jesus said to him, “You have said it yourself; nevertheless I tell you, hereafter you shall see THE SON OF MAN SITTING AT THE RIGHT HAND OF POWER and COMING ON THE CLOUDS OF HEAVEN. Matthew 26:64

Two Into One – Binyan av mishnaic ketuvim (“building a teaching principle based on two verses”) is reasoning from two verses to a larger principle. It happens all the time in the New Testament. In this verse, Yeshua takes part of a verse in Psalm 110:1 and inserts it into a verse from Daniel 7:13. Here are the two verses:

“The Lord says to my Lord: ‘Sit at My right hand until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet.’” Psalm 110:1

“I kept looking in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven, one like a Son of Man was coming. And He came up to the Ancient of Days and was presented before Him.” Daniel 7:13

Notice the changes Yeshua makes. He alters the verse in the Psalms so that it reads “sitting at my right hand.” Then He combines it with Daniel’s vision so there is no doubt His application of Psalm 110 to Himself implies He is the Son of Man who is presented victoriously to the Ancient of Days. But the implication goes further. Yeshua suggests that He is the one “coming on the clouds,” a role ascribed to God alone. In this use of principle #4, Yeshua combines two verses to reach a larger conclusion. What is that conclusion? He is God!

Read the story again. Did you notice no one shouted, “That’s terrible exegesis!”? No one questioned His scholarship. They all knew exactly what He was doing, and it was proper procedure. It wasn’t the hermeneutics that made them furious. It was the conclusion.

Yeshua was a rabbi too. If we read His words from the perspective of a rabbi, we see more clearly how He handles Scripture, how He interprets the Word and what techniques He employs to draw out its meaning. Perhaps we need a course in rabbinic thought before we run around proclaiming the teachings of Jesus. Our approach is like using the dialogue from West Side Story as if it were the words of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

What do we learn today? We learn to be careful. Maybe all that Yeshua says isn’t quite as obvious as the translations make it seem. Maybe we need to pay a lot more attention to the culture before we start drawing conclusions about contemporary applications. Maybe there’s room for dialogue rather than dogma.

Topical Index: principle #4, Binyan av mishnaic ketuvim, Psalm 110:1, Daniel 7:13, Matthew 26:64, hermeneutics, interpretation

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Prophecy Fulfilled

Thursday, May 07th, 2009 | Author:

For You will not abandon my soul to Sheol, nor will You allow Your Holy One to undergo decay. Psalm 16:10

Undergo Decay – In the Old Testament, what happens after death is not clearly articulated.  There are a few verses about the underworld, called Sheol, but it is a place where everyone goes when they die.  Since the focus of the Old Testament is life on this earth under God’s direction, there is little if any of the contemporary preoccupation with heaven.  The big question in the Old Testament is not “Where you will go when you die?”  It is “Who do you serve while you live?”

So, that makes this verse a little unusual.  This oddity causes Christian commentators to see Messianic prophecy in this statement, especially since this is the interpretation placed on the verse by Peter (Acts 2:27) and Paul (Acts 13:35).  The verse becomes a reflection on the death of Yeshua, not a statement about David.  Since David died and his body did undergo decay, it’s not likely that this verse could be applied to David.  As a prophecy about Yeshua, this verse makes sense.  Yeshua was not abandoned in Sheol and He did not undergo decay.  He was raised from the dead to new life.  Understanding this verse as prophecy is the reason that “Holy One” is capitalized in our translation.

But if this verse is about Yeshua, then its interpretation violates one of the cardinal principles of biblical exegesis, namely, the first effort of exegesis is to understand the verse in the way that the original audience would have understood it.  If this verse is about Yeshua, then it would be impossible for anyone living at the time of David to understand the meaning of the verse.  Now, we could argue that it is prophecy and therefore the meaning is deferred until the time of its fulfillment, but that still leaves us with a big question mark for the original audience.  Of course, if the original audience also saw it as prophecy, then maybe they would say, “Well, we can’t understand this now, but some day it will be clear.”  But it’s still a problem, isn’t it?  Do you think that David wrote these words into his poem without understanding what they really meant? Something very unusual is happening here.

A great deal of critical work has been done on this verse.  That work attempts to place the meaning of the text in the timeframe and cultural setting of the author, staying true to the principle of exegesis.  In other words, this verse needs to be read within the setting of the rest of the psalm; a psalm about David’s protection and confidence in the Lord.  With this interpretation in mind, the verse does make sense to its original audience.  David says that God will not allow him to see death under the present circumstances.  In other words, God will rescue him from his enemies and he will not end up in Sheol today.  This fits the whole message of the psalm; a psalm about God’s care for his servant.  This ordinary meaning is further supported by the fact that the LXX changed the context of the verse by treating it as eschatological.  Interestingly, Peter quotes the verse as it is found in the LXX, not the Hebrew text.  You can follow all these arguments here.

OK, so what’s the point of all this linguistic mumbo-jumbo?  Is the verse about Yeshua or not?  The answer is “Yes” and “No.”  Peter and Paul, both Hebrews and both familiar with the LXX, clearly saw the verse as prophecy.  More importantly, the translators of the LXX, who were all Jewish rabbis, also saw the verse as eschatological.  In other words, no Christian interpretation was needed for these Jews to see that the verse meant more than it could have meant in David’s time.  So, the verse is about Yeshua.  But, at the same time, the verse in its original form in the Hebrew text can be read as nothing more than a statement about David’s trust in God.  It is not overtly prophetic.  In other words, it becomes prophetic by hindsight, when Peter and Paul recognize that it fits the circumstances of Yeshua’s resurrection.  This is an important lesson for us.  What appears prophetic is the result of seeing the words after the action has been completed.  What we like to call prophecy is often only identifiable because the events have already happened.

You might want to consider this the next time someone starts telling you about everything that is going to happen according to the Bible.  Even the Jewish rabbis didn’t see it coming until after it arrived.  Makes you wonder about our penchant for prophecy, doesn’t it?

Topical Index:  prophecy, interpretation, Psalm 16:10, Sheol, decay

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