Endless Imagination
May our God come and not keep silence; fire devours before Him, and it is very tempestuous around Him. Psalm 50:3 NASB
“For He bruises me with a tempest and multiplies my wounds without cause.” Job 9:17 NASB
Very tempestuous/ tempest – If we’ve learned anything at all about rabbinic exegesis of the Tanakh, we’ve learned that chronological and cultural settings mean virtually nothing. When the fundamental approach to the text is that it is all one piece delivered by one God with one purpose, then the actual historical context doesn’t mean much. Any single verse can be used to interpret any other verse regardless of its historical origin because the real author, God, isn’t limited to a particular historical epoch. In this view, the entire Tanakh is like yesterday’s newspaper, subject to the same interpretive assumptions throughout. Therefore, something Job said can be used to understand something David wrote, and vise versa. Couple this with the ability to re-read the text by switching vowels and syllabication and we end up with the possibility of very creative, almost imaginative explanations of the Bible. And just in case you thought that this is a Jewish approach, you should note that most Christian believers follow the same non-historical, non-cultural assumptions. They read any part of the Bible as an interpretive scheme for any other part. That’s why they can find references to Yeshua in Genesis and the Church in Exodus. Sometimes this produces some interesting variations. Job 9:17 uses the word śĕʿārâh, a word that spelled the same as the word for “hair’s breadth” in rabbinic material.[1]
“The word for ‘hair’ here is se’arah, which is a homonym of the word for ‘storm’ in the verse from Psalm 50 . . . So, while the Psalm is describing a wonderous revelation of God, it is read by rabbinic tradition as a description of the danger of standing in God’s presence (‘devouring fire’), a danger that is not physical, as evoked by the image of a storm, but rather moral, since God will hold those closest to Him to a very fine scrutiny (‘down to a hair’s breadth’). This same wordplay figures in a midrash on Job 9:17 . . . Job is complaining about God’s having visited affliction on him for at most a trivial infraction (for he knows he hasn’t committed a great sin). But BT Bava Batra 16a . . . reads it as ‘He crushes me with a storm (se’arah),’ and takes it as an allusion to God’s rebuke to Job ‘out of the whirlwind (se’arah)’ in chapters 38ff.”[2]
Here’s the lesson, if there is one. Our exegetical tradition often has more influence on interpretation of the text than anything else. It takes real effort to overcome this training, whether rabbinic or Christian. Perhaps it doesn’t really matter in the long run, but if we want to understand the meaning of the text now, before we’re corrected in classes on the Bible in heaven, then we need to be at least aware of these influences. “To have no faith is callousness, to have undiscerning faith is superstition.”[3]
Topical Index: exegesis, storm, hair, se’arah, homonym, Psalm 50:3, Job 9:17
[1] BT Yevamot 121b.
[2] Gordon Tucker, in Abraham Heschel, Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations (ed. and trans. by Gordon Tucker, Continuum International Publishing Group, New York, 2007), p. 171, fn. 11.
[3] Abraham Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, p. 159.
