What Only God Can Do (2)

For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.  Hebrews 10:4  NASB

Impossible – If it’s impossible for the sacrificial system to take away sins, then why did God give such elaborate instructions about the process?  Why did the early followers of Yeshua continue to offer sacrifices at the Temple after the resurrection?  Was it all just a Jewish hoax, a kind of deferral of forgiveness until the sacrificial death of the Messiah?  And furthermore, how can the sacrifice of human blood be any more efficacious than the substitute of the blood of bull and goats?  This verse has been appropriated by Christians to prove that the sacrificial system has been overturned, or more accurately, replaced.  As Kaiser notes:

One of the greatest evangelical notes in the ot is struck by this word: forgiveness and pardon from the very God of forgiveness. It also raises the greatest problem as well: What was the nature of this forgiveness? Hebrews seems to state just as categorically that ot forgiveness was ineffective and impossible (Heb 9:9; 10:4).^[1]

His solution: “The experience of forgiveness in the ot was personally efficacious, although objectively the basis and grounds of that forgiveness awaited the death of Christ.”^[2]  In other words, people felt forgiven but theologically they were not forgiven until the death and resurrection.  This is theological slight-of-hand.  The doctrine requires that forgiveness is accomplished by Jesus.  Therefore, any experience of forgiveness prior to Jesus’ death is merely proleptic, that is, it anticipates the eventual action of Jesus.  Jacob and David might have felt that they were forgiven, but the truth is that their real forgiveness was held in abeyance until Jesus died.  On this footing, all the verses about God’s forgiveness in the Tanakh are simply disguised Christology.

There’s not much doubt about the language of the verse in Hebrews.  The Greek word for “impossible” is adýnatos.  You can see the English “dynamic” in this Greek root.  It is simply “not capable” or “not effective.”  But we don’t need a linguistic trick to negate the meaning.  We should notice that the entire letter is a midrash.  And what is a midrash?  Remember the explanation by Michael V. Fox?  Maybe not.  Here it is again:[3]

We should distinguish between midrash (or darash) as a hermeneutic, or interpretive methodology, and midrash as the interpretation itself.  In the latter sense, a ‘midrash’ can be a unit of interpretation—one interpretation of a verse—or one of the compilations of midrashic interpretations.  These compilations were composed mainly from the third to the eleventh centuries C.E., but the material is older.

As a hermeneutic, midrash focuses on each verse or its components, not on an entire book.  It seeks, first, to harmonize the verse with the entirety of the Bible, in the belief that the Bible speaks with a single voice, which is ultimately God’s.  As such, it must in all ways accord with the beliefs of the expositors, which is to say, the theology and law of rabbinic Judaism.  Second, midrash seeks to draw out the fullness of meaning potential in the verse.  It makes use of a variety of homiletical techniques, including historical comparisons, personal anecdotes, wordplays, different readings of Hebrew words, and, above all, reapplication of associated biblical verses.  Midrashic compilations also incorporate interpretations that are fairly straightforward, usually without drawing a distinction among the different types.

The midrashic hermeneutic attempts to bring forth the limitless range of meanings of the biblical text.  It thus embraces a multiplicity of interpretations.  (In contrast, a different approach to interpretation, peshat exegesis, arose and flourished in the Middle Ages.  Commonly but mistakenly called ‘literalist,’ the peshat approach attends to the plain sense of the passage and tries to understand the verse within the rules of grammar and to locate its meaning in its literary and historical context.  It aims at the author’s specific intention and will exclude other readings as inaccurate, even when these produce a reading in harmony with the assumptions of the faith.  Modern critical exegesis follows the basic principles of peshat exegesis, while sometimes recognizing that biblical texts may be univocal.)[4]

We investigated the application of midrash in the letter to the Hebrews in Today’s Word from 2019 (CLICK HERE).  If this letter is really midrash, then it is an imaginative exposition with an agenda.  That agenda is the author’s attempt to explain the superiority of the Messiah’s role vis-a-vis the Levitical priesthood.  It is not an attempt to replace or displace the Levitical role.  This explains why the author ignores the multiple means of atonement available according to the Tanakh, and makes the startling (and technically false) statement that the blood of sacrificial animals does not provide a means of expiation.  When we read Hebrews, we need to keep Zornberg’s comment constantly in mind:“ . . . it is impossible to imagine that meaning is somehow transparently present in the isolated text.”[5]  The Letter to the Hebrews is a sustained rabbinic midrash, an imaginative exposition concerning the Temple, the priesthood, and the Messiah.  Its sweeping generalizations, its selective interpretation, its amplification of the written Torah are all midrashic techniques.  “The blurring of boundaries between revelation and interpretation, between the written and the oral Torah, is a fundamental mode of the rabbinic imagination.”[6]

Time to read it again.

Topical Index: midrash, Hebrews, priesthood, sacrifice, Hebrews 10:4

^[1] Kaiser, W. C. (1999). 1505 סָלַח. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 626). Chicago: Moody Press.

^[2] Ibid.

[3] https://skipmoen.com/2019/11/what-is-it-3/

[4] Michael V. Fox, The JPS Bible Commentary: Ecclesiastes (Jewish Publication Society, 2004), p. xxiii., for the full discussion see https://www.skipmoen.com/2019/11/what-is-it-3/

[5] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus (Schocken Books, New York: 2001), p. 2.

[6] Ibid.