Experimental Exegesis
“I will make you pass under the rod, and I will bring you into the bond of the covenant;” Ezekiel 20:37 NASB
Rod – One of the tenets of conservative Christianity is that the Bible must be interpreted by the Bible. What it means is this: if I accept the claim that God is the real author of the words of the Bible, then in order to understand any particular part of the Bible my first resource should be the Bible itself. I should interpret one passage of the Bible through other passages of the Bible, just as I would compare one literary piece of an author by looking at other literary pieces by the same author. What Kierkegaard wrote in Either/Or must be considered in Fear and Trembling, for example.
This is the theological motivation behind a concordance, that is, a list of the occurrence of any particular word in the Bible. With a concordance I can find that the word kýrios (Greek: lord) is used 713 times in the apostolic writings, and furthermore I can look up every one of the 713 occasions and compare them. This is not simply linguistic analysis. It is that, of course, but it is also a way to see if John uses the word in the same way that Matthew uses it, based on the assumption that the true, underlying meaning of the word will be the same since both men were inspired by God to write it. In fact, if I were to find that Matthew used the word in a completely different, incompatible way than John, serious consequences for my theological exegesis could occur. Perhaps this is one of the reasons average Christian believers are not encouraged to read Enoch or documents from Qumran or the Samaritan Pentateuch.
So, I thought of an experiment—an exegetical experiment. I’d take a word at random and see how it’s connected (or how it isn’t) to other biblical texts. I opened the Bible wherever my finger landed—in this case, Ezekiel 20:37—and pointed randomly to a word—“rod”—and then began the hunt for its occurrences and meaning. The Hebrew is שֵׁבֶט shêbeṭ. Then I found where the word is used in other verses in the Hebrew. Immediately I discovered a problem. This single Hebrew word is used 191 times, but is translated 10 different ways in the NASB, the majority as “tribe” or “tribes.” I discovered that there are two roots with the same consonant structure. Except for diacritical markings (the vowel pointing), they appear the same, but one root is about rods, spears, sticks, and staffs while the other is about tribes, subdivisions of tribes, and people.
Without the vowel points, I couldn’t tell the difference except by context (and, of course, that’s how translators tell the difference). This discovery tells me two additional things: first, the listening audience also had to understand the word in context. “Rod” or “tribe” made sense depending on what they were hearing. Secondly, I can’t rely on the English translation to demonstrate that the same Hebrew word is behind “rod,” “shaft,” “club,” “scepter,” and “chastisement,” in the case of the first root, or “tribe” and “people” in the second root. Without the Hebrew original, the English translated words can mean quite different things. Therefore, if we’re going to follow the conservative exegetical tenet, our work must be only in the original languages. Translations are grossly inadequate.
This has another serious implication, namely, the ordinary believer who relies on the translated Bible is incapable of real exegesis. He or she is left with the opinions of the experts. His or her faith is then dependent on another human being who is able to tell the believer what the words mean and how they’re related. But that, in turn, means that the expert must also know the evolution of the original languages. For example, there are words in Song of Songs that are late Hebrew, words that never appear in the earlier books and can be traced to documents originating in the Babylonian era. What this implies is that the poem wasn’t written by Solomon since the language Solomon used didn’t include these words. Now the “conservative” approach to exegesis means that we have to admit pseudepigraphical authorship of some of our canonized books. Suddenly life got more complicated.
We could, of course, claim that since the author is really God, He used words that didn’t come into the ordinary language of the people until much later and simply put them in Solomon’s mouth, but that would mean that Solomon wrote words he didn’t know—a stretch of the mind, at least. Unfortunately, something similar is often claimed about biblical prophecy, that is, that God told the prophet to say something that the man didn’t understand at all because the prophecy was for another time (usually, it’s claimed, our time). You can readily see the problems this creates.
Back to shêbeṭ. In the original it’s possible to see how this word could cover various situations when we examine the text, but does it have the same meaning when it occurs in Genesis 49:10 compared to our verse in Ezekiel? In 49:10 it says “the rod shall not depart from Judah.” Is that the same idea as “I will make you pass under the rod”? Clearly not. The word itself evolved. How do we explain that under the tenet that the Bible interprets the Bible? The only way we know that shêbeṭ really means two different things in these two verses is to understand something about ancient kings and not-so-ancient punishments. And that, again, is contextual. The meaning of the word is not determined by God’s heavenly dictionary. It’s determined by the way it is used in human language.
Our experiment is finished—for now. We’ll still engage the practice of etymology because we want to know the historyof a word, but we must conclude that words, even biblical words, have meaning in their use, not their origin. Origin might tell us something about a word’s evolution, but if we want to know what it means, we’ll have to look at the whole linguistic context, both biblical and non-biblical. That’s why Genesis 1:2 depends on Egyptian thinking, not Archangel Michael’s marginal notes.
Topical Index: words, meaning, interpretation, exegesis, shêbeṭ, Ezekiel 20:37
