Bible School
These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. And you shall repeat them diligently to your sons and speak of them when you sit in your house, when you walk on the road, when you lie down, and when you get up. Deuteronomy 6:6-7 NASB
Repeat them diligently – Whether you knew it or not, Jewish education today is a reflection of Hellenism. By the way, so is virtually all Western education. If you thought that somehow the post-exilic Jews maintained their ancient educational practices, you’d be mistaken. By the first century, and most likely long before, the Hellenistic model of education had taken precedence over ancient forms. The Yeshiva, the idea of a disciple, the whole context of rabbinic teaching was an adaptation of Hellenism.
“Anyone who belonged to the people of God—even the proselyte—was now invited to study wisdom, i.e., the law; and provided that he had the application and the aptitude, he had the possibility of being a great teacher of the law. This attitude ‘was foreign to early Israel and the ancient Orient in general, but was part and parcel of the liberal Hellenistic ideal.’ . . . Even the master-pupil relationship in the Rabbinate, bound up with the principle of tradition, has its model less in the Old Testament, where it was not known in this strict form, than in Greece.”[1]
When we talk about the paradigm shift that accompanies moving from the Western worldview to the Hebraic worldview, we probably don’t realize that our educational model is essentially Greek. In the ancient Hebraic world, there were no schools. There were no rabbis with disciples. There were no teaching priests. Everything about the relationship with God and His interaction with Israel was taught in the home. Parents were the responsible educators. All of this changed in the Captivity. When the captives returned from Babylon, a new class of devotees emerged—the teachers. And a new relationship to God’s Word and to Israel’s history emerged—the Yeshiva—the system of education in a place of study. What used to be God-talk in the midst of doing life became the purview of specialists. Now if you wanted to know about God and what He said you needed to go to the Yeshiva, or the priest, or catechism class. God became the property of the religious instructors.
This model is ubiquitous in our world. If you want to learn, you need to go to class. In fact, the apprenticeship model has virtually disappeared. Perhaps that’s why there are no more Renaissance painters, sculptors, or architects. There are still examples of sheer genius, but the movements are gone. Study has replaced personal example. What does this mean for you, a student of the Bible? If you’re like me, your education came from books. You didn’t hear the stories from your father because he didn’t hear the stories from his father. You learned in the classroom. But even with the greatest teachers, the classroom isn’t the same as the home and a teacher isn’t the same as a parent. Some part of the vital connection is lost, a part that Moses clearly understood. He could have established “schools” during those forty years. He didn’t. Have you every wondered why?
Topical Index: education, Hellenism, school, pupil, Deuteronomy 6:6-7
[1] Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period, Volume One (Wipf and Stock, 1973), pp. 80-81.
“the apprenticeship model has virtually disappeared.” Gone but not quite. My brother Dan and I had a father and two grandfathers who were all Germanic trained master craftsmen and one way or another we both learned from them all. We have never been unemployed a day in our lives but the formally trained process has virtually disappeared in our families as well but not completely. An end “product” is still visible in our children.
Man know longer speaks what he knows, as he is in himself, derived from his experience in relationship with those committed to the good of one another and in relation to goodness in contrast to inimical. The dis-integration of man, both as an individual and in his societal relationships, is precisely that presently being spoken, apparently in large part because that is all that he knows. The only vital relationship that may be trusted wholly is with one who speaks what he has seen with the Father; and thus proclaims, “so also you do that you have heard from the Father.”(see John 8:38) But it would seem that in this age of narcissistic expression, few will submit to hear what a father speaks.