The Code

And Jesus answered them, “To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been granted.  Matthew 13:11 NASB

The mysteries – Do you know the mysteries?  According to the Messiah, knowing secrets has been granted to you.  So, when you open your Bible, are you looking for those hidden gems, those esoteric occurrences, those spiritual mysteries buried in God’s words?  Are you intrigued by the subtle nuances we so often discover in this journey?  Do you imagine that there is a sub-text, a secret alphabet submerged in the layers of Hebrew?  Does your spiritual barometer jump when you find an odd letter or two, a strange phrase, an apparent contradiction?  Well, you’re not alone.  As you know if you’ve been with us a while, we often scratch the surface of the text in order to uncover concealed truths.  We’re biblical miners, digging for treasure.

But we’re also dyslexic.  Why?  Because we also think that the Bible communicates God’s words in human clothes.  We aren’t mystics, searching the texts for secrets of the universe.  We’re not “Bible Code” sycophants.  We really don’t believe that John Kennedy’s assassination was predicted in the numerical code of the Hebrew alphabet.  We believe that the message of Scripture is plain, easily understood, readily available to everyone.  We avoid Gnostic cosmology and Kabbalistic enigma.  So, while we’re thrilled when we discover that Joshua 2:23 has a surprising Hebrew word (מָצָא(māṣāʾ), we think it really doesn’t matter too much in the long run.  The message is more important than these little oddities.

Not surprisingly, rabbinic Judaism also dealt with these two approaches.  Gordon Tucker’s long explanation is worth reading carefully because it explains our spiritual dyslexia:

“Rabbi Ishmael has hitherto been presented as the advocate of a commonsense reading of the Torah text.  The text means what it says.  ‘The Torah speaks in human language,’ so redundancies are simply a stylistic feature, not to be loaded with a lot of hyperinterpretive baggage.  But Rabbi Ishmael also has certain definite theological ideas.  God is abstract, transcendent, remote, not emotionally involved with us in a direct way.  What if it should turn out that the Torah text, on which Rabbi Ishmael relies, lends credence in many places to a passionate, involved God in the Akivan mold?  Rabbi Ishmael might then have to resort to symbolic or metaphorical reading of those biblical passages, in order to reconcile them with his theological notions.  He might have to depart from his preferred exegetical model, in order to salvage his theology.

“Does it follow, then, that Rabbi Akiva’s treatment of the same anthropomorphic passages will be more literal?  Possibly, but not necessarily.  In some cases, ‘literal’ may be an apt designation of the Akivan treatment (‘the idols cannot see, speak, or smell, but our God can,’ etc.).  But sometimes that Akivan exegesis is as fanciful and prolific in these theological contexts as we have been accustomed to expect from him.  What is the difference, then, between the Ishmaelian and Akivan exegesis, when neither hews to the plain literal sense?

“The difference is important but hard to characterize.  We may attempt to express it by saying that Rabbi Ishmael wants to play down the anthropomorphism, while Rabbi Akiva wants to play it up.  To Rabbi Ishmael, the truth behind the words is at bottom inexpressible, and the expressions we have in the Torah are but a concession to the weakness of human understanding. . . Our expressions are ‘conventional’ . . . one may just as well use one symbolic means of expression as another, for they are all inadequate except as means of pointing beyond themselves, to the transcendent, abstract reality beyond all human words and conceptions.

“By contrast, we have the Akivan formula, ‘Were it not written, we could not say it!’  But it is written thus, and so we must take it as a necessary, unalterable revelation of some secret of the infinite divine mystery.  The accompanying exegesis will then expand on the biblical figure and end up with an even more extravagant image than the original.”[1]

“When Rabbi Akiva found strange or difficult language in the Torah, he opened his ears as wide as a hopper.  For him, paradox in the text was a door to hidden truths of Torah.  Rabbi Ishmael tried to purify the text of such elements, saying, ‘Torah speaks in human language,’ or ‘it tells only what the ear can hear.’  To take such strange or difficult parts as literally true was erroneous, in his view.”[2]

Perhaps it’s time for each of us to recognize our proclivity.  Are we more in line with Akiva or with Ishmael?  The answer isn’t trivial.  How you read the text will influence your theological thinking about the words.  If you’re more like Akiva, you’ll see theological doctrines buried in the narrative.  Crushing the head of the serpent in Genesis 3 will become a Messianic prophecy.  The “angel of the Lord” will support the idea of a pre-existent Christ.  John 1 will have a certain cosmological mystery to it.  But if you’re like Ishmael, the serpent is a serpent, an angel is an angel and logos is a word for “word,” not God.  You must first admit that you are spiritually dyslexic if you hope of depth analysis.  Paradigms are not just about worldviews.  They are also about our reading glasses.

Topical Index: Akiva, Ishmael, text, mystery, commonsense, Matthew 13:11

[1] Gordon Tucker in Abraham Heschel, Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations (Continuum, New York, 2007), pp. 223-224.

[2] Abraham Heschel, Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations, p. 231.