Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

INTERPRETATION, BIBLICAL

OT and Judaism

Interpretation of the Bible began within the Bible itself. Later texts interpreted and appropriated earlier ones, as the book of Jeremiah illustrates. Jer. 23:1-6 includes an oracle concerning the “branch,” a legitimate ruler in David’s line, whose just rule will contrast with that of Judah’s current leaders, whom Jeremiah indicts and threatens with severe punishment. Jer. 33:14-18 takes up and expands this oracle with reference to the permanence of David’s house and the levitical priesthood, even beyond exile. Thus the early reading and interpretation of Jeremiah contributed to the growth of the book. Zechariah, in the postexilic period, then interprets Jeremiah’s “branch” oracles messianically to announce the coming of a royal figure (Zech. 3:8) who will share leadership with the high priest (6:12-13). Lending urgency to Zechariah’s expectations is an allusion (Zech. 1:12; cf. 7:5) to Jeremiah’s prophecy that Judah’s punishment would last 70 years (Jer. 25:11-12; 29:10), a formulaic number that Zechariah interprets quite literally. In thus interpreting Jeremiah’s prophecy, Zechariah understood his own visions and oracles (chs. 1–6) as marking the end of Judah’s punishment and the beginning of its future.

Biblical interpretation within the Bible implicitly acknowledged, and also established, the authority of the earlier material it used in quite varied ways. Zechariah alludes to Jeremiah and to other texts — especially from Isaiah — in elaborating, and authorizing, his vision of the future. And Jeremiah (Jer. 26:12-19) expressly cites an earlier prophet, Micah (Mic. 3:12), as precedent in a legal discussion. This process of interpretation contributed not only to the growth of the OT, but also to its eventual status as a definitive collection that tended to resist further expansion.

By the 1st century b.c.e., whether or not the Hebrew canon was in some sense closed, interpretation of the Bible was taking new forms. Pseudo-Philo’s Biblical Antiquities retells the biblical story, adding interpretive detail. Translation offered another means of interpretation. The Jewish community in Alexandria had already produced a Greek version, the LXX, which differs in many places from the MT. From a later date, the several Targums represent another, more paraphrastic translation into Aramaic; according to rabbinic practice, they supplemented and interpreted, but did not replace, the Hebrew text in the weekly synagogue readings.

Especially after the destruction of the second temple (70 c.e.), rabbinic interpretive practices — the practice of commentary — became dominant in Judaism. The term “midrash” can serve for the mode of rabbinic commentary, which begins from a biblical text and offers legal (halakhic) or illustrative (haggadic) interpretation. Any part of the text — a sentence, a word, a letter — may be the subject of interpretation, in conversation with a living tradition of commentary: an oral Torah alongside the written Torah. Rabbinic interpretation in early Judaism was not arbitrary. In time, it articulated exegetical rules (middôṯ) which had been established by use; best known are the lists of 13 and seven ascribed to R. Ishmael and R. Hillel, respectively. These are rules of inference and analogy, describing legitimate means of treating the internal consistency and wholeness of the Torah, which contains all wisdom and has its origin from God.

Other forms of interpretation developed within early Judaism, in or shortly before the 1st century. Departing, physically and theologically, from the Pharisees and what would become rabbinic Judaism in Jerusalem was the group at Qumran. The Temple Scroll (11QT), a rewriting of the Torah and the longest of the Dead Sea Scrolls, reflects the group’s pervasive concern for matters of cultic purity and ritual. Another group of scrolls, the pesharim, has similarities to rabbinic midrash. However, the pesharim quote an entire passage (sometimes only part of a verse, from a prophet or Psalms), followed by “the interpretation concerns. . . .” The pesharim assume that the Qumran community lives in the last days and can take comfort from the prophet’s words, whose message for the present the pesharim decode.

Early Church and Medieval Interpretation

The Qumran community was not alone among apocalyptic Jewish groups who developed their own characteristic interpretive practices. For the followers of Jesus, these centered on Jesus himself, in the events of whose life they saw Scripture as being “fulfilled” (John 19:36). “Scripture,” in the case of the NT, means primarily the Greek Bible (LXX), which in time could be called the “old covenant” or OT (cf. 2 Cor. 3:14).

The NT interprets Scripture in quite varied ways. In places it resembles Qumran’s pesharim, as when Jesus in Luke 4:16-19 quotes Isa. 61:1-2 and a part of 58:6, and announces that “today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21). Matthew’s account of the magi (Matt. 2:1-11) can be read as a narrative realization of Isa. 60:1-6. The Letter to the Hebrews interprets in a more Platonic fashion, with Christ bearing the “imprint” or character of God (Heb. 1:3), and the old covenant as a mundane copy of a heavenly archetype (8:5; cf. Exod. 25:40). Hebrews, which is dense with quotations of Scripture, employs rabbinic exegetical techniques, but in order to show Christ’s and the Church’s supersession of Judaism and the “first” covenant (Heb. 8:7). Paul’s letters proceed differently, employing as well as urging a spiritual and “ecclesiocentric” reading of Scripture shaped by the experience of the Spirit in the Christian community (2 Cor. 3:2-18). Paul’s interpretation, and that of the NT generally, has often been called typological: establishing a figural (cor)relation between two events or entities, such as Adam and Christ (Rom. 5:14) or Israel and the Church. This provokes the question whether or to what extent Paul’s use of typology may be distinguished from allegory.

Paul uses the term “allegory” in Gal. 4:21-31 (v. 24), but proceeds differently from the allegorical interpretation that Christians practiced in subsequent centuries. While Philo of Alexandria (30 b.c.e.–c.e. 40) practiced allegorical interpretation in the service of Judaism, a later Alexandrian, Origen (185-253/4), was the most able Christian allegorist. Origen’s hermeneutics coheres with his tripartite anthropology — body, soul, spirit. “Body” corresponds to reading for the literal or fleshly sense of the text and “spirit” to a spiritual reading; in this way, hermeneutics corresponds to the soteriological ascent (anagōgḗ) of the soul or the mind to the divine. Interpretation of this kind not only brings but requires spiritual enlightenment; hence, the spiritual sense is hidden within the literal, and remains hidden to those incapable of discerning it. Some texts have or make no literal sense, driving the interpreter to search for their inexhaustible spiritual meaning.

Origen’s contemplative and mystical hermeneutics, and the allegorical tradition in Alexandria, had their counterpart and opposition in Antioch. There people like Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia, in the 4th and 5th centuries, stressed historical and literal exegesis. Jerome (347?-420), early under the influence of Origen, was compelled as a translator (the Latin Vulgate) to study the literal sense, while recognizing other meanings as well. Augustine (354-430), especially in On Christian Doctrine, attended to the Bible’s rhetoric, to the way God communicates through Scripture, and the distinction between words and things as signs and the spiritual realities (res) to which they refer. In most places, the text’s literal sense is clear in its teaching of faith, love, and hope; where it is obscure, a figurative reading is required (3.9-10). The Bible’s edifying purpose forms a rule for its interpretation. After Augustine, the understanding of the Bible as having a fourfold sense (literal, allegorical, tropological, anagogical) brought together the main streams of patristic hermeneutics.

Medieval hermeneutics can be thought of as a lengthy debate about the place and definition of Scripture’s literal sense. Invigorating this debate was the confrontation with classical learning and its new disciplines, and with it a certain tension between monasteries and the cathedral schools. Classical texts like those of Aristotle were mediated through Arabic scholars, who affected Jewish interpretation as well. In the later Middle Ages, Jewish interpreters expressed a preference for the literal sense (peshat) over the applied sense (derash), or sought ways to coordinate the two. In the 11th and 12th centuries, Rashi, Moses Maimonides, and Ibn Ezra exercised a profound influence on Jewish interpretation and, either directly or indirectly, on Christian interpreters as well. Hugh of St. Victor, Thomas Aquinas, and Nicholas of Lyra stressed the literal sense as the basis of all interpretation, but they defined “literal sense” in different ways. For Thomas, the literal sense was what the author intended, the ultimate author of Scripture being God. Nicholas introduced a double literal sense, so that the son promised to David in 2 Sam. 7 is literally both Solomon and, but more properly, Jesus Christ.

The Reformation and Modern Interpretation

Implicit, and often explicit, in both patristic and medieval interpretation, is that the normative sense of Scripture must be determined in accordance with the rule of faith or the analogy of faith — with what Christians believe and the Church teaches. A late medieval theologian, Jean Gerson (1363-1429), applied this to the definition of the literal meaning of Scripture, whose words could mean any variety of things. Its literal meaning, he argued — thus its normative meaning, its res — is established “by the holy doctors and expositors of sacred Scripture.” He argued this against John Hus, a dissenter from the Catholic Church who demanded to be proved wrong by the plain meaning of Scripture.

Martin Luther, a century later, also dissented from the Catholic Church, while agreeing entirely with Gerson’s stress on the literal sense of Scripture. Like other Reformers, such as John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli, Luther reflected humanism’s motto, ad fontes (“to the sources”). Their access to the biblical sources was greatly enhanced by the availability of Greek and Hebrew texts and their ability to read them. In turning to Scripture, Luther did not reject Church tradition; he appealed to it in arguments against the Anabaptists, but he held Scripture properly interpreted to be the critical norm of the Church’s tradition and its teaching. Justification by faith, the hermeneutical distinction between law and gospel, and the principle that Scripture is its own interpreter lie behind the Lutheran motto, sola scriptura (“Scripture alone”). Calvin, like Luther, devoted much of his energy to biblical interpretation, but Calvin also wrote a handbook to guide readers of Scripture, his Institutes of the Christian Religion. One may read this as an effort to articulate the res — the reality or meaning to which Scripture bears witness.

Protestant “Orthodox” or scholastic theologians of the post-Reformation period sought to defend and advance the insights of the Reformers, after the Council of Trent (1545-1563) refined and confirmed Catholic teaching. One point of contention concerned the Protestant notion of Scripture’s clarity: while only the Holy Spirit could give internal clarity, Scripture is clear in what it teaches about salvation; hence, even a layperson — even an unbeliever — could correct the bishop from Scripture. To Catholics, this amounted to private interpretation and would result in anarchy. Protestants contended that the Catholic view of multiple senses entailed that one text could signify or refer to different things, undermining Scripture’s authority by placing it under the Church’s. The Reformed Protestants said that interpretation must be guided by the analogy of faith — in conformity with the creeds, catechism, and confessional articles. Formally, this differed little from medieval views.

The arcane character of Protestant scholasticism and its confessionalism provoked contrasting responses in the 17th century. In the Netherlands, Benedict Spinoza and Hugo Grotius introduced historical and rigorously critical interpretation of the Bible. Spinoza argued that it was immaterial whether the biblical stories, or their moral lessons, or the doctrines derived from them are true, since only their meaning matters — the way they contribute to piety and behavior. Truth is for philosophy to determine. In Germany, Philip Spener and A. H. Francke urged direct engagement with Scripture, without the mediating artifice of dogmatic theology. Whereas Spinoza and Grotius required an objective stance toward the text, Spener and especially Francke said that the spiritual disposition of the interpreter must accord with the Spirit who inspired the text. While Spinoza and Grotius tended to identify the literal or primary sense of the text with its historical sense, Francke joined the literal sense with the affective sense (sensus pius), and said that the text so interpreted must be applied to the interpreting subject. Pietists like Francke and J. A. Bengel were anything but unsophisticated; indeed, Bengel’s work represented the most meticulous textual scholarship among Christians since Origen.

The rationalists and pietists conspired unwittingly to introduce the modern era of biblical interpretation, which pursued textual and historical study with increasing detachment from Church doctrine. In France, Richard Simon’s critical study of the OT (1670) argued that the Pentateuch consisted of traditions compiled by postexilic editors. Now “tradition” could refer, not to Church tradition, but to material lying behind the biblical texts. A century later in Germany, Johann S. Semler’s “Free Investigation of the Canon” proposed that the canon should be studied as a historical phenomenon, rather than as a norm, and its books regarded as witnesses to their own times. Robert Lowth’s study of Hebrew poetry, in England, and Johann G. Herder’s work on the same subject, in Germany, helped to combine biblical scholarship’s historical interests with romanticism. These were joined early in the 19th century by the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel (among others), which influenced the developmental theories of Ferdinand C. Baur (NT) and Wilhelm Vatke (OT), and David F. Strauss’s mythic interpretation of the NT.

Hegel’s colleague in Berlin, Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher, lectured on hermeneutics, elevating that topic to renewed theological importance. He held that an interpreter must enter into the subjectivity of the author, not only through grammatical study of the text but through an act of intuition or divination — in order to understand the biblical authors better than they understood themselves. Here pietism has its echo.

Contemporary Approaches

Schleiermacher’s influence on biblical interpretation was mediated by Wilhelm Dilthey, who viewed texts as expressions of life fixed in writing. This view was joined with Martin Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology in Rudolf Bultmann’s program of “demythologizing” the NT. Bultmann wanted to understand the mythological expressions of the NT’s theology in order again to hear the kerygma or proclamation about Jesus (and decisively the cross) as the advent of God’s reign, which calls for faith — for a decision, yes or no. Faith is Bultmann’s analogue to Heidegger’s “authentic existence.” More importantly for Bultmann, he considered his radical historical criticism and demythologizing to be consistent with Luther’s (and, he believed, Paul’s) doctrine of justification by faith alone.

Bultmann’s work, which took shape between the two world wars, began in conversation with Karl Barth, whose Romans commentary (1918) marked a radical departure from the prevailing historical-critical interpretation of the Bible. Biblical scholarship in the 19th and early 20th centuries had been invigorated by the availability of materials from Palestine and the ancient world generally, and refinements in historical and literary analysis (form criticism, tradition history). These helped to fuel interest in the history of religion, and especially in the development of the “Israelite” and early Christian religions, each in their respective and quite different contexts. In Barth’s judgment, this historicism and the liberal theology it comported with failed to engage the subject, God, and subject matter (Sache) of the biblical text. Bultmann accused Barth of failing critically to assess the text and its expressions in terms of its subject matter.

In North America after 1945, the Biblical Theology movement also responded to what its proponents viewed as stagnation in biblical studies and theology. Influenced by C. H. Dodd and H. H. Rowley in England, they stressed the unity of the OT and NT and the essentially historical and dynamic character of biblical theology. This attempt to join historical-critical studies with theology encountered severe criticism, but just as influential in its demise was the availability of more compelling alternatives, such as Gerhard von Rad’s tradition-historical approach to the OT. In the NT field, Bultmann’s students, especially Ernst Fuchs and Gerhard Ebeling, developed his views further in the “new hermeneutic.”

Another of Bultmann’s students, Hans-Georg Gadamer, returned to the project of a universal hermeneutics or theory of understanding that Schleiermacher initiated. However, Gadamer moved, through Heidegger, beyond Schleiermacher’s subjectivism and considered understanding to be an event in which the horizon of the text and that of the interpreter are “fused.” This event thus occurs within a tradition, as part of the effective history of the text. Appealing in part to theological hermeneutics, Gadamer rehabilitated such concepts as tradition, authority, and prejudice (or pre-judgment). While Gadamer did not employ these concepts naively, Jürgen Habermas criticized him for attending insufficiently to the distorting effects of tradition, which covers over varieties of injustice; Habermas proposed a counterfactual ideal-speech situation as a critical principle. Paul Ricoeur has drawn on the German tradition of philosophical and theological hermeneutics, but also on French work in structuralism and semiotics. His theory of interpretation includes a necessary step of distanciation or explanation in moving from a first to a second naiveté — the appropriation of the world projected by the text.

These developments in hermeneutics have helped biblical scholars to consider the role and character, and the aims, of their historical-critical approaches, and to pursue alternatives. In recent years, various kinds of narrative approaches have appeared, influenced both by the study of literature and theory in fields outside biblical studies and by theological concerns. Simultaneously, archaeological research and the availability of new materials — especially the Ugaritic texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi texts — have again invigorated historical studies. These now routinely include theories and methods drawn from the human sciences, especially anthropology and sociology.

The most significant recent development in biblical interpretation has been the inclusion of a broader range of voices and interests. Following Vatican II, Roman Catholics and Protestants have worked together. Neither has biblical interpretation remained an exclusively Christian enterprise. While Jewish scholars, especially in Israel and North America, have advanced the historical study of the Bible, they have also helped to expose the anti-Semitic biases of much biblical scholarship. Moreover, the Jewish philosophers/theologians Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas contribute an “other” voice to the subject-centered hermeneutics that has dominated for two centuries. Liberation and feminist interpreters have drawn attention to, or unmasked, the vested interests concealed in, and hence the political character of, the institutions and practices of biblical interpretation. These interpreters draw on experience and perspectives not represented in past practice. The significance of social location, including gender, race, class, and socio-historical context, is exhibited in biblical interpretation from around the globe. African, Asian, and Latina/Latino interpreters have expanded the theoretical and moral-political issues that hermeneutics must engage.

A critical hermeneutics of suspicion extends also to the biblical texts themselves, or to their production. The “new historicism” employs many of the methods of historical criticism but investigates the margins of texts, viewed as “sites of contestation” that reflect and participate in social “power relations.” There is at the same time a call for a renewed theological interpretation of Scripture that values pre-modern interpretation and tradition, and has as its context the Church and its practices.

Biblical interpretation now embraces wide diversity, and no one mode can claim to occupy its center.

Bibliography. A. K. M. Adam, Making Sense of New Testament Theology (Macon, 1995); J. Bowker, The Targums and Rabbinic Literature: An Introduction to Jewish Interpretations of Scripture (Cambridge, 1989); M. Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford, 1985); S. E. Fowl, ed., The Theological Interpretation of Scripture (Cambridge, Mass., 1997); R. A. Mueller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics 2 (Grand Rapids, 1993); J. S. Preus, From Shadow to Promise: Old Testament Interpretation from Augustine to the Young Luther (Cambridge, Mass., 1969); F. Segovia and M. A. Tolbert, Reading from This Place, 2 vols. (Minneapolis, 1995).

Ben C. Ollenburger

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

INTERPRETATION, BIBLICAL

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)