“And behold a certain lawyer stood up to test him saying, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life.” He responded to him, “What is written in the Torah, and how do you read it” (Luke 10:25-26). This dialogue between Jesus and a Jewish lawyer raises a fundamental issue for studying the New Testament: how DO you read ancient Jewish texts?
What is in the Torah, and how do you read it?
This question provides an insightful window into ancient Judaism. The first century historian Josephus stated about Jewish life in the land of Israel, “Above all we pride ourselves on the education of our children, and regard as the most essential task in life the observance of our laws and of the pious practices, based thereupon, which we have inherited” (Against Apion 1:12). Philo of Alexandria echoed Josephus’ description of the Torah education of children by their parents within ancient Judaism: “All men guard their own customs, but this is especially true of the Jewish nation. Holding that the laws are oracles vouchsafed by God and having been trained in this doctrine from their earliest years, they carry the likenesses of the commandments enshrined in their souls” (De Legatione 31). At the heart of Josephus’ and Philo’s descriptions stands the issue: what’s in the Torah, and how do you read it—education and observance.
Most readers of the Gospels do not understand the nature of Jesus’ question, nor the sophistication of the lawyer’s reply, and the genius of Jesus’ response to the lawyer’s reply. But, what stood behind Jesus’ question: How do you read it? How did ancient Jews read the Bible?
One of the greatest challenges for students of the New Testament is learning how ancient Jews read and interpreted the Bible, the Hebrew Bible-Old Testament. The books of the New Testament belong to the world of Ancient Judaism—its thought and worldview, its faith and theology, and its use and interpretation of the Hebrew Bible-Old Testament.
The world of the New Testament is not the world of the Old Testament-Hebrew Bible; rather, it belongs to the world of the reading and interpreting of the Hebrew Bible-Old Testament within ancient Judaism. The Hebrew Bible-Old Testament is not one book. It’s an anthology. This is true for any Bible, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Samaritan, or Orthodox. What we call the Bible is not one book, but a collection of various books written by different authors, over a period of time, comprised of different genres. These all factor into how we should read it.
The process of gathering individually written books into collections which eventually formed the Hebrew Bible began in the period after the Babylonian Exile, the Persian period. The identification of individual books as authoritative for the community of faith and the gathering of those books into collections to serve the community of faith required the emergence of individuals who could read and interpret these books, explaining them to the people.
The passage of time between the writing of the biblical book and the period of the interpreter and his community presented several challenges to reading the Hebrew Bible: 1) Time. The writers of the books of the Hebrew Bible represented their time, their culture, their worldview and religious outlook. The passage of time effects those things within a culture. As we’ve learned from the great bard, “The times they are a changin.” The interpreter’s role was not to provide a historical perspective on these ancient books, but rather to offer contemporary interpretation, which makes the faith current and relevant. What does this mean to us?
2) Language. Language changes and evolves over time. We see this simply in comparing our modern American English to the English of Beowulf, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. An interesting example of how ancient scribes updated language can been seen in one of the most famous Dead Sea Scrolls, the Great Isaiah Scroll. When one visits the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, which houses the Dead Sea Scrolls, you see at the center of the hall, under the domed roof, a case that houses a facsimile of the “Great Isaiah Scroll.” It’s a copy of the book of Isaiah dating to the second century BC, with its 66 chapters in the order found in the order of our printed Bibles today. But, the language of the scroll reflects an updating or contemporizing of the Hebrew to reflect the more common vernacular in the second century BC. Words’ meanings change. Words become archaic and fall out of use. Forms of words and the use of verbs change. These presented challenges for reading and interpreting these ancient texts, and, as we will see, it offered some rather unique opportunities for interpretations as well.
3) The composition of the biblical books. Ancient Jewish literature, like the books of the Hebrew Bible, were written without vowels and punctuation. Of course, chapter and verse divisions did not exist. Only the consonantal text appeared. The act of reading—supplying vowels and punctuation—was an act of interpretation. Traditions of how passages should be read grew up.
These ancient texts were being looked to for guidance from the community of faith. They believed that they communicated what God wanted of them, not just those in the past. Therefore, the people needed those who could interpret and explain these texts to them—to explain what God wanted. The actions of these ancient interpreters do not differ too much from a modern pastor who in his or her sermon seeks to explain how the ancient texts of the Bible pertain to the modern community of faith. It makes the faith relevant and contemporary, rescuing it from the past.
These ancient interpreters believed that Israel’s sacred books did not solely pertain to what happened in the past. Even though they were written long before, they revealed how people should arrange their lives in the present and in the future. These ancient interpreters did not produce a work detailing their methodology for reading the Hebrew Bible. Rather, we find their ideas and methods at work within the literature found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, Josephus and Philo, rabbinic literature, and, yes, the New Testament.
Their methods and assumptions may strike the modern reader as a bit odd, yet one thing is central to understanding how they read the Bible: they began and paid incredibly close attention to its language. They sought meaning within the language of the Scriptures: vocabulary, word order, word repetition, unique phrases or words, all became the focus of interpretive meaning. Language drove their interpretation; the combination of two biblical passages often derived from shared language between those two passages. Word order within biblical texts contained interpretive meaning. For example, in Exodus 24:7 when Moses brought the commandments down to the people, prior to him reading the commandments, the people utter, “We will do and we will listen.” Paying attention to the order of the words, ancient Jewish interpreters raised the question, how can one do the commandments of God without hearing them first. They concluded from the word order, the doing of the Torah took precedence over the “hearing” of it, which within the Hebrew vernacular of the period meant to study it. This language of “to do and to hear” appears in the words of Jesus in the Gospels and in the writings of Paul and James within the New Testament. Word repetition, ancient interpreters assumed the Bible would not repeat itself, so the appearance of repeated words provided an opportunity for interpretation.
For the student of the New Testament, focus on the role language plays within Jewish interpretation of biblical texts. This is crucial for understanding how the New Testament uses the Hebrew Bible. Language, not theology, drives how ancient Jews read the Bible. This is something often missed and misunderstood, even within the world of New Testament scholarship, which often lacks a knowledge of Hebrew, especially the Hebrew of ancient Judaism. Ancient Jewish interpretation of the Bible, of which the New Testament was a part, functioned in dialogue with other contemporary biblical interpretations; therefore, when we find citations or allusions to the Old Testament within the New Testament, we should not ask what the Old Testament passage meant, but rather, we should pay attention to how that passage, or those passages were interpreted within contemporary Jewish interpretations. This often sheds important light upon the New Testament passage.
One of the best resources I know of that shows how ancient Jewish interpreters read the Hebrew Bible is James Kugel’s The Bible As It Was. It offers a readable, fun exploration of ancient Jewish interpretations of many well-known stories of the Bible. In his introduction, which is worth the price of the book, Kugel outlines the four assumptions of ancient Jewish interpreters.[1] They are:
· 1) The Bible is fundamentally a cryptic text that should be scrutinized for every detail and hidden meaning. That meaning pertained to the immediate reality of the interpreter and his audience, not the historical context of the passage from the Hebrew Bible.
· 2) Scripture is one book of instruction and is relevant to the present world of the interpreter and his audience.
· 3) Scripture is harmonious with no mistakes or contradictions; therefore, those places that seem to reflect contradictions and disagreements require proper interpretation to be clarified and harmonized.
· 4) All Scripture is divinely inspired.
Ancient interpreters did not arrive at their interpretations willy-nilly. Words were interpreted, texts were explained, and sites were identified often through a sophisticated philological analysis in relation to other texts. They often began with the simple, plain meaning of a text within their analysis and focus centering on a very careful reading of the language of the text. Even those who used nonliteral meanings derived their interpretations from within the language of the text.
When we find figures in the New Testament, like Jesus, Paul, Peter, or James, citing or alluding to a passage or passages within the Hebrew Bible-Old Testament, they are not working like modern Bible readers trying to determine the “original, historical” meaning of the text. They function like ancient Jewish interpreters who sought contemporary interpretation and meaning within the language of the Hebrew Bible. To read them correctly, we must read them within the rich world of ancient Jewish interpretation.
[1] James Kugel, Traditions of the Bible (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998), 14-20.