Category Archive: Bible
From Shadows to Reality
Yesterday, I finished reading Jean Danielou’s From Shadows to Reality, a very helpful study of the biblical typology of the early church Fathers.
In my early biblical studies, I was under the impression that the Fathers were all given to a methodology called “allegorization.” Danielou, however, shows that there is a difference between allegory, which involves using the Bible to express philosophical ideas, and typology, and that, while some of the Fathers blend the two, they were aware of the difference between them. As Danielou writes:
It would be an entire abuse of language to include moral allegory with typology under the one heading of the spiritual sense, as opposed to the literal sense: typology is a legitimate extension of the literal sense, while moral allegory is something entirely alien: the former is in truth exegesis, the latter is not (64).
Indeed, I think it would be fair to say that typology is included in what Danielou and others call “the literal sense.”
But what appears to have happened in some more modern exegesis is that, instead of asking about typology in a text, exegetes settle for “the grammatical-historical method.” That is to say, they endeavour to understand a passage of Scripture by looking at the meaning of words, the grammar of the passage, and the historical and cultural background of the passage.
Grammatical-historical exegesis may give an impression of scientific accuracy, especially when compared to some of the fanciful interpretations that the Fathers give (though some of them aren’t nearly as fanciful as they first appear). If you’re reading about Herod, you can look up Herod in your encyclopedia and learn which Herod you’re reading about and what he did. If you discover that a certain verb is in the present tense, you can say, “Aha! The biblical writer is talking about something which was is taking place even as he writes.” One may get the impression that if we apply the correct methodology in reading the Bible, we will be able to prove our interpretations of it beyond the shadow of a doubt.
That impression of scientific accuracy, however, is an impression. Interpreting a text is never a matter of “scientific accuracy.” (Indeed, one might also queston whether science is a matter of “scientific accuracy,” in this sense.)
For instance, learning some things about Herod doesn’t yet tell you what the text is saying about Herod, why he’s mentioned in this particular place, and so forth. Nor is grammar a matter of strict and unbendable rules. That a verb is in the present tense doesn’t mean that the action of the verb is taking place in the writer’s own time. Many of the verbs in Mark (like the verbs in my “Aha!” sentence above) are present tense, but they are describing events prior to the time when Mark wrote his Gospel. Interpreting a text involves more than analyzing the possible meanings of words, examining the grammar, and taking the historical context into account.
Furthermore, given that there is such a thing as symbolism, is it possible to come up with an interpretive methodology that guarantees you’ll be able to know (and prove) exactly what the author is doing with his symbolism? We read about a man who has been separated from the woman he loves and at that point in the story it’s winter. Everything is icy, cold, bleak. Later, when he finds his love again, it’s spring. I would like to say that the symbolism is obvious, that the winter reflects the bleakness and barrenness of his own life and that the spring fits with his new life, reunited with his love. And maybe it is obvious. But could you ever prove that the writer is using winter and spring symbolically?
But even more significantly, interpreting a text in Scripture involves reading it typologically. In particular, understanding Scripture entails understanding how Scripture speaks of Christ. That’s what Jesus taught the disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:27). Origen, commenting on that passage, says,
Jesus it is who reads the Law, when he reveals the secrets of the Law. We, who belong to the Catholic Church, do not reject the Law of Moses, but receive it if and when it is Jesus who reads it to us. For it is only if Jesus reads the Law in such wise that through his reading we grasp its spiritual significance, that we correctly understand the Law (cited in Danielou 283).
Origen is correct: we understand the Old Testament only if we read it the way Jesus read it to the disciples on the road to Emmaus, that is, only if we see it as speaking of Christ (which is what Origen has in mind, primarily, when he speaks of the “spiritual significance” of the Old Testament). As Peter Leithart has written, “Interpretation of the Old Testament must be grounded in grammar and history, but if it does not move to typology, it is not Christian interpretation” (A House For My Name 27).
Reading about the typology of the Fathers is helpful, then, for showing us how our forefathers understood Scripture and how they struggled to see all of Scripture as speaking of Christ. Their interpretations were not always correct. Sometimes they blended allegory with typology. Sometimes, even when their typological connections were correct, they missed key elements which would have helped to put their interpretations on a more solid basis. Nevertheless, they have a lot to teach us and their meditations on Scripture are useful for sparking our own meditations and for pushing us to a better approach to Scripture, one which isn’t characterized by their mistakes and abuses, but one which also seeks to avoid our own.
For that reason, I’m thankful for Danielou’s study. I just wish he’d covered more than the first six books of the Bible!
There Are No Idioms
I was thinking, in connection with my last post, about why translators sometimes mistranslate certain phrases in the Bible. Part of what promotes mistranslation, it seems to me, is the push for readability.
Virtually every translation has, as one of its goals, to produce a readable version of the Bible. In translations such as the NASB and NKJV, that goal is balanced by the goal of trying to come as close as possible to a word-for-word translation. In other translations, such as the NIV, the goal of readability is much more dominant. Sometimes, translators even claim that they are translating the ideas, and not so much the words. After all, they might say, the words are but the vehicles for the idea, and the goal is to get the ideas of Scripture across to people. And what’s more, we do want people to be able to read the Bible, don’t we?
But readability cannot be our chief goal in translation. For one thing, we don’t simply want to get the ideas across. We want people to hear what God actually says, and that involves trying as much as possible to reproduce the words He uses in the way He uses them. Ideally, if a passage is chiastic in structure, we should want our translation to be chiastic, too.
Besides, if our goal were to produce a completely readable Bible, we’d certainly trim down a lot of the repetition in the Bible. We’d probably eliminate most of Numbers 7 (“one silver plate, the weight of which was one hundred and thirty shekels…”).
“Does all that repetition really matter?” I can imagine someone asking. After all, the ancient world may have loved lists (just look at all the lists in medieval literature), but we don’t, so why not translate the Bible into our own style, the style readers today are accustomed to? Lists aren’t part of that style, so lists must go. We can say the same thing — get the same idea across — in fewer words.
Now most translators don’t go to that extent. But in the push for readability, certain other sacrifices are made.
Take the matter of idioms. When you’re translating from another language, you often run into idioms which aren’t found in English. Sometimes a metaphor might make sense even when it’s translated literally, but often the translator struggles to find an equivalent English idiom to get the same point across.
Once when I was translating something from the Dutch, I discovered that instead of saying “Putting the cart before the horse,” the Dutch writer had “Putting the horse behind the cart.” It’s the same idiom from a different perspective. When I translated that passage, it was easy to switch the Dutch idiom for our version of it.
But can we do that to a phrase in the Bible without losing something? Here’s a thesis for consideration: There are no idioms in the Bible. Put another way, the Bible’s idioms are normative.
The Bible does not simply adopt pithy idiomatic sayings from its surrounding culture, and its short, often metaphorical, sayings cannot be switched for other sayings in English that “make the same point.” Rather, the Bible says what it wants to say in the way that it wants to say it. The Holy Spirit chooses his words carefully. If we switch phrases in the Bible for what we think their English equivalents would be, we lose something of what the Spirit is saying. In particular, it seems to me, we lose a sense of the Bible’s symbolism.
And so to refer back to my last post, “uncover his father’s corner” or “his father’s wing” is not simply an idiomatic way of saying “commit adultery with his father’s wife.” The Spirit could have said “commit adultery with his father’s wife” if He had wanted to. He didn’t. He chose to refer to the wing of the garment for a reason, even though “commit adultery with his father’s wife” would seem to be much clearer — much more readable — for modern readers, and even though modern readers might find the reference to the father’s wing baffling. That puzzling reference to a wing is normative: it is part of what the Spirit is telling us about man, about clothing, about marriage, about holiness, and so forth. It isn’t a Hebrew idiom which can be traded for something clearer for English readers. There are no such idioms in Scripture.
Translations
On Sunday afternoon, my Scripture reading (as background for the Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 41, dealing with the Seventh Commandment) was Deuteronomy 22:9-30. In preparing for that sermon, I noticed two major translation problems.
In Deuteronomy 22:9, the NKJV reads, “You shall not sow your vineyard with different kinds of seed, lest the yield of the seed which you have sown and the fruit of your vineyard be defiled.” The KJV, NASB, and NIV all have the same thing: “be defiled.”
But the word in Hebrew is a form of the verb qadash, and everywhere else that word appears it means “to be or become holy.” A quick glance through my Hebrew concordance reveals that nowhere else in the whole Old Testament does the word refer to something defiled, and my lexicons do not give “defiled” as an option for qadash.
Later on in that same passage, the NKJV has this: “A man shall not take his father’s wife, nor uncover his father’s bed” (Deut. 22:30). The NIV gives up translating completely and settles for a paraphrase: “he must not dishonor his father’s bed.” The KJV has “… nor discover [i.e., uncover] his father’s skirt,” which is much closer. The NASB is similar: “he shall not uncover his father’s skirt.”
The word rendered “bed” by the NKJV and “skirt” by the NASB and KJV is the word kanaf, and it’s the word for a bird’s wing. By extension, it applies to the wings or corners of a garment, which is how it is used earlier in the passage: “You shall make tassels on the four corners of the clothing with which you cover yourself” (Deut. 22:12, NKJV).
By translating kanaf as “bed” as the NKJV does or by paraphrasing as the NIV does, the connection between Deuteronomy 22:12 and 30 is lost. The reader can no longer see that all the laws in Deuteronomy 22:13-30, which deal with fornication, adultery, rape, and seduction, are bounded by laws about the corners or wings of a man’s garments. But those corners or wings have everything to do with the laws about sexual morality which they surround.
In the Bible, taking a bride is spreading one’s wing (or the corner of one’s garment) over a woman. That’s what Ruth asks Boaz to do for her (Ruth 3:9). That’s what God did for Israel (Ezek. 16:8; cf. Ruth 2:12). The husband-to-be would symbolically take his wife-to-be into his cloak so that she is covered by his garment’s corner, that is, by his wing.
The corners of Israel’s garments had tassels on them, which represented and reminded Israel of her holiness (Num. 15:38-41). To uncover someone’s corner or wing, then, is to violate the holiness of their marriage bond. And that’s what Deuteronomy 22:13-30 is all about. But you’d never know it if you read most translations.
Furthermore, you’d never know from most translations that mixtures become holy. If you sowed field seed in your vineyard, both the produce of the seed and the produce of the vineyard become holy, which would mean that you couldn’t eat it. (The Berkeley Version takes this stab at a paraphrase: the produce will “be confiscated to the sanctuary.”) As Jim Jordan points out in his essay, “The Law of Forbidden Mixtures,” there are mixtures in God’s sanctuary, the most notable of which is that the priests wore linen garments embroidered with coloured wool (all coloured cloth in the Bible is wool: they couldn’t dye linen). Ordinary Israelites were forbidden to wear mixtures, but the priests wore mixtures. Mixtures in the Old Covenant become holy.
And the tassels that the Israelites wore on their garments had a blue (and therefore woolen) thread in them. Each Israelite had a little mixture, a little bit of holiness, on the four corners of his garment. So the corner or wing that a man spreads over his wife has a tassel symbolizing holiness.
But you’d never spot any of this symbolism if you just read the standard English translations. Instead of reproducing what the text of Scripture actually says, the translators have attempted to give their own interpretations. They read that the produce of mixed seed is holy and they say to themselves, “Nope. That can’t be right. Mixtures are bad, so … let’s make that defiled instead.” They read about uncovering a father’s corner and they assume that readers won’t be able to figure it out. It’s an obscure idiom, they think, and so they simplify things by speaking about uncovering the father’s bed or they simply paraphrase to try to “get the meaning across.” But the ironic result is that in so doing they fail to get the meaning across, because the meaning is bound up with the words God uses.
Berlin’s Poetics
Last night, I finished reading Adele Berlin’s Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative. In some ways, the book was a disappointment. Berlin focuses primarily on characterization and point of view, and what she says about them seems sound. But it also seems fairly obvious. Some characters are complex and fully developed, some are depicted in ways that make them (stereo)types, and some are merely agents, there because they play a role in moving the narrative forward but not described in any detail (e.g., Abishag). Well, yes, but that just seems to be the case for any narrative.
With regard to point of view, Berlin points out how the biblical narrative indicates a change with regard to point of view. For instance, the word hinneh often (but not always) introduces a new point of view. For instance, when Jael has killed Sisera, we then read about Barak arriving at the tent, and hinneh there’s Sisera, dead. Hinneh here suddenly switches us to Barak’s point of view, his surprise at what he suddenly sees. All of which seems to be true, but again it also seems to be fairly obvious.
Berlin’s discussion of “naming” is helpful. The way characters are referred to tells you something about the person doing the referring or about which of the person’s many relationships is important at this particular moment. When Joseph’s brothers are plotting to kill him, Reuben intervenes and Reuben keeps referring to Joseph, not as “Joseph,” but as “the boy.” Michal is David’s wife, but when she shows contempt for David’s dancing, the narrator (whose naming and whose point of view is always authoritative) calls her “the daughter of Saul.” She’s acting Saul-like at this point, opposing David.
At times, Berlin does make some interesting and potentially helpful comments about particular biblical narratives. I’m not convinced by her reading of the connection between David’s relationship to women (Michal, Abigail, Bathsheba, and Abishag) and David’s public life (p. 33), but the possibility of such a connection is worth thinking about. Is there a connection? Does the narrator show us David’s relationship with women (the private sphere) as a way of characterizing David’s relations in the public sphere?
I’m also not convinced by some of the elements in Berlin’s reading of Ruth (chapter 4), and in particular I find it hard to swallow her interpretation of Ruth’s nighttime visit to Boaz. Naomi had romance in mind (on Berlin’s read, it sounds like seduction), but Ruth misunderstood:
She [Naomi] wanted Ruth to approach Boaz after he had eaten, when he had just lain down, but before he had actually fallen asleep — just at the time that “his heart was good” and he would be most receptive to Ruth’s visit. But Ruth waited too long. She did not realize that her mission was a romantic one, thinking rather that she was there on secret legal business (p. 91).
I grant that the procedure in Ruth 3 is a bit hard to figure out, but that Ruth thought she was up to some legal business and that it involved sneaking up to Boaz alone when he was lying down and uncovering his feet (on Berlin’s view, “legs” as a euphemism for genitals) and lying down with him? As Maxwell Smart’s enemies always said when he tried to bluff, “I find that hard to believe.”
In the last major section of the book, Berlin takes on source criticism and form criticism. Source criticism tries to determine the original sources that (on this view) went into the making of the text we have today (e.g., verses 1, 5, 6a, and 8 are from one source and they’ve been stuck together rather badly with verses 2, 3, 4, 6b, and 7, which were originally a different story). Form criticism builds on source criticism and wants to trace how the story developed from the original version into the version we have today, gaining bits and losing bits along the way. In both source criticism and form criticism, repetition, (apparent) inconsistencies, and doublets (the same story told twice or even similar stories) all indicate different sources (source criticism) or later developments in the story’s history (form criticism).
Berlin shows, however, that both source criticism and form criticism operate at odds with the findings of rhetorical and literary criticism. The rhetorical and literary critics show that there are good reasons why the author (or final editor) included repetitions. Repetitions and apparent inconsistencies (or real inconsistencies between what the narrator has said and what a character says) and such things are in the text for a reason, not because someone edited some earlier sources badly.
To be sure, there are gaps, inconsistencies, retellings, and changes in vocabulary in biblical narrative, but these can be viewed as part of a literary technique and are not necessarily signs of different sources. The whole thrust of source criticism is toward the fragmenting of the narrative into sources, while, at the same time it ignores the rhetorical and poetic features which bind the narrative together (p. 121).
I recall Rev. VanderHart in seminary telling us how the earlier critics — source critics and form critics — got upset with the newer, younger literary critics at the Society of Biblical Literature meetings. The earlier critics wanted to take the wall of the Bible and break it all down into bricks and mortar and once they had destroyed it all, they thought they were done their exegesis: “See? The whole thing looks like a unit, but it really isn’t. It’s all a bunch of stories that some rather stupid editor stuck together badly.”
But now the newer critics are coming along and challenging the older view. Sure, the newer guys often grant that there may be a bunch of sources underlying the text of Scripture as it stands, but they aren’t interested in that and they question whether the existence of those sources can even be proven. What they’re interested in is the text of Scripture as it stands right now. The author (or perhaps editor) wasn’t stupid. Even if he edited a bunch of sources, they point out, he put things together deliberately.
To say, “The story about Judah and Tamar is clearly from a different source and we know that because it’s right in the middle of the Joseph narrative where it sticks out like a sore thumb,” isn’t exegesis. It’s the refusal to exegete. It’s the refusal to notice the literary function of that text in the whole narrative as it stands right now. Unless we assume that the author/editor was stupid, we should suppose that he thought the Judah story fit where he placed it and played a role in the whole narrative of Genesis. And it seems to me that it’s more likely that the source critics are the stupid ones here.
In the end, however, Berlin’s book was disappointing. While I grant much of what she said, much of it also seemed obvious, though it wasn’t bad to see it spelled out (e.g., the function of hinneh). Her demolition of source and form criticism was fun, but not especially helpful, since I’ve never bought into either. Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative was much more helpful for interpreting the narratives of Scripture. Any other books on narrative you’d especially recommend?
“Reading the Bible”
Barb points out that my article entitled “Reading the Bible” has been published in U-Turn online. I received the hardcopy in the mail last week, but hadn’t checked yet to see if it was up on the webpage.
While you’re surfing U-Turn, check out Peter Leithart’s “The Christian and Literature” (which is part of the intro to his Brightest Heaven of Invention) and Jeff Meyers‘ “Drinking with Thanksgiving.”
ESV
Here is a helpful review of the English Standard Version by Kathleen Nielson. Nielson notes that the ESV has “the obedience of faith” in Romans 1:5 and 16:26. The benefit of the translation “the obedience of faith” is that it leaves the work of interpreting that phrase up to the reader, whereas many translations simply give the translators’ own interpretation. The NIV, for instance, has “the obedience that comes from faith” in Romans 1:5 and reworks 16:26 so that it reads “so that all nations might believe and obey him.”
Many translations, it appears, shy away from anything that might seem unclear or ambiguous on a first reading, which seems strange on the face of it: Why couldn’t Paul write something that you wouldn’t fully understand until you had read further in his letter? Should we assume that everything Paul wrote was immediately clear to his first readers so that they would never have to wrestle to figure out his arguments or what he meant by a phrase like “the obedience of faith”?
Nielson notes, as well, that the ESV has “the obedience of faith” in both Romans 1:5 and 16:26. One of my pet peeves with a lot of translations, a peeve I share with Nielson, is the inconsistency with which they translate certain phrases. Nobody reading Romans 1:5 and 16:26 in the NIV, for instance, would guess that Paul uses exactly the same phrase (“the obedience of faith”) at the beginning and end of his letter. But surely the repetition of that phrase is important, isn’t it?
Nielson also addresses the idea that the goal of translation is to produce a version of the Bible which is easy to read:
In one sense, the ESV might be accused of being more difficult than some other contemporary versions. Two responses come quickly to mind. First, this accusation of difficulty is not a problem with the translation; it is a problem with the Bible and with taking the time to read and study it. I remember the first time I taught Shakespeare. The play was King Lear, and one of the first questions from my first-year college students was: “Couldn’t we read this in a modernized version?” My answer was no, because I wanted them to read the words Shakespeare wrote, to understand them, learn from them, and delight in their beauty. By the end of that class, most of those students had taken in that play wholeheartedly, memorized parts of it, and enjoyed it thoroughly.The process did require a bit of work. Anything worthwhile does. For good reason the church has developed teachers and preachers and theologians, to help us dig into the riches of the inspired word of God. The ESV is certainly not difficult to the degree that Shakespeare is! It does, however, respect readers enough to give them the biblical text in all its demanding beauty.
Is there a perfect translation out there? No. (One of these days, though, I will have to check out the ESV.) But articles like this remind me why I spend time working through each passage I preach in the Greek or Hebrew instead of simply relying on an English translation.
Typo in the Bible
Have you ever found a typo or a grammatical glitch in a Bible? Generally it seems as if Bible publishers are pretty careful to make sure that there are no such errors, but once in a while one slips through. In the 1600s, one version of the Bible left out the word “not” in the Seventh Commandment: “Thou shalt commit adultery.”
The mistake I found in my edition of the NKJV isn’t that funny, but here it is. In Ezekiel 14:21, I have
For thus says the Lord GOD: “How much more it shall be when I send my four severe judgments on Jerusalem — the sword and famine and wild beasts and pestilence — to cut off man and beast from it?”
What the Lord says here is clearly a question, not an indicative statement, and therefore it should be “shall it,” not “it shall.” Not a huge glitch, but it’s the only one I’ve found and I’m curious whether this same error shows up in all editions of the NKJV or just in the one I’m using. Did some editor finally spot it and fix it?
[Update in 2016: The typo still exists.]
Perspectives on the Word of God
I first read John Frame’s Perspectives on the Word of God: An Introduction to Christian Ethics several years ago, before I went to seminary. Now that I’ve got a couple of years of the ministry (and a lot more reading and thinking) under my belt, I sometimes think I should go back and re-read some of the books I read in the past.
During this vacation, I took that opportunity and read through Perspectives once more. It’s a short book (only 56 pages of text) and it’s based on three lectures Frame gave at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, so it obviously can’t cover the material in any depth. And yet Frame does cover a lot of ground in this little book and does so in a very helpful and readable way.
The first lecture deals with the Word of God itself. The Word of God is not limited to Scripture. God created everything by His Word. His Word is His power, His authority, and His presence. In fact, God’s Word is even identified with God Himself and is an object of worship (Pss. 34:3; 56:4, 10, etc.).
The second lecture deals with the media of God’s Word, and here Frame makes a very important point:
All of God’s word to us is mediated, in the sense that it always reaches us through some creaturely means. This is true even when revelation seems most “direct.” For example, when God spoke to the people of Israel gathered around Mt. Sinai, and they heard the divine voice from heaven, even then God’s word reached the people through creaturely media. For one thing, God spoke human language. For another, he used the normal earthly atmosphere to transmit the sounds to the eardrums of the people. Further, it was the people’s brain cells that interpreted the sounds as words and interpreted the words as God’s message. God’s word never lacks media when it is spoken to human beings (pp. 19-20).
Frame goes on to discuss three means: events (history, redemptive history, miracles), words (divine voice, prophetic speech, written word, preaching), and persons (human constitution, examples of Christian leaders, God’s own presence). One could wish that Frame had also included the sacraments, perhaps as a subcategory (“rites”) under “event media.”
Frame’s point is worth pondering, especially in connection with a trend in Reformed theology which wants to downplay God’s mediated work as “sacramentalism” or “sacerdotalism” and which emphasizes instead some kind of “immediate” (unmediated) work of God on the believer’s heart. But Scripture speaks of the preaching of the Word as Christ’s own voice (Rom. 1:14-15) by which God regenerates (1 Pet. 1:23-25). And many times in Scripture, we hear about the efficacy of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. God delights in using means to work in the lives of His people, and as Frame says, He never speaks without using means.
The final lecture in the book surveys the three basic secular approaches to ethics (existential, teleological, and deontological), critiques them, and then proposes a Christian ethic which takes into account the strengths of all three. In our ethics, we must work with God’s objective Word as norm, the situation which we are confronting, and the nature of the persons involved. What is the situation? What does God want me to do about it? What changes need to take place in me (him, her) so that I (he, she) may do the right thing?
All in all, a helpful treatment, which whets my appetite for Frame’s long-promised but still unpublished Doctrine of the Christian Life.