Kugel on Biblical Interpretation by the Ancient Interpreters and Current Jewish and Christian Interpretation (5/23/21) (2024)

The Ancient Interpreters at Work

Whowere the interpreters of these ancient writings? n14 For the most part, theirnames are unknown. From their writings and from their whole approach tointerpreting Scripture, it would appear that most of them were teachers orprofessional sages of sorts; n15 is some were probably independently wealthymen (and, possibly, women) who had the leisure to pursue their subject. n16Indeed, we know that a few, like the second-century BCE sage Ben Sira, belongedto the ruling class and were close to the political leadership (Sir. 39:4; 50:1-24);such figures no doubt strengthened the connection between reading Scripture anddetermining how community affairs were to be run in their own day. Their ideasabout how Scripture is to be interpreted have survived in a number of textsbelonging to the end of the biblical period—texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls and the biblical apocrypha and pseudepigraphas as well as in somewhat laterwritings such as those of early Christians and the founders of rabbinicJudaism.

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The mannerin which ancient interpreters read and explained Scripture is at first likelyto strike modern readers as a bit strange. They did not go about the job ofinterpreting the way we do nowadays. Take, for example, the famous biblicalstory of how God ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac on an altar:

And it came to pass, after these things, that God testedAbraham. He said to him, "Abraham!" and he answered, "Here Iam." He said, "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, andgo to the land of Moriah. Then sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on oneof the mountains that I will show you." So Abraham got up early in themorning and saddled his donkey. He took two of his servants with him, alongwith his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering and then set out forthe place that God had told him about. On the third day, Abraham looked up andsaw the place from afar. Abraham told his servants, "You stay here withthe donkey while the boy and I go up there, so that we can worship and thencome back to you."

Abrahamtook the wood for the burnt offering and put it on his son Isaac; then he tookthe fire and the knife, and the two of them walked together. But Isaac said tohis father Abraham, "Father?" and he said, "Here I am, myson." And he said, "Here is the fire and the wood, but where is the lambfor the burnt offering?" Abraham said, "God Himself will provide thelamb for the burnt offering, my son." And the two of them walked together.

When theycame to the place that God had told him about, Abraham built an altar andarranged the wood on it. He then tied up his son Isaac and put him on the altaron top of the wood. Abraham picked up the knife to kill his son. But an angelof the LORD called to him from heaven, and said, "Abraham, Abraham!"And he said, "Here I am." He said, "Do not harm the boy or doanything to him. For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheldyour son, your only son, from me." And Abraham looked up and saw a ramcaught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and sacrificedit as a burnt offering instead of his son.

Gen.22:1-13

The storyitself is quite disturbing to modern readers — as it was to ancient readers.How could God, even as a test, order someone to kill his own son? And why wouldGod ever need to test Abraham in this way? After all, God is supposed to knoweverything: presumably, He knew how the test would come out before it tookplace, and He certainly already knew that Abraham was one who "fearedGod," as the angel says after the test is over. Equally disturbing is the wayAbraham deceives his son Isaac. He does not tell him [12] what God has told him to do; Isaac iskept in the dark until the last minute. In fact, when Isaac asks the obviousquestion—I see all the accoutrements for the sacrifice, but where is the animalwe're going to sacrifice? — Abraham gives him an evasive answer: "GodHimself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son." Thisactually turns out to be true; God does provide a sacrificial animal — butAbraham had no way of knowing it at the time.

Modernreaders generally take these things at face value and then either wrestle withtheir implications or else just shrug their shoulders: "Well, I guessthat's just the way things were back then." But ancient interpretersinstead set out to give the text the most favorable reading they could and, insome cases, to try to get it to say what they thought it really meant to say,or at least ought to say. They did this by combining an extremely meticulousexamination of its words with an interpretive freedom that sometimes borderedon the wildly inventive.

Thus, inthe case at hand, they noticed that the first sentence began, "And it cameto pass, after these things." Such phrases are often used in the Bible tomark a transition; they generally signal a break, "The previous story isover and now we are going on to something new." But the word"things" in Hebrew also means "words." So the transitionalphrase here could equally well be understood as asserting that some words hadbeen spoken, and that "it came to pass, after these words, that God testedAbraham." What words? The Bible did not say, but if some words had indeedbeen spoken, then interpreters felt free to try to figure out what the words inquestion might have been.

At thispoint, some ancient interpreter — we have no idea who — thought of another partof the Bible quite unrelated to Abraham, the book of Job. That book begins byreporting that Satan once challenged God to test His servant Job. Since thestory of Abraham and Isaac is also a divine test, interpreters theorized thatthe words mentioned in the opening sentence of our passage might have been, asin the book of Job, a challenge spoken by Satan to God: "Put Abraham tothe test and see whether he is indeed obedient enough even to sacrifice his ownson." If one reads the opening sentence with this in mind, "And itcame to pass, after these words, that God tested Abraham," then theproblem of why God should have tested Abraham disappears. Of course God knewthat Abraham would pass the test—but if He nevertheless went on to testAbraham, it was because some words had been spoken by Satan challenging God toprove Abraham's worthiness.

As forAbraham hiding his intentions from Isaac—well, again it all depends how youread the text. Ancient interpreters noticed that the passage contains a slightrepetition:

Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and put it onhis son Isaac; then he took the fire and the knife, and the two of them walkedtogether. [13] But Isaac said to his father Abraham,"Father?" and he said, "Here I am, my son." And he said,"Here is the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burntoffering?" Abraham said, "God Himself will provide the lamb for theburnt offering, my son." And the two of them walked together.

Repetitionis not necessarily a bad thing, but ancient interpreters generally felt thatthe Bible would not repeat itself without purpose. Between the two occurrencesof "and the two of them walked together" is the brief exchange inwhich Abraham apparently hides his true intentions from Isaac. But Abraham'swords were, at least potentially, ambiguous. Since biblical Hebrew wasoriginally written without punctuation marks or even capital letters markingthe beginnings of sentences, Abraham's answer to Isaac could actually be readas two sentences: "God Himself will provide. The lamb for the burntoffering [is] my son." Read in this way, Abraham's answer to Isaac wasnot an evasion but the brutal truth: you're the sacrifice. If, following that,the text adds, "And the two of them walked together," this would notbe a needless repetition at all: Abraham told Isaac that he was to be thesacrifice and Isaac agreed; then the two of them "walked together" inthe sense that they were now of one mind to carry out God's fearsome command.

Byinterpreting the story in this fashion, ancient interpreters solved two of themajor problems raised by this account, God's apparent ignorance of how the testwould turn out and Abraham's apparent callousness and evasiveness vis-a-visIsaac. But did these interpreters actually believe their own interpretations?Didn't they know they were playing fast and loose with the text's real meaning?

This isalways a difficult question. I personally believe that, at least at first,ancient interpreters were sometimes quite well aware that they were distortingthe straightforward meaning of the text. But with time, that awareness began todim. Biblical interpretation soon became an institution in ancient Israel; onegeneration's interpretations were passed on to the next generation, andeventually they acquired the authority that time and tradition always grant.Midrash, as this body of interpretation came to be called, simply became whatthe text had always been intended to communicate. Along with theinterpretations themselves, the interpreters' very modus operandi acquired itsown authority: this was how the Bible was to be interpreted, period. Moreover,since the midrashic method of searching the text carefully for hidden implica-[14] tions seemed to solve so many problems in the Bible that otherwise had nosolution, this indicated that the interpreters were going about thingscorrectly. As time went on, new interpretations were created on the model ofolder ones, until soon every chapter of the Bible came accompanied by a host ofclever explanations that accounted for any perceived difficulty in its words.

The Four Assumptions

Readersalways approach texts with certain assumptions, and the assumptions changedepending on what they are reading; not every text is thought to mean in thesame way. Thus, when we read a poem in which the poet says to his beloved,"I faint! I die!" we know he's not really dying; likewise, when hesays he's wallowing in love in the same way that a cooked fish is wallowed ingalantine sauce, well . . . we know this isn't really intended as an exactdescription of his emotional state. And it is not just poems. Novels and shortstories, form letters and radio commercials and last wills and testaments—allsorts of different compositions come with their own conventions, and we asreaders are aware of those conventions and interpret the texts accordingly. Weexpect to be amused by a stand-up comedian's recitation of his woes, and so welaugh in all the right places; yet if a somewhat similar monologue is spoken bya patient at his group therapy session, people will probably not laugh, in partbecause they bring an entirely different set of expectations to his"text." (Also, they don't want to hurt his feelings.)

It is astriking fact that all ancient interpreters seem to have shared very much thesame set of expectations about the biblical text. No one ever sat down andformulated these assumptions for them—they were simply assumed, just like ourpresent-day assumptions about how we are to understand texts uttered by poetsand group-therapy patients. However, looking over the vast body of ancientinterpretations of different parts of the Bible, we can gain a rather clearpicture of what their authors were assuming about the biblical text—and whatemerges is that, despite the geographic and cultural distance separating someof these interpreters from others, they all seem to have assumed the same fourbasic things about how the Bible was to be read:

1. They assumed that the Bible was afundamentally cryptic text: that is, when it said A, often it might really meanB. Thus, when it said, "And it came to pass after these things," eventhough that might look like the familiar transitional phrase, what it might reallymean was "after these words." Indeed, this text, they felt, was socryptic that it did not even say what the words were—it had left it to theinterpreters themselves to remember the book of Job and so figure out the rest.Similarly, when the Bible repeated "and the two of them walkedtogether," [15] the second occurrence of this phrase had ahidden meaning: Abraham and Isaac had agreed and now proceeded as if of onemind.

2. Interpreters also assumed that the Biblewas a book of lessons directed to readers in their own day. It may seem to talkabout the past, but it is not fundamentally history. It is instruction, tellingus what to do: be obedient to God just as Abraham was and you will be rewarded,just as he was. Ancient interpreters assumed this not only about narrativeslike the Abraham story but about every part of the Bible. For example, Isaiah'sprophecies about the Assyrian crisis contained, interpreters believed, amessage for people in their own time (five or six centuries later). Likewise,when the book of Nahum had referred metaphorically to a "raginglion," the text was not talking about some enemy in Nahum's own day, butabout Demetrius III, who was the king of Syria six hundred years later, in thetime of the ancient interpreters. n17 Similarly, the Bible's laws wereunderstood as being intended for people to obey in the interpreters' own time,even though they had been promulgated in a very different society manycenturies earlier.

3. Interpreters also assumed that the Biblecontained no contradictions or mistakes. It is perfectly harmonious, despiteits being an anthology; in fact, they also believed that everything that theBible says ought to be in accord with the interpreters' own religious beliefsand practices (since they believed these to have been ordained by God). Thus,if the Bible seemed to imply that God was not all-knowing or that Abraham hadbeen callous and deceitful with his son, interpreters would not say that thisstory reflected beliefs about God or basic morality that had changed sinceancient times. Instead, they stoutly insisted that there must be some way ofunderstanding the Bible's words so as to remove any such implications: that cannotbe what the Bible really intended! And of course the Bible ought not tocontradict itself or even seem to repeat itself needlessly, so that if it said"and the two of them walked together" twice, the second occurrencecannot be merely repetitive; it must mean something different from the first.In short, the Bible, they felt, is an utterly consistent, seamless, perfectbook.

4. Lastly, they believed that the entireBible is essentially a divinely given text, a book in which God speaks directlyor through His prophets. There could be little doubt about those parts of theBible that openly identify the speaker as God: "And the LORD spoke toMoses, say- [16] ing . . ." "Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel .." But interpreters believed that this was also true of the story ofAbraham and the other stories in Genesis, even though the text itself neveractually said there that God was the author of these stories. And it was heldto be true of the rest of the Bible too—even of the book of Psalms, although thepsalms themselves are prayers and songs addressed to God and thus oughtlogically not to have come from God. Nevertheless, most interpreters held thepsalms to be in some sense of divine origin, written under divine inspirationor guidance or even directly dictated to David, their traditional author. n18

How theseassumptions came into existence is hard to say for sure, and in any case thatquestion need not detain us here; n19the fact is, they did come into existence, even before Israel's ancient libraryof sacred texts began to be called the Bible, in fact, even before its precisetable of contents had been determined.

What aremodern readers to make of these assumptions? Many readers will balk at theancient interpretation of the Abraham and Isaac story given above, indeed, atmany of the interpretations mentioned in this book. But it is simply in thenature of assumptions in general that they are assumed, not consciouslyadopted. Once biblical interpretation had started along the path of these FourAssumptions, it developed a logic, and a momentum, of its own. This was simplyhow the Bible was to be understood. The power and persuasiveness of theseassumptions may be clearer if one considers that, to a remarkable degree, theycontinue to color the way people read the Bible right down to the present day(even if nowadays they may lead to somewhat different conclusions from thoseadvanced by the ancient interpreters). Thus, many modern-day Jews andChristians continue to look to the Bible as a guidebook for daily life(Assumption 2); they do not read it as if it were just a relic from the ancientpast. In fact, a significant number of contemporary Jews and Christians seek toact on a daily basis in accordance with the Bible's specific exhortations andlaws, and many view the Bible's prophecies as being fulfilled in the events oftoday's world (another aspect of Assumption 2). Without quite saying so, quitea few readers also generally assume that the Bible has some sort of coherentmessage to communicate and that it does not contradict itself or containmistakes (Assumption 3). Many also believe that the Bible's meaning is notalways obvious (Assumption 1)—it even seems deliberately cryptic sometimes,they say. And the idea of divine inspiration, in fact, the conception of theBible as a whole as the word of God (Assumption 4), is an article of faith in agreat many denominations.

Thus,whatever one thinks of the Four Assumptions, there is no denying their stayingpower. What is more, some of the interpretations they gave rise to havedemonstrated a comparable durability: to a degree not generally recognized,these interpretations are still with us and have actually succeeded in [17]changing the meaning of quite a few biblical stories. As will be seenpresently, the story of Adam and Eve only became "the Fall of Man"thanks to these ancient interpretive assumptions; the book of Genesis saysnothing of the kind. The same is true of many other things that people havealways believed the Bible says—that Abraham was the one who discovered thatthere is only one God, that David was a pious king who wrote the book ofPsalms, or that the Song of Solomon speaks of God's love for His people. TheBible says these things only if it is read in accordance with the FourAssumptions. That is why, even today, trampling on these assumptions can getpeople's hackles up— Charles A. Briggs was neither the first nor the lastmodern scholar to learn that lesson.