James L. Kugel's How to Read the Bible is a really enjoyable book, and a wise one. A major theme running through the book is that traditional Biblical interpretation shared four assumptions. Part of Kugel's point is that the Bible was always interpreted. That is, no account of the Bible, no edition of the Bible, and none of the work in the Talmud approaches the Bible without a layer of interpretation affecting the writer's perception of what the text says. For one example, when New Testament authors refer to Old Testament texts, they do so with an interpretation in mind, and that interpretation shares these four assumptions.
The first assumption, as I quotedit in my post "Knight's Reading List XIV: February 2008," is:
“1. They assumed that the Bible was a fundamentally cryptic text: that is, when it said A, often it might really mean B. …"
To take one example from Kugel, Genesis quotes God as saying to Adam, "You may eat from any tree in the garden. But you shall not eat from the tree of knowing good and evil, because on the day that you eat from it, you shall die." Genesis 2:15-17. That's pretty clear, but, as the story goes on, Adam did eat from the tree of knowing good and evil, and he did not die. At least, he didn't die for another 900 years, as the Bible says that he lived to the age of 930. So the phrase "on the day that you eat from it, you shall die," cannot be taken literally. This passage was interpreted as meaning that, in the sight of God, a thousand years was as a day.
"But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." 2 Peter 3:8.
There are lots of interesting consequences of this interpretation. For one thing, it means that the Creation might have taken 7,000 years, or even more, instead of a literal seven days. For another, it has allowed Christian churches to continue to operate, when it is quite apparent that the New Testament writers expected Christ to return in their lifetimes. Why didn't everybody decide that the New Testament prophecies were wrong and go back to worshipping Zeus in, say, 150 CE? Because a thousand years could be as one day. This concept certainly builds a lot of flexibility into your interpretation of time in the Bible.
Let us note, however, that the Bible itself, so far as Genesis is concerned, doesn't say that a day is as one thousand years. Through the Torah, a year is a year, a day is a day, and time is pretty inflexible. So the elasticity of time is an interpretation of what the Bible says, based on the assumption that the Bible is cryptic, that its meanings are mysterious.
This is an enjoyable assumption. It has led to such exercises as finding codes in the Bible by reading every seventh word, or by numerology, or by other methods of "decoding." You see, the assumption is that it is coded, and so it needs decoding. That gives people who like puzzles, and who want to find hidden information in the Bible, lots of ways to go about their business. But it is also a dangerous assumption. If the Bible might not mean what it says, it might mean anything. How is one to separate a valid interpretation from an invalid one, if the words don't mean what they say in plain speaking? This gets into interpretation such as Leo Strauss telling us what Machiavelli meant by what wasn't written in The Prince. In fact, there is a whole line of thought holding that the works of Plato are fundamentally cryptic, so that they can only be understood by the "elect" who can decode and interpret them correctly.
My question is, how would one read the Bible if one eliminated this assumption from one's interpretation of the text?
Glenn A Knight
In my study
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3 comments:
Glenn:
A quick thought: The assumption that something is "fundamentally cryptic" sounds fishy. Why not "often" cryptic? It would serve as well without giving the unfortunate impression that one needs an expert to understand anything and everything written in it.
"Thou shalt not steal" does not require a great deal of decoding, though it would certainly be open to extrapolation as well as interpretation. (For instance, what is meant by "stealing" could be the subject of millennia worth of discussions.)
When the Bible says A, it might mean B, but there is no reason to think that when the Bible says A, it really means "not A". I don’t know Kugel at all, but "fundamentally cryptic" is a phrase that makes the yellow light start blinking on my agenda-detection panel.
I like your book reports, by the way, and keep telling myself I’m going to start emulating them.
Regards,
Zabeli
Let me try to be clear about this. Kugel himself is not saying that the Bible is fundamentally cryptic. He is saying that traditional interpretations of the Bible assume the cryptic nature of the Bible. They don't spell out that this passage is cryptic, or that passage is cryptic, but they often interpret passages in ways that require one to see something other than the plain text.
Now, who are these interpreters? First, there is some interpretation internal to the Bible (and by "Bible," here, we primarily mean the Hebrew Bible, not the New Testament.) So, there are passages in the prophetic writings that retell or refer to older stories.
Second, there are references in the New Testament to the Old Testament. I gave one example of this, but there are others. In fact, one way to look at the entire New Testament is as a cryptic interpretation of the Old Testament. Nowhere in the Old Testament does it say "In about 4 B.C. a man named Jesus will be born in Bethlehem, and this man will be son of God." Rather, it says lots of stuff, often in symbolic language, which the New Testament writers interpret, post hoc, as referring to the events of their time. (This also gets into another assumption.)
There is also Talmud and midrash, Jewish writings interpreting and explaining the Bible at great length. Kugel relies on this literature a lot for examples of the four assumption in Biblical interpretation.
Finally, there are early Christian interpreters, such as Jerome and Augustine.
As I read Kugel's book, I was impressed by the number of examples he had found to support his idea that these four assumptions were basic to Biblical interpretation.
Even today, of course, you see people like Jack van Impe, who are constantly using the Bible as a source for commentary on modern issues, by assuming that when the Bible says, for example, "Assyria," it really means Iraq.
Today's Bible reading has given me an example - in this case, an interpreter urging that a passage not be understood cryptically. I have The NIV Study Bible, published by Zondervan, and it includes an introduction to each book of the Bible. From the introduction to the book of Joel, on page 1330:
"Joel sees the massive locust plague and severe drought devastating Judah as a harbinger of the 'great and dreadful day of the Lord' (2:31). (The locusts he mentions in 1:4, 2:25 are best understood as real, not as allegorical representations of the Babylonians, Medo-Persians, Greeks and Romans, as held by some interpreters.)"
Note that the author of the introduction is implying that many previous interpreters have taken this passage as allegorical, or cryptic, and that he finds it necessary to assert that a locust may be merely a locust.
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