Docherty's The Use of the OT in Hebrews 1

1. I have been in college administration for the last four years. One year teaching and then before that I had been Dean for six other years. In short, my focus for at least 10 of the last 11 years has been administration. That takes its toll on the scholar in me.

I don't know what the future holds: professor, pastor, administrative servant. But I have some scholarly work to do this month. To do it well, I really need to blow through some books. This weekend is the first.

2. Susan Docherty's work The Use of the Old Testament in Hebrews is pretty significant. It's also expensive but I bit the bullet. I want to read/skim it this weekend--206 pages. If I sleep 16 of those hours, go to church, eat at least 4, run twice. Well, let's say I potentially have 24 hours of reading (not going to happen, of course).

So let's say the goal is 10 pages an hour. Yeah, right.

3. In chapter 1, Docherty sets out her agenda. She believes NT studies has not kept up with research into Jewish exegetical techniques. She aims to bring Hebrews research up to speed. She also believes that NT study is behind in recent research on the text of the Greek Bible in the first century. Both of these aims make her book a significant read.

She then lays out the book. In chapter 2, she'll look at the last 150 years of Hebrews commentary work as it relates to the use of the OT. In chapter 3, she will introduce us to the Goldberg school of analyzing Jewish exegesis in relation to underlying assumptions about Scripture. Chapter 4 looks at recent studies on the Greek text of the OT in the first century. Chapter 5 applies Goldberg's method to Hebrews.

The game is on.

New Testament Use of the OT

For a couple years, there's been a hole in my Bible as Scripture class. I have in the syllabus that there will be a video called, "The NT Use of the OT" to watch on Thursday evening. So far, that video has never been ready.

No one ever complains--one less assignment. My problem is that it is a complex topic, and I want to present it in a clear, convincing, and non-offensive way. I probably spent two hours last night trying to record the PowerPoint in its current form and finally just went to bed and mulled it over some more.

So here's the outline I woke up with:

1. The NT can use allegory.

• Galatians 4:21-31 - Paul uses Sarah and Hagar as an allegory for the heavenly and earthly Jerusalem
• Hebrews 9:6-10 - The author uses the structure of the earthly tent as an allegory of the two ages and the two covenants.
• 1 Corinthians 9:9-10 - The ox in Deuteronomy represents the minister of the gospel, and "treading the grain" means to minister to a community.

2. The NT (almost) uses pesher.
Pesher is a word used to describe the exegesis of some commentaries at Qumran, where verses are applied to contemporary situations in the interpreter's day. Matthew especially comes close to this.

• Matthew 2:15 - "Out of Egypt I called my son" in Hosea 11:1
• Matthew 2:23 - "He will be called a Nazarene" in where?

3. Some Basic Insights
I think that's enough data to draw a very important conclusion. The NT authors did not follow the rules of modern exegesis when they interpreted the OT texts.

4. This makes sense.

• It makes sense because I do not interpret texts in your head, but in mine.
• In revelation, God takes on our flesh. He does not expect us to take on his (which is impossible anyway).

5. Meaning is contextual.

• God revealed truths, promises, and commands to the NT authors within their frame of reference.
• As they read the OT, God met them in how the OT text appeared to them rather than use it as an opportunity to give them a history lesson.

6. In the OT stories, God gave them...

• examples to imitate (Job, Hebrews 11)
• examples to avoid (Esau, Sodom)
• Illustrations of truths (Abraham, Rahab on faith/works)
• These examples stand on their own as true. They don’t have to match the OT exactly.

7. Good Jewish Midrash

• Arguments from lesser to greater
• Verses connected together by catchwords
• Points made out of distinctions in detail, such as the use of a singular instead of a plural

8. Metanarratives

• Paul's Adam-Christ sequence
• Mark's exile-return sequence
• Metanarratives, by their very nature, are extra-textual. They stitch together originally separate stories.

9. The OT Law

• Sacrifices are understood as shadows of Christ.
• Israelite particulars of the Law (circumcision, Sabbath, food laws) are not applicable to Gentiles.
• Christ's law is love God/love neighbor (the filter for applying OT ethics).
• Some laws are continued (sexual laws).

10. Prophecies
Some texts are interpreted "spiritually" (sensus plenior).

• E.g., about events in the life of Jesus
• Some predictions expanded in scope (e.g., return from exile, return of the throne of David)

11. Possible Conclusions

• We can hear God through Scripture, even when we don't know the historical meaning.
• We should not read NT interpretation for historical information on the OT (e.g., authorship).

Ways the NT Uses the OT

Someone asked if I would post something like the following, so here it is.  What are the ways in which the New Testament uses the Old Testament?

1. Literal Interpretation
There are clearly instances where the NT takes an OT passage literally. For example, the examples/exempla of Hebrews 11 take individuals from Old Testament stories as literal examples of faith.  Abraham demonstrated faith when he left Ur and Haran for what would become the land of Egypt (Heb. 11:8). Of course here we are not surprised that the NT interpretation took place within the framework of understanding of the interpreter (e.g., contemporary traditions of authorship were assumed). The point here is that the author's intention was to interpret the OT literally.

Hebrews uses the "lesser to greater" argument several times on the basis of a literal interpretation. If the punishment under the old covenant was severe, and the new covenant is greater than the old covenant, then the punishment under the new covenant should be greater than the punishment under the old covenant.

2. Typological Interpretation
The category of typology is an invention of the Protestant Reformation, as it was important for some Protestants to make a distinction between allegorical interpretation (which was considered bad by the Reformers and associated with Roman Catholic interpretation) and typological interpretation (which was said to take the literal meaning seriously and was thus considered acceptable). 

An example is when Hebrews 3-4 consider the pilgrimage of Israel from Egypt to Canaan as analogous to the audience's pilgrimage in faith. The audience did not want to be like the wilderness generation. They left Egypt but did not enter into God's rest because of disbelief. So the audience was in danger of not entering into God's rest, of not making it to the promised heavenly homeland.  

3. Allegorical Interpretation
The New Testament obviously uses allegory from time to time and doesn't blink an eye. The most obvious example is in Galatians 4:21-31, where Paul even uses the word allegoreo.  Sarah and Hagar become allegories for the heavenly and earthly Jerusalem--clearly nothing that Genesis itself had in mind.  Nor is it based on a contextual reading of the story.

Another example include when Paul makes Deuteronomy 25:4 an allegory for supporting ministers. "Do not muzzle an ox when it is treading grain" becomes "Take care of your ministers when they are ministering to you." Some might argue that this comparison is typology because there is a similarity between the original meaning and the NT meaning.  That is possible in our breakdown, but it would have been an allegory in NT times. 

4. Spiritual Interpretation
In a number of instances, Hebrews changes the meaning of Old Testament words by a number of techniques. These include techniques like 1) excerpting words from a passage, 2) putting the words on Jesus' mouth, or 3) mixing more than one passage together.

a. excerpting
Matthew especially will lift a set of words from somewhere in the OT and put them against the context of Jesus. This method reminds us of the "pesher" interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Matthew 2:15 lifts the words "out of Egypt I called my son" and uses them not of Israel leaving Egypt but of the baby Jesus leaving Egypt. Matthew gives us no indication that he is comparing the exodus with Jesus leading us out of sin. The comparison is between the two sons and the geographical leaving of Egypt.

b. scripting
In a number of places, NT authors put OT words on Jesus' lips. Hebrews 10, for example, puts Psalm 40 on Jesus' lips in a way that obviously was not part of the original meaning.  The psalmist originally was saying that God would rather have obedience that animal sacrifices. Put on the lips of Jesus in Hebrews, the psalm comes to point to the end of the sacrificial system altogether in light of the body of Jesus on the cross. Hebrews makes this point, by the way, on the basis of a difference in the Greek text of Psalm 40 from the original Hebrew text.

c. cross-reference
Biblical authors, like other interpreters of their day, sometimes mixed diverse biblical passages together.  Gezera shewa, for example, was a technique that joined passages on the basis of stitch words or words two passages hold in common.

The NT authors traditionally mixed together Psalm 8 and Psalm 110, two psalms that originally had nothing to do with each other on the basis of things being under feet. Hebrews 4 mixes together Psalm 95 with Genesis 2:2-3 by the theme of "rest."

We might call the above examples types of "spiritual interpretation" because the passages are taken out of context and given a distinctly new significance.

3.2 OT Predictions or Polyvalences

... continued from yesterday's post in my hermeneutical autobiography: What was Matthew Thinking?
_________
I now believe that it was the expectations I had of Matthew that were wrong and that it was perfectly appropriate for Matthew to read Hosea in a figurative way like other Jewish exegetes of his day. There is no error here as far as the Bible is concerned, only in our teaching about prophecy and fulfillment.  The NT authors paid varying degrees of attention to the context of the verses in which they saw meanings. They read the OT "spiritually." Matthew pays some of the least attention to context of all the NT authors, with his method at least approaching the pesher method of interpretation we find in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

This, mind you, is not dissimilar to the way I saw people use Scripture growing up. When my family was trying to decide whether to move to Florida or not, several verses jumped out at family members. For example, one of my sisters read a verse in Judges 1:15 that says, "Thou hast given me a south land," and felt like God wanted us to move. To be sure, the book of Judges wasn't written originally to be a prophecy about the Schenck family moving to the south.  But the meaning of words depends on the context against which you read them, and the words can be read that way when placed in the context of the Schenck family.

This is the "polyvalence" of language, its susceptibility to multiple possible meanings when read against varied contexts. And so it is that the texts of the Bible can be taken in an almost infinite number of ways, as they are.  This is the one of the mechanisms behind the over 20,000 different denominations out there. The question of the authority of Scripture pales in impact behind the question of which interpretation is authoritative. There is far more of us in what we call the Bible than most people realize.

I want to be clear here.  These texts did have an original meaning, which was a function of their original contexts.  The rules of inductive Bible study are not ambiguous and they are the surest path toward figuring out the most likely original meaning.  There are both great dangers and great potential for meaninglessness in a charismatic, pneumatic (spiritual) approach because the words can come to mean pretty much whatever you want them to mean. But we can't be too hard on those who read Scripture this way because the New Testament models it.

There is no problem to the way Matthew interprets the OT if you believe he does so under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. What it creates problems for is the person who wants these OT prophecies to be straightforward predictions.  It creates problems for the person who tries to use OT prophecy as an apologetic. Those who say, "It is mathematically impossible that all these predictions would come true in one person" are setting up themselves and others for a potential faith crisis--or mockery. Read in context, the majority of OT passages with which the NT engages are not read in context to varying degrees. If you don't have room in your thinking for a double meaning to those verses, you're potentially in trouble.

Take the verses in which Matthew hears foreshadowing of the virgin birth in Isaiah 7:14: "a virgin will be with child and bear a son" (NASB). What did this verse originally predict in Isaiah?  The context is not ambiguous, nor the original meaning. King Ahaz is feeling the pressure of two kings to the north. Isaiah has a sign from God to assure him. Ahaz doesn't want to listen but God gives him this sign anyway. A virgin will conceive and bear a son, and before that son is old enough to tell the difference between right and wrong, the kings to the north will no longer be a problem.

Now if Christ is the only fulfillment of this prediction, it was no sign to Ahaz, because in that case Ahaz had been dead for 700 years before it came true. The expectation of the context is that Isaiah is speaking of a child who would be born soon thereafter. And this is exactly what we find.  In 8:3 Isaiah approaches a prophetess and she gives birth to a son of whom are said similar things (8:4), and this child "Immanuel" is there as the nation of Assyria flows through the land (8:8).  We are so used to reading Isaiah 7:14 in terms of a miraculous virginal conception that we forget virgins conceive all over the world every day--they just do so through normal sexual relations.  And the meaning of the Hebrew word 'alma used here could refer to a young woman who is not a virgin as well.

It does not in any way deny the virginal conception of Jesus to recognize that Isaiah 7 had a first meaning that was fulfilled in the days of Ahaz, over 700 years before Jesus. What it does is mess with the preconceptions some of us have with regard to OT prophecy. It was troubling to me when I first learned about this dynamic, not because there should be anything troubling for faith here but because of the misconceptions I had.

After I learned how to follow a passage's train of thought, to read verses in context, this dynamic was repeated over and over again.  Take Psalm 16 about God rescuing the psalmist from death and put it in the context of Jesus' death, and it can now be read in terms of Jesus' resurrection (Acts 2:10). Take Jeremiah 31:15 about the destruction of the northern kingdom in 722BC and put it in the context of Bethlehem and it can now be read in terms of Herod killing all the children there in 4BC (Matt. 2:18).  Roman Catholic scholars of the twentieth century came to call reading the OT in this way reading it in a "fuller sense," a sensus plenior.

In seminary I would learn to listen to the OT books on their own terms and would find a much richer story of God walking with his people than the flat interpretation of the OT that only reads it in terms of later Christian belief...