TIP of the day: You're wrong (and so am I)

Dr. Michael Wilson said:

Starting with the text and no tradition or preconceived ideas is the best way to preach truth.

I believe in the sense that logic uses the terms, this is impossible. Even knowing what a word "means" is a preconception in many cases. One of the most significant theological differences among preachers is whether the Word of God is the (dead) ink on paper or is the (living) revelation of God in kairos time. To my mind the question is whether or not one is aware of these assumptions and their consequences.

A resource that helped me see some of my previously unconscious assumptions re: interpretation of Scripture is Torah Through Time: Understanding Bible Commentary from the Rabbinic Preiod to Modern Times by Shai Cherry which he wrote in response to his experience as a Jew teaching Christian classes at Vanderbilt.

[quote]

James Kugel, a leading contemporary scholar on the Hebrew Bible and its reception in ancient times, suggests that there were four assumptions that animated late biblical writers and early biblical interpreters. Although Kugel was not the first scholar to note these assumptions, his template will help us track the history of Jewish biblical commentary. The first assumption that Kugel lays out is that the Torah is fundamentally cryptic. We have seen how the Torah was perceived to be cryptic, which is why a special class of scribes was needed to “translate” the Torah, not only linguistically, but conceptually.


 Kugel’s Four Assumptions
     1.      The Torah is cryptic and cannot be understood from a superficial reading.
     2.      The Torah is eternally relevant and not merely a historical document.
     3.      The Torah is perfect without mistake, contradiction, or repetition.
     4.      The Torah is Divine in origin.


The process of interpreting the Torah is influenced by how one understands the nature of Hebrew. Among the legacies of the scribes is that the Rabbis of the post-second Temple era (1st–7th c. CE) held that Hebrew, unlike other languages, captured the essence of the thing described. In other words, Hebrew is not a language of conventions whereby we agree that the word book will indicate this thing you happen to be reading right now. For the Rabbis, “God spoke and the world came into being.”8 Because the world was created by the Divine language of Hebrew, language participates in the very essence of reality. The biblical word davar means both word and thing; this means that the word and the thing share an essence according to such an understanding of Hebrew. Many scholars of Rabbinic literature have observed that the Rabbis were inveterate punsters in large part because of the aural nature of their teachings. Although true, such a description belittles the seriousness with which the Rabbis felt Hebrew informed us about the nature of reality. For them, if two words sound alike or share certain root letters, it may well be because there is an underlying commonality that links the essences of those things.
Kugel’s second assumption is that the relevance of Torah precludes it from being merely a record of genealogical and historical events. In short, the Torah is no antiquarian artifact. It was a living link, a tree of life, between God and the early Jewish community. It was the responsibility of the scribes, and later the Rabbis, to translate the seemingly irrelevant sections of the Torah into a program for contemporary living. The Torah, according to this assumption, is eternally relevant.
Kugel’s third assumption that the Torah is perfect and without mistake has manifested itself in several ways. On one level, there could be no unintended grammatical mistakes in the Torah. Furthermore, one part of the Bible could not contradict another section. The Torah was a unified whole. Most importantly, the perfection of Scripture implies that nothing is superfluous or redundant. When the Torah repeats itself, as it does regularly, this assumption demands that the repetition is not for literary emphasis or the result of a combination of disparate documents. Only the scribe, and later the Rabbi, will be able to discern the divinely coded meanings that are not apparent to the untrained eye.
Given the assumption that nothing is superfluous in the Torah, any seeming violation of literary economy becomes an invitation for the assumption of relevance to express itself. Kugel notes that this characteristic of early biblical interpretation finds “its fullest expression in rabbinic writings.”9 He calls this aspect of Rabbinic hermeneutics “omnisignificance,” whereby every word, letter, and calligraphic flourish becomes available for interpretation.
Kugel’s fourth assumption is that all of Scripture is in some way Divine. Whether that means that the Hebrew Bible was the product of Divine dictation, written under Divine inspiration, or merely divinely sanctioned, varies among the commentators of antiquity and the biblical books under discussion.10 But they all assumed the Bible to be anchored, somehow, to God. A Rabbinic text claims that when two people study Torah, the Divine presence dwells between them.11 An even more daring text suggests that when one studies Torah, one comes to understand the mind of God.12 Thus, engaging in Torah study was a way to interact or commune with God, filling a pressing need in the years after the Roman destruction of the second Temple in 70 CE. Studying Torah and generating novel interpretations theoretically open to all males (unlike the Priesthood with its genealogical requirements), was the vehicle through which Rabbinic Jews in the post-Temple environment maintained and fostered a relationship with God. For many, Torah study became an obsession because it was a way, the Rabbinic way, of “living in the House of the LORD, all the days of my life” (Ps. 27:4).


Shai Cherry, Torah through Time: Understanding Bible Commentary from the Rabbinic Period to Modern Times (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2007), 9–11.

Several pages later, he offers the following table: