Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Bible Passages

  • Leviticus 5:14-6:7

    I’m still following the division of David W. Baker’s commentary on Leviticus in the Cornerstone Biblical Commentary on Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.  Today’s passage equates to Leviticus 5:14-26 in the Hebrew text, and the Hebrew text is indeed better divided than the English or the LXX.

    While the section is indeed properly grouped together, the priests have snuck in a pretty major doctrine into the passage.  The first part deals with violation of holy things (through 5:19), along with the possibility that one has done so but doesn’t know.  I think there’s good reason to believe, with Milgrom and others, that this also involves that horrible sense of guilt that has no known source; one feels that one has done something very wrong, but can’t be sure.  The early part of this passage provides an opportunity to deal with that guilt.  One can pity the bank account of someone who had a guilt complex, however!

    Some call this a guilt offering.  I prefer “reparation” offering, again following a number of commentators.  The offering accompanies a reparation.  It is this reparation portion that presumably connects the violation of sacred things at the end of chapter 5 with the violation of one’s neighbor at the beginning of chapter 6.

    I recall quite vividly how I encountered this chapter when reading Leviticus with Milgrom’s AB commentary.  I read the passage ahead in Hebrew before reading the commentary and so I had studied through the previous chapters and noted the sacrifices for inadvertent sins, but no sacrifices for intentional sins.  There was no statement that these sins were intentional, but it’s hard to imagine finding someone’s property and then lying about it as “inadvertent.”

    Baker notes this, but the best discussion comes from Milgrom (373-378) in a section titled “The Priestly Doctrine of Repentance.”  In his words, “…The Priestly authors took a postulate of their own tradition, that God mitigates punishment for unintentional sins, and empowered it with a new doctrine, that the voluntary repentance of a deliberate crime transforms the crime itself into an involuntary act.”  NISB emphasizes the voluntary part of this repentance, i.e. one must repent without being caught.

    The passage also provides the elements of repentance:

    1. A realization of feeling of guilt; one acknowledges that what was done was a wrong.
    2. Payment of reparation
    3. Confession
    4. Desire for atonement and sacrifice
    5. Forgiveness

    These days we frequently forget the first part and often the second.  I doubt one gets to #5 without going through those elements.

    The OSB notes that the sacrifices here for damage done to another are not gradated, unlike the previous sacrifices.  The poor must offer the same thing as the rich.  Being poor, they note, does not provide the right to steal (p. 124 on 5:15, 21, 25).

    Abbreviations:

    OSB – Orthodox Study Bible

    NISB – New Interpreter’s Study Bible

    Milgrom – Milgrom, Jacob.  Anchor Bible:  Leviticus 1-16.

    Baker – Leviticus portion written by David H. Baker, of the Cornerstone Biblical Commentary on Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

    Chapter 6 deals with sacrifices for sins that appear to be quite deliberate.

  • Leviticus 4:1-5:13

    It is not entirely helpful to include these two sections under the same heading, but there is certainly a break between 5:13 and 5:14, so the division is understandable as Baker does it.

    We’re moving here to sacrifices that are required, first for inadvertent acts in chapter 4, and then for acts of omission that result in prolonged impurity (Milgrom: 307ff), only some of which are inadvertent in chapter 5.  Milgrom maintains, I think convincingly, that the distinction in chapter 5 is that the acts in question result in prolonged impurity, and prolonged impurity gets worse.

    Baker does well in presenting the major lesson I think we can take from these chapters, that wrongs are not just a personal thing, but they have a lasting impact on others.  We have a tendency to think that if something was a mistake there is no real guilt attached.  “I goofed,” is supposed to forgive all.  Here errors, most notably amongst the leadership, even if inadvertent, are highlighted as damaging the entire congregation and particular as polluting the sanctuary, and thus the congregation’s relationship with God.

    There is a secondary point, in that chapter 5 provides gradated levels of offerings and includes one even the poorest could bring–a grain offering.  I think this should be discussed in terms of atonement, in which we regularly quote Hebrews 9:22, which in turn quotes Leviticus 17:11.  Perhaps while blood provides the strongest metaphor for atonement, it is not the absolute requirement that some make it.  An exception to the blood sacrifice as in Leviticus 5:11-13, would not in that case be a minor point.  I’ll discuss this further when we get to Leviticus 17:11.

    The OSB emphasizes the difference between the sins of the priesthood and the laity, and quotes St. John Chrysostom thus:

    Wishing to show that sins receive more serious punishment by far when they occur in the case of the priest than in the case of the laity, Moses enjoins as great a sacrifice to be offered for the priest as for the whole people, and this amounts to a proof on his part, that the wounds of the priesthood need more assistance, that is, as great as those of all the people together.”

    OSB further applies this to the modern priesthood as well.  I could wish they would both quote the fathers more and would indicate the particular work.  In this case I have been unable to find the reference by search at CCEL–I’m probably doing something wrong.

    Again, I commend Baker for providing the elements that a preacher would need quickly and with the minimum of fuss.  You will frequently find you want to know more, but there are other reference works for that purpose.

    Abbreviations:

    OSB – Orthodox Study Bible

    NISB – New Interpreter’s Study Bible

    Milgrom – Milgrom, Jacob.  Anchor Bible:  Leviticus 1-16.

    Baker – Leviticus portion written by David H. Baker, of the Cornerstone Biblical Commentary on Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

  • Leviticus 3: Fellowship Offering

    I’m moving through this fairly quickly, paced by the Cornerstone Biblical Commentary: Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.  (See the last entry.)  The pace of reading is an interesting issue.   In order to study Leviticus with Milgrom’s Anchor Bible commentary, I spent time nearly daily for more than a year.  Now I’m covering about a chapter a day. [Note:  Links to all sources are at the end of the post.]

    The temptation, after having spent the longer period of time, is to be a bit dismissive of the faster reading, but I’ve found that various levels of detail in study are very helpful.  In the Pentateuch or Torah, I have read it through with individual major volumes, such as Milgrom’s.  Well, there really isn’t another commentary such as Milgrom’s in my experience.  That one remains a high point of all my studies.  But at least I have used commentaries that dedicate a full volume to a book.  I have also read along with commentaries that cover the whole Torah at once.  Each pass through has its own blessings.

    As I read chapter 3 and the comments on it in the three sources I’m reading through right now I was again impressed by the difference in viewpoint of the person whose focus is Biblical studies as opposed to the person whose focus is pastoral or on daily living.  I could easily get stuck on the technical terms.  Today I was playing around with the Greek words used to translate Hebrew technical terms.  I didn’t go far, as I quickly remembered my purpose, but I could cheerfully spend some hours playing with that topic.

    Ordinary church goers, including very intelligent and educated people, are often not going to be very interested in such things unless they are specialists.  What they want to hear is what connects and applies.  That seems to be the strength of Baker’s commentary.  Given two and a half pages of comment, I’m sure you can tell he doesn’t detail the technical terms.  What he does is bring the material home.

    Now I’ve used the term “fellowship offering” which, like pretty much every other term, is a bit weak as a translation.  It will do, however.  The fellowship offering again emphasizes how much of the sacrificial system did not have to do with atonement for specific sins.  Rather, it had to do with all aspects of worship, such as praise, celebration, thanksgiving, community, reconciliation, and indeed fellowship.

    Now while Baker is more Christological than your average critical commentary, he is not quite so much so as the OSB, which unabashedly connects everything with Jesus.  In this case, the fellowship offering illustrates the freely offered fellowship with God and connects to the service of communion in a different way than the preceding grain offerings.  We often ask why Jesus had to die.  One of many good answers is that he became one of us, like us, in fellowship with us, and that fellowship was complete.

    I think western evangelicalism often manages to be both excessively Christological, and not Christological enough.  What do I mean by such a contradictory statement?  First, in the west we try to connect rationally between specific predictions in the Old Testament and events in Christ’s life.  If we can’t rationally connect them, and assume that they were in the mind of the original writer (and not just in the mind of God), we don’t really want to assert them.  In this rational connection, prediction and accomplishment sense, we are often too quick to draw the connection, and we force the rational explanation.

    On the other hand, concepts like “sacrifice” and events like the Eucharist were formed by people who were well acquainted with passages such as the ones I’m reading right now.  Their minds were fertilized by these words and ideas.  There were connections in the way they understood these things that we will miss if we don’t have the same concepts fertilizing our own minds.  To say that Jesus is our fellowship offering does not necessarily mean that Moses or the Priestly writer were thinking, “Wow!  This points to the future Messiah who will die on the cross.”  What it does mean is that the two ideas are related.  Both are part of God’s interaction with his people in history, and both show these various principles.  How much you think God planned it all out may differ, but the ideological connection can be real in any case.

    All of my sources write in similar ways on this passage.  The NISB does not make the Eucharistic connection.  The OSB makes that most strongly.

    Abbreviations:

    OSB – Orthodox Study Bible

    NISB – New Interpreter’s Study Bible

    Milgrom – Milgrom, Jacob.  Anchor Bible:  Leviticus 1-16.

    Baker – Leviticus portion written by David H. Baker, of the Cornerstone Biblical Commentary on Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

  • Leviticus 2 – Offering Food

    There’s a bit of a change of gears in the second chapter of Leviticus, which contains only food sacrifices.  (See Leviticus 1.  Abbreviations at the end of the post.)  These sacrifices are most commonly not offered because of some sin or impurity, but rather as sacrifices of thanksgiving or for some celebration.

    I think that if most Christians were asked to do a word association, they would think of “animal” very quickly in relation to “sacrifice.”  That’s because they are very much used to the link between animal sacrifice, sin, and the sacrifice of Jesus.  That link is not without merit, but the temple services were so much more than animal sacrifices for sin.

    Baker gets less new out of this chapter than out of the first one, though he does mention the meticulous directions for the sacrifices because “it’s human nature for people to wriggle their way out of any obligation that might cost them something.”  That’s a good point about people in general, though I’m not sure it’s a major point to be drawn from this chapter.

    The difficulty for anyone trying to teach from these passages is that especially these first few chapters are much like notes for priests and presumably worshipers, though the latter might have gotten the answers indirectly.  Supposing you took all the liturgical directions for your church for a year and put them in a book.  This would probably be quite useful to the next worship leader, but it wouldn’t make engaging reading for most church members.

    Nonetheless, one could learn a great deal about liturgy by reading such a book.  But if you were going to use a portion as a text for a lecture on liturgy, what would you assign?  Doubtless the instructions for various weeks would contribute to the topic.

    This is similar to the problem of teaching from Leviticus.  You have quite a number of cryptic instructions, and many of the lessons don’t come through until you have the broader picture.  I’m thinking as I go through this book about using a more visual approach to teaching.  Certainly many people use tabernacle models and so forth, and that would help, but perhaps a study could start with an overview of key points, trying to produce a general picture of a year of worship, then focusing on individual aspects, and finally drawing lessons for specific aspects of worship, such as atonement and forgiveness, thanksgiving and celebration, characteristics of the worship experience, living in a way that is conscious of God’s presence, and connecting worship with history.

    I’ll continue to comment on these ideas as I continue to write, but there are a couple of thoughts from the resources I’m using that I’d like to mention.

    First, Baker comments that “the major difference between this sacrifice and the previous was that here there was no blood shed, and as a result, there was no atonement (1:4; Heb 9:22)” (p. 27).

    I find this rather interesting in consideration of Lev. 5:11-13, which provides an alternative of a grain offering for animal sacrifices, which clearly refers to both atonement and forgiveness.  I’ll discuss this more when we get to that chapter, though I did look ahead and did not see any discussion of the matter in Baker.  NISB notes that grain offerings could substitute for animal sacrifices for the poor with equally little discussion.

    Milgrom does discuss the issue of blood in atonement and various other uses and I will include some of his comments at the appropriate time.

    The OSB was quite interesting, with its unabashedly Christological interpretation.  The grain offering “pictures Christ as the totally acceptable grain offering to God” (p. 119), paralleled with John 12:24.  In addition, the grain offering is related to the faithful in Christ and their service.  Metaphors are wonderful that way–multiple meanings!  The oil is the Holy Spirit, and the salt represents the “whole spiritual meditation of the scriptures” (p. 120).

    While I would hardly see this passage as pointing forward in that sense, looking back I can see that the grain offering might will provide an excellent background for understanding some of the bread passages in the gospel of John.

    I also note for the record that again the OSB works out much better when I don’t read the translation!

    Abbreviations:

    OSB – Orthodox Study Bible

    NISB – New Interpreter’s Study Bible

    Milgrom – Milgrom, Jacob.  Anchor Bible:  Leviticus 1-16.

    Baker – Leviticus portion written by David H. Baker, of the Cornerstone Biblical Commentary on Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

  • Starting Leviticus in the Tyndale Cornerstone Biblical Commentary

    I recently received my copy of this good looking volume from Tyndale for review, and I have summarized its features here.  I noted there that this is not a book I will read once and then write a short review.  Rather, I’m going to blog through it, which also means that I will be blogging through Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.  Ambitious, no?

    Well, don’t expect massive detail, but I will bring thoughts as I go through and major points from the commentary so you can understand its value.  I’m still working with very little reading, so I’m going to defer many points until I have read more.  As of today, I completed reading of the introduction to Leviticus.

    As expected, the author, David W. Baker, takes a conservative stand on authorship and dating of the book, arguing for a “life-setting back in the period of the wilderness wanderings” (p. 5).  I won’t be making a major issue of my disagreements on issues such as this.  My only concern is that the position of the commentator is made clear and that he engages other positions as well.  Considering the length of the introduction and the size of this commentary, he is doing both quite well.

    As one who thinks Christians neglect the book of Leviticus I was happy to see that Baker is making an all-out assault on this neglect of an important portion of the Bible.  Along with the typical arguments of history and theology, that this is part, even a core part, of Israel, and that we have grown from Israel, and that it is also of great historical interest, he suggests “religious reasons” and particularly that one might see it as a “handbook for worship” (p. 4).  I am eager to see how he will portray that particular perspective through the book.

    I’ve been a bit irritated ever since I finished my reading of Jacob Milgrom‘s commentary, because I have so many notes that I would like to use in teaching but very few of them are accessible without a serious effort in terms of teaching background and history, for which I rarely have time.  Many believe the hardest part of Biblical studies is digging out details.  In my view, the hardest part is developing an understanding to the point at which one can express it clearly and comprehensibly.  After reading the his introduction, I am looking to Baker for help in that task.

    I’d conclude this interaction with the introduction with the following quote:

    …Whether we like it or not–and the lack of preaching and teaching from Leviticus today seems to indicate that we don’t–this book is also in our canon.  Leviticus is God’s Word to us in some way just as much as the Gospels.  We also are an audience who must seek to determine the book’s relevance to the church in our own times.

    Very much my own feelings.  I am hopeful that Baker can help make it more of a reality.

  • Stories in a Chronological Context

    Several things over the last couple of weeks have called my attention to time.  My pastor preached about it last week, speaking of times of God’s extended silence.  I lost some of it while being sick this week which always makes me a bit tense.  Then I received a copy of 24/7:  A One Year Chronological Bible, which puts Bible readings into a chronological framework.  (I’ll get around to reviewing the Bible in a later post.)  Finally I was asked about God’s answers to prayer and the frequencies of his miraculous intervention.

    As Christians when we read scripture we need to be aware of these long periods of time.  There are times to lose our sense of times, especially when our liturgy calls us to become more aware of eternity and less aware of the present.  It is rare in my experience that the liturgy is successful in this call, but it is certainly worth it, and should be more frequent.  But the very experience of eternity impinging on our limited, dare I say puny, time requires that we be aware of time.

    Stories, on the other hand, tend naturally to give a false impression of time.  You cannot tell a story of a long period of time whilst truly giving the full impression of the extended time of waiting involved.  Frequently you’ll see phrases like “after a long time” or “after several months” or even “years passed.”  For the reader, whether it is a few days or a few years, they are passed in just a moment.

    Which in the ordinary course of reading a story is a minor issue.  You know that time passed for the characters, and you’re glad you don’t have hundreds of pages narrating when they ate, went to bed, got up, or went to the toilet.

    But when you go to reading scriptural stories, which provide us with an example (1 Corinthians 10:6), you need to think about this.  How long was it between one thing and the next.  Consider for a moment Judges 13:1:

    The Israelites again did what was evil in the sight of the LORD, and the LORD gave them into the hand of teh Philistines forty years.  (NRSV)

    Now how do we normally read this story?  Well, when I got it in church, I heard immediately about the arrival of the angel and then we wandered through the story of Samson as one overwhelming chain of miracles.  Of course, with all this miraculous intervention by God, we also shook our heads over Samson’s terrible failures.  How could he, when God was so obviously with him?

    But that view of the story misses two important things.  First, those forty years.  Forty years ago it was 1978, and Jimmy Carter had been president for nearly two years.  Forty years ago I was in college.  Forty years ago the PC was a pretty marginal idea.  Forty years ago there was no internet.  Forty years is a long time, and the Israelites had been under foreign domination for that length of time.

    Second, there’s the lifetime of Samson.  While the story of Samson can be covered in a Sunday School lesson or so, at least as stories are commonly covered in Sunday School, we’re told that Samson judged Israel for 20 years (Judges 16:31).  Twenty years is an awful lot of lifetime in which to hide those miracle stories.  It may be that Samson spent years between those miraculous interventions wondering whether God was going to do things for him.  Yes, we’re told he always had his strength, but it seems to have come into play only rarely.  All things considered, I would guess that Sampson did often long for God’s more direct intervention

    We can apply this principle to the entire Bible story.  I’m frequently asked why God doesn’t act today in the way he acted in Bible times.  Which Bible times?  Do we refer to the hundreds of hears the Israelites spent in slavery in Egypt?  Or perhaps we’re looking for century after century of the divided kingdom.  Maybe instead we should think about the 400 years or so from the time of the return from the exile to the opening pages of the New Testament.  Sure, we have a few interventions under the Maccabbees, but would you really want to suffer what those guys did in order to get a couple of divine interventions?

    My point here is certainly not that we should pray less, or ask less of God, nor is it to cut off hope.  More importantly, I think we need to cut off excuses.  We shouldn’t claim that God is more absent from our lives than he was from the lives of people in “Bible times.”

    Yes, there are moments in time when God’s intervention is pretty frequent, but even then remember that we are being told a few stories that cover a long time.  The book of Acts, for example, relates around 30 years of the history of the early church.  If we spread the number of miracles recorded in Acts over 30 years of the modern church, is it possible that people would complain bitterly about God’s absence?

    Stories are wonderful.  They can be encouraging or instructive.  But in the Bible they form part of a history of how God has intervened.  Understanding how they fit into time can be very important as we try to learn the lessons they offer for our lives.

  • The Jonah Problem Redux

    Bruce Alderman wrote an interesting post today on what has to be somewhere close to my favorite book of the Bible–Jonah.  He referenced an earlier post of mine from my Threads blog, but I’m not really commenting on that part.  I should also note that while I call Jonah somewhere close to my favorite book, that is a comment that causes my students in real life to burst forth with gales of laughter, since I have labeled way too many passages as my favorites.

    But the thing about Jonah is that there are so many different things you can get from it.  One key element is the way in which people get hung up on the miracle of the great fish, even though pretty much nobody would claim that’s the point of the book.  The great fish is largely a literary device to move the character forward.  You have the twist of Jonah heading off to the Spanish coast (to use an anachronistic name) but then winding up closer to Nineveh than when he started.  It’s an interesting note on the idea of running away from God.

    Bruce focuses on the hardship in which God places Jonah.  Often we’re afraid to comment on such things, but is God really being fair here?  He calls Jonah to go to Nineveh, makes him preach this unpopular message, and then turns and makes him into a false prophet.  I’m pretty certain we’re supposed to read that subtext in the story; I doubt a Jewish audience would miss it.

    So you have the intertwining of several messages at this point.  First, there is the message that God cares about people who are not Jews.  If, as is probable, Jonah was written during the time after the exile, this attitude to foreigners may well stand in opposition to the official position reflected in Nehemiah’s activities.

    Second, there is God’s focus on compassion over vengeance or judgment.  No Jew of the period would imagine that Nineveh hadn’t deserved destruction.  (Note also that if the general dating I referenced earlier is correct, Nineveh had already been destroyed at the time the book was written, making it an interesting “what-if” type of story.)

    Finally there’s the notion of the call of God on a person, and just how that may work out for the one who is called.  I wonder if Jews might have seen in this a bit of the impact of their call or chosenness on their own lives.  Being God’s chosen has not always been particularly pleasant for the Jewish people!

    I like to bring up Jonah when talking about spiritual gifts because inevitably someone is bound to comment on how nice it would be to be a prophet.  I have to suggest they think again.  Prophets don’t necessarily live happy lives.

    When teaching about how to study the Bible I use the phrase “the Jonah problem” in another way, however, which focuses on what Jonah does outside the city.  He’s waiting to see what God will do.  His interest is in the destruction of the city–or not.  So he hangs out waiting for God to act, when it turns out that God has already acted, but not in the expected way.  I define this “Jonah problem” as “looking for the wrong miracle.”

    I like to connect Jonah with Jeremiah 18.  Jeremiah is another excellent example of a prophet called into a very unpleasant situation.  He has to live in a city under siege and preach surrender, thus getting all the patriots up in arms against hm.  In Jeremiah 18 God provides him a vision to explain how it is that God can allow Jerusalem to be destroyed when he had earlier made an eternal promise to David.  (See Psalm 89:3-4, for example.)  God makes the claim there that he gets to change his mind.

    What I see in Jeremiah 18 is a fairly clear pointer to God’s major concern in prophecy.  We tend to look at prophecy as a way of learning what is going to happen.  God’s use of prophecy is to change people’s behavior.

    If a parent tells a child that he will not get to watch TV tonight unless he cleans his room, it is not the parent’s intent to inform the child as to what his evening will be like.  Rather, the parent wishes to get the child to clean his room.  If the room is cleaned, nobody becomes annoyed when the child gets his TV time.

    Perhaps we should consider giving God the same latitude.

  • Reading Psalm 100 Out Loud

    One of my Bible study methods, though most important for devotional reading, is to read a passage aloud.  Since the lectionary Psalm for this week is Psalm 100, which is very short, I thought I’d read it aloud in a number of versions and then write my subjective impressions.

    I chose to read it from the REB, NJB, CEV, NRSV, The JPS Tanakh, and the NLT.  There was very little method to all this; those versions were just nearest my computer at the time.  I could have read from more by either walking farther or by using my Logos library, but I didn’t.

    Prior to reading these aloud in English I had read the Psalm a few times in Hebrew and had done a draft literal translation myself.

    The purpose of the exercise, beyond “whatever” was to get a feel for how each version would function in public reading.  I’m frequently asked what the “best” translation is, and one obvious question is always “best for what?”

    First, whether more functional or more formally equivalent, the translations were more similar than I would have expected when read side by side.  The NJB was fairly choppy.  I like its use of “Yahweh” in the Psalm, though I don’t use that as a rule in reading publicly.  The REB was similarly a bit choppy and appeared to use vocabulary that didn’t fit well.  (Note that I normally prefer the REB, though today was an exception.

    I disliked the use of “love” to translate Hebrew “hesed”, as was done by the CEV and the REB.  I understand the reason in the CEV, but the REB uses “acclaim” in verse 1, “acknowledge” in verse 3, I think they might have employed a few more letters on “hesed.”

    The very positive thing about the CEV is that it is very easy to understand when heard, with no difficult vocabulary.  At the same time, it loses all sense of Hebrew rhythm and parallelism.  This is one of those necessary trade-offs in translation.  You’re going to lose something, and if your goal is to translate for a fairly basic set of English vocabulary.

    The JPS Tanakh is an excellent translation, though it didn’t seem to read as well as the NLT read aloud.  The NRSV sounded remarkably good to me, which again is not usual.  I usually like the NRSV for the formal equivalence, but dislike its sound.  Unfortunately, it is the Bible used for most scripture readings at my church.

    Overall I would give the edge to the NLT as a compromise between easy to understand, decently flowing English text, maintaining some sense of the parallelism, and not translating any of the Hebrew words in too jarring a manner.

    All this is, as I have said, very subjective.  One impression is very strong–all of the translations seemed less smooth and readable when read aloud than when read silently.  I know the CEV is designed to be read orally, but I think there it is very hard for me to come from reading the Hebrew text with the parallelism and some sense of similar length poetic lines, and then go to a translation that deliberately eliminates both elements.

    I suspect that a major reason why the NRSV sounds good to me in this case is that this is one of those Psalms I memorized in the KJV as a child, and the NRSV is the closest to the KJV amongst those I read.

    One thing I believe I should think about is the quality of reading involved.  There are some readers who can make a scripture reading really resonate.  I wonder how much my own inclinations about reading impacted the way I felt about what I read aloud?

  • Patience for the Nuts and Bolts

    Last night I attended a Bible study in which my pastor was teaching on Romans 1:22-32.  If that verse selection doesn’t fully make sense to you, consider that he was simply following up from the point at which he stopped the prior week.

    My pastor is Dr. Wesley Wachob, an accomplished exegete.  One of the joys of attending First UMC in Pensacola is that while I may occasionally disagree on some technical point, I never have to cringe while listening to the sermons.  Elsewhere I frequently have order myself to ignore exegetical problems or those related to Biblical languages while listening to otherwise uplifting sermons.

    So, being who he is, Dr. Wachob starting out by teaching precisely what Paul was saying.  It’s not relevant to my point here, but I happen to agree with that position.  I’m also not trying to proclaim Dr. Wachob’s position on all issues related to homosexuality, which is only a minor point of the passage, though it is the primary one for which it is cited.  (I eagerly await the sermon on how gossip and slander represents the true measure of human depravity as in verse 29-30.)  The issue I’m looking at is the starting point.  (For my Methodist readers, Dr. Wachob in no way violated the Methodist discipline in anything he said to the group.)

    In particular, Paul is not writing an essay either on what constitutes an appropriate list of sins, nor is he arguing for what things are sinful and why.  He is taking an assumption of what is sinful and tying it all to idolatry, i.e. anything that places anything other than God in God’s place.  Thus homosexuality is assumed to be wrong, based on the Torah, and this is something that Paul can count on as an agreement with his audience.

    Thus the point here is that while we can be pretty certain based on this passage that Paul thought homosexuality was wrong, it is as an underlying assumption, rather than as something explicitly explained.  When I say that, if you know my own view of inspiration as message embedded in surrounding cultural views, then you don’t know how I feel about homosexuality generally, gay marriage, or any related issue concerning how we respond to gays in our society today.

    The text does not immediately translate itself into modern context.

    If you doubt this, consider Numbers 31:15-20.  Does the command that Moses gives, couched in support for the moral preservation, not to mention the physical, of the Israelite people, represent a good standard for warfare?  I would, of course, argue that it does not.  How it can be a command of God in scripture is worthy of a bit more discussion, but that isn’t going to happen today.

    Last night in our class there was a gentleman who was clearly quite knowledgeable.  Throughout the discussion he kept asking our teacher to make the application.  His requests were resisted.  Now I understand his impatience, but at the same time I applaud the resistance.  The nuts and bolts of exegesis need to be done first.

    This doesn’t mean that we don’t later view the scripture in their canonical context or in the broader context of theology.  It doesn’t mean that we never get down to current, practical applications.  It just means that we have to do the hard work first.

    Dr. Wachob’s interpretation of this passage–and mine–will not satisfy many on any side of this debate.  The general desire is to somehow have Romans tell us directly what to do today.  And yes, there are interpretations that make this not address homosexuality as such in its original context.  But that is a very unlikely reading of what Paul is trying to say.  Paul is talking not about some isolated group of people, but rather is talking about all gentiles here (he’ll get to the Jews later) and making a case that all have failed.  That is is theological point.

    It may require some patience.  But it is worth it.

  • Sacrifice then and Now

    What meaning is evoked in people’s minds by the word “sacrifice?”  One of the things I like to do when teaching is to simply write a word on the board that is commonly used in Biblical and/or Christian discourse and get people to give me various things that this word means to them.  I try not to specify the context too closely.

    The other day I did this while teaching a bit on the tabernacle service, and its relation to the theme of Hebrews 7-9.  Yes, I know, big subject.  But I started by writing the three words “temple”, “priest”, and “sacrifice.”

    The result was not entirely unexpected, but was instructive.  I’m going to stick with the word “sacrifice.”  The group focused on giving up things for others or for some benefit for oneself.  For example, one person talked about giving up certain things in life in order to pursue an avocation for tennis.  Others talked about sacrificing in order to help the poor.

    It is probably indicative of the group involved that, even though we were in Sunday School class, the “church” meanings did not come up.  When I brought up the idea of sacrifice for sin and the various ways in which that might be understood, people acknowledged it with an “oh yeah.”

    Now this was not a stupid group of people. Far from it.  They were one of the most interactive and constructive groups with whom I have had the privilege to work recently.  But what was uppermost in their minds was not quite entirely unlike a picture of sacrifice in the ancient world, but it was pretty close.

    The idea of offering a sacrifice “to” anyone–God, for example–again did not come up.

    When I have done a similar exercise with more conservative groups I will likely get all the words that relate to sin and atonement, but they will often miss the idea of a sacrifice in order to accomplish something, a simple offering for thankfulness, or the fairly common purification sacrifices.  Those are ideas that are not part of either the liberal or conservative universes.

    So how does one read and/or teach Hebrews in such a context?  First, I consider my use of that exercise completely justified.  I can get an idea of where people are, and then point out the differences and similarities between their view of sacrifice and that of the ancient world.

    Elements that may be missed by various groups include:

    • Any concept of substitution
    • Purification (clean and unclean)
    • Thankfulness
    • Appeasement
    • Magical rituals in which the animal is slaughtered less as a sacrifice and more as a part of the magical ritual.
    • Sacrifice as part of the continuing liturgy.

    There is a difficulty here, I think, in teaching a book like Hebrews without having some exposure to sacrifice, priesthood, and temples in the ancient world.  A good start on that exposure would be to look at the sacrifices as taught in Leviticus especially, but such a process tests the patience of the best of classes.

    I’m not one to maintain that the author of Hebrews was some kind of expert on the Torah.  On the other hand he certainly did have a working acquaintance, at least with the LXX version of it, and he would not necessarily see sacrifice in the same way we do.  In order to get some portion of his perspective, we need to do some reading of that same literature.

    Even simply looking at each of his quotes and perhaps their Old Testament context will be inadequate.  We need somewhat of a picture of how ancient Israelite religion worked, placed in an ancient near eastern context, before we can learn how one New Testament author wanted to change, or better, <em>transform</em> it.