Interpretation

The scriptures referred to are Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10.

I saw a one-panel cartoon recently that showed a police car on the side of the road. Another car had obviously just been pulled over and its driver was standing on the side of the road with the cop. And because this is a cartoon, the driver of the other car was a chess piece, specifically a knight, with the big horse head on a pedestal body. The cop is doing a field sobriety test and saying, “Walk in a straight line please.” And the knight is thinking, “Oh boy.”

I bring this up because there is a way of interpreting the Bible that has been called “knight's jump exegesis.” Exegesis is just a fancy word for the critical interpretation of the Bible. It comes from the Greek word “to lead out” and ideally what the exegete is doing is merely bringing out what is there in the text. He or she should not be reading things into the text that aren't there. The most infamous example of that was a preacher in the 1960s who thought there was something wicked about women putting their hair up in a top knot. So he found a proof text. And he preached that Jesus actually said, “Top knot come down.” Except he was taking the words completely out of context. In Matthew 24, Jesus is talking about the end times and what he actually says in verse 17 is “Let him which is on the housetop not come down to take anything out of his house.” [King James Version, emphasis mine] That is hilariously bad exegesis of a single verse.

Since the knight is the only piece in chess that doesn't move in a straight line, but goes 2 spaces in any direction and then one space laterally, “knight's jump exegesis” is stringing together a verse here and a verse there, and then arriving at an entirely novel interpretation. It is wrenching verses out of their contexts and performing a shotgun wedding on them in order to support your view.

You see this when preachers take Paul's saying that Christians who are alive when Jesus returns “will be caught up together with them [the resurrected dead] in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air,” and then try to make that fit into any other apocalyptic text. This is the so-called “rapture” that some preachers go on about, where they say Jesus will come down out of heaven, scoop up believers and like a yo-yo return to heaven while all the unbelievers on earth suffer through the Great Tribulation. It is mentioned in only one of the 33,000 verses of the Bible (1 Thessalonians 4:17) and you both have to take it literally and then force it into the series of events constructed from the highly symbolic visions recorded in Daniel and Revelation. I have to confess that I love the elaborate and often brightly colored End of the World timelines that certain fundamentalists draw up to ingeniously include every apocalyptic detail mentioned. But I wonder why, since no one ever proposes that the Antichrist will actually have 7 heads and ten crowns, they are so sure the other stuff is literally true?

What got me thinking about this is a comment someone once left on my blog, decrying interpreting the Bible. I went to that person's blog and Lo and Behold! he was offering his interpretation of the Bible. His case would have been stronger had his blog merely been passages of scripture, without anything else. And ideally those sections of the Bible would be in the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, because it is impossible to translate from one language to another without making some interpretive decisions.

I thought about this as I was perusing our passage from Nehemiah. After the Persians conquer the Babylonian empire, Nehemiah gets permission to go to Jerusalem in the 3^rd wave of returning exiles to rebuild its walls. He finds that not only are the walls of the city broken down, so are the people. They feel God let them down. In today's passage the priest Ezra, who had a hand in rebuilding the temple, leads a ceremony in which the people renew their covenant with God. He reads aloud from “the book of the law of Moses.” We are not sure if this is the whole Torah or one of the books in it or parts of it. I don't think it was everything from Genesis to Deuteronomy because the session takes 6 hours and we are told, in a verse inexplicably dropped from our reading, that the Levites, assistants to the priesthood, “instructed the people in the Law while the people were standing there.” (v.7) It goes on to say, “So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.” The Hebrew can be translated, “making it clear and giving the meaning...” In other words, this wasn't a bare-bones reading of the text and only the text. They were explaining the meaning of the text. In essence this was a 6 hour Bible study.

Why were they interpreting the scriptures rather than merely reading them? Possibly because, since the texts were first written, Hebrew had evolved, as all languages do. The King James version is only 400 years old but parts of it are hard to understand because English has changed in that time. Or the Levites had to interpret it because the people spoke Aramaic or the Babylonian tongue and Hebrew had become mostly a liturgical language, like Latin in the Roman Catholic church. But it might have been the problem we all have when diving deeply into some parts of the Bible, especially the Old Testament. Some passages are difficult to take in on an initial reading. A superficial reading can obscure the deeper meaning. Context and the culture at the time must be taken into account. The post-exilic Jews were not the Israelites coming out of Egypt. They were farther removed from them than we are from Shakespeare. They needed help getting the right message from the scriptures read.

This is especially true today. Most passages from the Bible can be taken at face value. There is nothing ambiguous about what Jesus says at his trial when the high priest asks him, “'Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?' 'I am,' said Jesus.” (Mark 14:61-62) There is nothing unclear about Jesus saying that the two greatest commandments were to “'Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength' The second is: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:30-31) There is nothing equivocal about Jesus saying, “I give you a new commandment—to love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. Everyone will know you are my disciples—if you have love for one another.” (John 13:34-35) But not every passage in the Bible is that clear.

I have a book entitled Hard Sayings of the Bible. In it 4 biblical scholars tackle just about every passage that bothers or confuses people. Currently I have it at the jail because I have to field a lot of inquiries from people with little to do but read the Bible and puzzle over the difficult passages. There are other books with scholars wrestling with different interpretations and approaches to topics like the Canaanite genocide in the book of Joshua. I have on my Kindle such titles as Banned Questions about Jesus, Four Views of Hell, and Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God. I am learning a lot through books like Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes and the NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible. And while I can't say there is one definitive answer to every question, neither are there any questions for which no answer exists and which unravel the faith and everything we know about God.

Our older brothers and sisters in faith do not have any qualms about interpreting scripture. Go to a yeshiva, an Orthodox Jewish school or seminary, and you will be overwhelmed by the noise of students and teachers questioning and offering interpretations and debating every line of the Torah. Basically the Talmud is a yeshiva in writing, a commentary on the Torah in the form of a multi-generational discussion among rabbis. They feel God's Word is rich with meanings that are not always found on the surface.

This is not to say that every interpretation is equally valid. For instance, the story of a city gate named the Needle's Eye doesn't really explain Jesus' comment about it being easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into the kingdom of God. That gate didn't exist in Jesus' time but only goes back to the Middle Ages. Jesus' point is that it is impossible. The disciples realize this and ask “Then who can be saved?” To which Jesus replies, “This is impossible for mere humans, but for God all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:23-26) In other words, we are all dependent on God's grace for our salvation. The rich, who have a lot of resources, may have a harder time not relying on them or the tactics they used to get or stay rich, and thus might try to save themselves. What they should do instead is humble themselves and simply trust in God's grace.

Interpretation is not the problem; bad interpretation is. Bad interpretation comes from taking things out of context, ignoring the culture or the history, or not comparing it with other biblical passages on the same topic to see how it fits in or how it or the other verses might lend nuance to the subject. The worst interpretations come from people reading things into scripture that simply aren't there. I have bookmarked an article entitled 67 Surprising Things Not Found in the Bible [here]. Among the things that writer David Housholder points out as missing in scripture are the battle of Armageddon, a singular apocalyptic Antichrist figure, any mention of abortion or transgenderism, pro or con, the idea that women can't wear pants (nobody in the Bible does), the existence of ordained clergy, most Christian holidays and church seasons or whether Jesus had long hair, a beard or was single. As the author says, “I'm just stating a list of things that the Bible simply does not explicitly teach. They may be true, but not because 'the Bible tells me so.'” He admits that we can deduce some things by connecting the dots, like the Trinity, and acknowledges some things are implicit. And it is often what is implicit that can be brought out by careful interpretation.

For instance, at last week's Bible study we looked at the wedding in Cana. The fact that Jesus' mother was there and working with the food and refreshments implies that this is probably the wedding of a relative. Jesus and his disciples probably got their invitation because of that or because Nathaniel was from Cana. Most scholars acknowledge that. What someone at the Bible study pointed out that when Mary ignored Jesus' comment that the wine situation had nothing to do with him, it must mean she knew Jesus had the power to rectify the situation. What had Jesus done before his ministry to convince her of that? And someone else pointed out that if Jesus converted all the jars of water into wine, what were the guests to wash with? Were there other jars of water in the house?

To understand the Bible you have to interpret it. And the best way to do that is to not only study the Bible but use multiple translations, commentaries, Bible dictionaries, concordances, and topical bibles, all of which can be found online at sites like biblehub.com or the Logos Bible app. Studying the Bible with other people is enlightening because they will sometimes notice things you don't or share a perspective you don't have. And remember, no one is always right nor is anyone always wrong. Don't fail to use your own mind simply because you usually agree or disagree with someone. Knee jerk acceptance or rejection of an interpretation isn't much better than knight's jump exegesis.

Interpreting the Bible is a very biblical thing to do. And some passages are difficult. We may have to wrestle with them as Jacob wrestled with the Lord. He didn't give up but said, “I will not let you go until you bless me.” And he got that blessing. Often struggling with some text yields a greater understanding and sharper insight. Martin Luther's struggle with the text “The righteous shall live by faith” brought him a whole new understanding of our relationship with God.

I believe everything in the Bible is there for a purpose. That purpose might be to stimulate us to question why we think one way or the other about something. It might be for us to move beyond a simplistic understanding of a verse or passage or topic. We may even have to embrace paradox, as researchers in quantum physics have to do. And don't think that scientists have everything figured out. In fact, the wisest ones realize that it is questions and acknowledging what we don't know that moves science forward. It is our questions about God and his word that moves our spirituality forward.

Some people think God is unknowable. The truth is that while we cannot comprehend the totality of God, we can know the essentials: that he is loving and just and merciful and that he created us in his image and desires that we grow to be like him. Our most vital information about God comes from Jesus, our vast God focused in terms we can understand: a human being. What we learn from him is that we need not fear what we do not know about God. We can trust him. And because of that, we need not fear anything. Not pain, nor death, nor judgment, nor our own imperfection. Though we don't know everything about him, he knows all about us. And he loves us anyway. In that solid fact, we can put our faith.