How Do You Know Your Interpretation of the Bible is Valid: Being a Modern-Day Rabbi

So, as I said before, I'm reading through the New Testament with a companion book, the Jewish New Testament Commentary by David Stern. I'm still in single-digit Matthew, by the way. There's just so much. Recently, because of Rob Bell's new book Velvet Elvis, I have been questioning my own interpretation of Scripture.

I once heard someone say, "God's word is absolutely true and reliable: until you read it." The idea is that you bring to the text vast amounts of prejudice. Social, ethnic, economic, geographical, historical, political, personal. So how can a person - say a man teaching Scripture to a congregation - know that he's correct?

Rob Bell would say you don't. As a teacher/preacher, I'm a rabbi. Which means I have my own interpretation (in Hebrew, a yoke). People come and listen, and hear my yoke, and then they talk about it. Then they hear another rabbi's yoke. And they discuss the differences and the variations. The idea is that the yokes are discussed in community by everybody, and that discussion is crucial. Which bothers me a bit, because I'm like, "So who's right?" Bell would argue the idea of "being right" is Western. Eastern cultures rely more on the digestion, the arguing, the idea of a community wrestling with truths that could never really be fully understood anyway. Which leads to a certain sort of humility, I would say.

Like in Acts 15, when the elders of the church have this massive decision to make about what to do with Gentiles who were converting. This decision will affect the history of the church. They came out of their meeting and said, "It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements."

Seemed?

Seemed?

You don't hear that kind of humility in a lot of evangelical circles today. So, that led me to ask, "How does a Rabbi come up with a yoke while they're studying Scripture?" This is what I learned.

There were four basic modes of Scripture interpretation used by the rabbis. These are:

P'shat: Simple Intepretation
This is the plain, literal sense of the text, more or less what modern scholars mean by "grammatical-historical exegesis." This method looks to the grammar of the language and the historical setting and context as background for deciding what a passage means. Modern scholars often consider grammatical-historical exegesis the only valid way to deal with a text: pastors who use other approaches in their sermons often feel defensive about it before academics. But the rabbis had three other ways of interpreting Scripture, and their validity should not be excluded in advance.

Remez: Hint
This method wherein a word, phrase or other element in the text "hints' at a truth not conveyed by the p'shat. The implied presupposition is that God can hint at things of which the Bible writers themselves were not aware of. For a fascinating look at remez in Scripture, especially Jesus, click here. It'll blow your mind.

Drash or Midrash: Search
This method is an allegorical or homiletical application of a text. This is a speciaes of eisigeis - reading on'e own thoughts into the text - as opposed to exegesis, which is extracting from the text what it actually says and would have meant to its original audience. The implied presupposition here is that the word of Scripture can legitimately become grist for the mill of the human intellect, which God can guide to truths not directly related to the text at all.

Sod: Secret
A mystical or hidden meaning arrived at by operating on the numerical values of Hebrew letters, noting unusual spellings, transposing letters, and the like. For example, in September, I'm preaching on the Biblical account of David and Goliath. I never noticed this before, but check this out. Goliath is six cubits tall. His spear weighed six hundred shekels. His armor weighed six thousand shekels. This repeition could be a covert reference to Satan. Add in the fact that the author calls Goliath's armor "scaled - a curious way to describe armor - and you could have a reference to Satan, the tempter, a reference to the serpent in the Garden of Eden. The implied presupposition here is that God invests meaning in even the most minute detail of Scripture, and even the individual letters could mean something.

The presuppositions underlying remez, drash and sod obviously epxress God's omnipotence, but they also express His love for humanity, in the sense that He chooses out of love to use extraordinary means for reaching people's hearts and minds. At the same time, it is easy to see how remexz, drash and sod can be abused, since they all allow - indeed require - subjective interpretation; and this explains why scholars, who deal mostly with the objective world, hestitate to use them.

However, rabbis historically used all four. They even had a method for remembering all four methods. It's a Hebrew acronym, taking letters from each of the four words. The acronym is:

PaRDeS

In Hebrew, the word pardes means garden or orchard. I find this fascinating. It's as though this word is both a reference to the Garden of Eden, and how God's word is a like a link to Him, and a link to paradise. But it also - for me - holds the idea that God's word is like an orchard: it provides food for us each day, but there's no way you can ingest all of it in one sitting. Or in two. Or in a million. We can no more exhaustively mine God's word of all it's secret treasures than we can eat all the fruit in an orchard.

So true.