from
Whose Bible Is It?
by
Jaroslav Pelikan

Four

(continued)

Beyond Written Torah: Talmud and Continuing Revelation

With the sacred text of the Tanakh in a language that was increasingly unintelligible to the worshipping congregation, Jewish liturgical practice had to resort to the use of Aramaic paraphrase and translation, known as Targum (meaning “translation”), which also became part of the normative tradition. [...]

These Targums, too, were originally oral. Pupils received them from their master, and apprentices from their mentors, and often sons from their fathers, as part of their training for the rabbinical office. In spite of the linguistic affinity and similarity between Hebrew and Aramaic—or, rather, precisely because of this similarity and affinity—such a “translation” had to be far more than a simple letter-for-letter transliteration. [...] Therefore it often required paraphrase or circumlocution to say in Aramaic what the original Hebrew had said, which unavoidably made the Targum into a biblical commentary of sorts.

Among glosses and paraphrases there was some effort by the rabbis to distinguish between Targum as translation-cum-explanation and Midrash as comment-cum-addition. A central feature of Midrash was the application of the biblical text to circumstances and needs that differed in some way from the original context of the passage. This often called for an explanatory gloss or addition to the original text. It is amusing to note that the early Christian exegetes, while often objecting to rabbinic methods of interpretation as artificial and arbitrary, actually created their own Targum and Midrash, as when they quoted the words “The LORD reigns” with their addition, “from the tree”—that is, from the tree of the cross, which is not in the Hebrew or even in the Septuagint. And then they accused the Jewish interpreters of having distorted the biblical text by deleting this addition from the Psalms because it was such an obvious prophecy about the crucifixion of Christ.

Even within the biblical period itself, divine commandments that had originally pertained to a nomadic people without a fixed home were often difficult to apply to the urban society of the late Jewish monarchy. But at least the Judaism of that later biblical period was able to count on the living voice of the prophets as a guide to conduct in accordance with the Law. Now it had to rely on the tradition of Halakhah, which means “the right way to walk.”

Halakhah, then, is the body of interpretations of the Law.

Halakhah, as containing interpretations of the biblical Law, is generally distinguished from Haggadah, “narrative” or “biblical interpretation.” Therefore, the materials of the Haggadah often have a direct appeal also to readers who do not stand in the Jewish tradition, including Christians, in a way that Halakhah, concerned so much with those aspects of the Pentateuch and its legislation that are not shared by other traditions, does not. The Tosefta is an especially rich source of Haggadic texts and, like most of the other materials being discussed in this chapter, has recently become available in English translation.

In a class by themselves among these interpretations of the sacred text of the Torah are the speculative mystical systems identified with the Kabbalah, which became a force also in Christian thought during the Renaissance and which continue to arouse interest among non-Jews. At their center is the contemplation and reflection on the Divine Name as revealed to Moses at the burning bush, “Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh,” [...] For the Kabbalah and its practitioners, the Tetragrammaton is the key to the mystery of all Being, divine or created, but also the key to the meaning of the Bible.

To identify the pre-Mosaic Law as it came to Noah, the Talmud singles out seven violations of the will of God: worship of idols, profaning the name of God, murder, unlawful sex, theft, eating the meat of a living animal, and failure to enforce laws. In this identification the Talmud was setting forth the content of what would come to be known in later philosophy and theology as “natural law,” that part of the content of the Law that did not depend either for its knowledge or for its force on the authority of a unique historical revelation from God, whether through Moses or through Jesus Christ, but that was knowable (and had historically been known) also to the Gentiles. This was a Christian as well as a Jewish concept and extended well beyond the orthodox boundaries of either of these communities, as the reference to “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” in the American Declaration of Independence shows.

If this natural law did not depend on revelation, it had to have come through a universal tradition and/or through the use of human reason. In its more extreme form, such an appeal to the power of reason in relation to the Torah was an anticipation of the Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah. But already in the Talmud, and then in the commentators on the Talmud, there was much attention to the capacity of the human mind to discern the divine will on the basis of the structure of the universe and the cumulative experience of the human race. The very processes of reasoning that were at work in the questions and responses of the Talmudic sages, as well as the methods of analysis that were at work in the Jewish exegesis of the Tanakh (and in the Christian exegesis of Scripture), implied that the divine revelation of the Law, though written on tablets of stone for Moses, was intended to be received through the more sensitive, though less durable, instrumentality of human speech and human thought.

Combined with the consistent emphasis of the Talmud on the oneness of God and the universality of the will of God for all humanity, this recognition prepared the students of the Talmud for an emphasis on the transcendent Law that was present within the written Torah and the oral Torah, but also beyond them.

Implicit throughout this chapter and strikingly evident repeatedly throughout this commentary material is the parallelism between these ultra-Jewish methods of dealing with the message of the Bible and the styles of exegesis that have been developed by Christians in isolation from, and in hostility to, Judaism with all its works and all its ways. The more we understand that parallelism, the more profound are the affinities and the more tragic the mutual ignorance and misunderstanding.

Five

The Law and the Prophets Fulfilled

The Jewish translation of Jewish Scripture into Greek, the Septuagint, became the Christian Bible. Its standing within the Jewish community, even in Alexandria where it had originated, gradually declined, at least partly, it would seem, because of the way Christians were using it to prove their distinctive interpretations.

[...] some parts of the Law and the Prophets were seen as “types” and “foreshadowings,” which had been real in and of themselves but were now finding their fuller meaning in Christ. Christ was the Second Adam, undoing by his obedience the mortal damage that the First Adam had done by his disobedience. (Very early this “typology” was extended to Mary as the Second Eve, who said in her obedience what Eve in her disobedience had failed to say: “Be it unto me according to thy word.”)

Many of these “foreshadowings,” however, soon came to be seen as having lost their original validity now that the foreshadowed reality had arrived. [...] What had been “foreshadowed” in the Torah had now been “overshadowed” in him as the fulfillment.

Thus the fundamental category for the Christian interpretation of the Old Testament was prophecy and fulfillment, as applied above all to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Christians who are so accustomed to this identification that they sometimes think of “Christ” as a personal name rather than a title are often surprised to find that it is in fact much less prominent than they might suppose it to be in the Tanakh [...] Nevertheless as early as we have any knowledge of it, the Christian tradition was applying this title to Jesus; moreover, it was also, in unprecedented fashion, equating it with the title of “Suffering Servant” from Isaiah. Jesus the crucified and risen was “Messiah” and “King of glory” and “despised, shunned by men, a man of suffering”—all at the same time.

This baptism of the Tanakh and identification of the church with ancient Israel enabled the exponents and defenders of Christianity to claim a long and distinguished lineage, going back through the prophets to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, thus making the apparent novelty of the Christian gospel, beginning in the first century of the Common Era during the reign of the Roman emperor Augustus, actually the first and most ancient of all religions. Yet at some point this “stupendous claim” of prophecy and fulfillment could no longer function with the combination of written Tanakh and oral tradition as its composite authority, but had to develop its own written authority, which would embody the oral tradition but not exhaust it. That written authority was what we now call “the New Testament.”

Six

Formation of a Second Testament

Seven

The Peoples of the Book

Sometimes it almost seems as though the peoples of the Balkans might get along better if only they could not understand each other’s languages so well.

So also during the “Middle Ages,” both in Western Europe and in the Eastern Roman so-called Byzantine Empire, rabbinical scholars and Christian scholars were kept apart by a common text, whether they called it Tanakh in Hebrew or Graphē in Greek or Biblia Sacra in Latin. [...] It takes a lifetime of trying to make sense of these three ancient languages—not to say, of trying to make English of them— to appreciate fully the vastly different thought worlds (which sometimes seem to be entire universes) that they represent. For example, the system of “tenses” in Hebrew does not really correspond to the ones familiar to us in any of the Indo-European langages, including English.

Although it became fashionable in the period of the Renaissance and Reformation to ridicule the shortcomings of Jerome’s translation and to challenge the official theological interpretations that were grounded (without a knowledge of the original) in its idiosyncracies, this must not be permitted to obscure its monumental influence or its enormous literary and religious power. [...]

The Vulgate was the Bible of Europe for over a thousand years, and it was the mother lode of the Latin Mass. Those who, from the perspective of the Protestant Reformation with its doctrine of “the Bible only,” criticize the Middle Ages for having neglected the study of the Bible should examine the text of the Latin Mass with a concordance to the Vulgate in hand.

Rashi (which is an acronym constructed from “Rabbi Shlomo Ben Itzakh”) combined a profound respect for the Jewish tradition of biblical interpretation, especially as represented by the Talmud, with a philologist’s concentration on the original text of the Tanakh and a careful grammatical exposition of it, verse by verse and word by word. Thus the more fanciful and often extravagant elaboration of allegories and other poetic interpretations that came from the rabbinical tradition was held in check by the primary insistence on what the text actually said. Rashi’s work coincided with the very early beginnings of an analogous shift of emphasis among Christian exegetes, an emphasis of which Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century is the best-known example. According to Thomas, the literal, grammatical sense of a passage of Scripture was the primary one to which any spiritual sense had to be attached and by which it was to be judged.

It says a great deal about the medieval Christian reading of the Tanakh that any interpretation which confined itself to the literal sense of a particular passage was criticized for its “Judaizing” tendency, because Saint Paul had differentiated himself from his Jewish past with the formula, “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” The same criticism was likewise directed at the rare case of an interpretation that presumed to correct the translations of the Septuagint and the Vulgate by a reference (often borrowed) to the original Hebrew. For although there were four senses of Scripture, the most avidly sought after was often the allegorical sense—or, as it was called, the “spiritual” sense—which of the four conveyed the richest meaning of a passage, often turning a prosaic reference to a “tree” into a celebration of the cross of Christ or the mention of a “rock” into a treatise on the authority of the pope [...]

Even without importing all of our problems into the medieval scene, one cannot resist observing that it ill behooves an era of human history like this one to look back at the Middle Ages and think only of jihad or of the Crusades and pogroms without remembering these and similar encounters when, at least for an occasional moment, Jews, Christians, and Muslims, by the power of the Book and in the heritage of Abraham, the father whom they shared, managed to transcend their separations without losing their identities.

Eight

Back to the Sources

To a degree that can often easily escape notice by someone who has never had responsibility for creating a critical edition of a historic text, the preparation of the text of the Bible for printing imposed on the editor or printer the obligation to make decisions about stabilizing the text, often for the first time ever. Over and over it became necessary to choose from among two (and often more) conflicting readings in the various manuscripts, of which only one could be the right one, and to decide which of them to print as the authoritative text. Once it was printed, the result of such choices achieved a certain measure of permanency.

Printed books last for centuries, and their mistaken readings will endure just as long as the correct ones.