Hearing and Doing the Word

The Drama of Evangelical Hermeneutics

Daniel J. Treier, Douglas A. Sweeney, Daniel J. Treier, Douglas A. Sweeney

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780567662644
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

This collection of essays honours Kevin J. Vanhoozer by representing the current state of evangelical hermeneutics in light of his work. The volume consists of three parts: The Biblical Script, Great Performances, and Theodrama Today. Each part contains wide-ranging contributions from well-known scholars, who address important topics for contemporary hermeneutics in dialogue with Vanhoozer's influential work. Kevin J. Vanhoozer is today's leading evangelical theologian of biblical interpretation. He is one of the most influential voices in contemporary hermeneutics, and in academic theology he is one of his generation's most influential evangelicals.

Part I

THE BIBLICAL SCRIPT

Chapter 1

Will the Goof Prevail? The Hermeneutics of Textual Criticism

Iain Provan

The origins of this essay, which I am delighted to contribute to this well-deserved Festschrift for Kevin J. Vanhoozer, lie deep in the mists of time—that is, during the earliest years of our friendship. Having got to know Kevin first as a graduate student in Cambridge in the early 1980s, I became reacquainted with him in the early 1990s as a colleague at New College in the University of Edinburgh. In this context, one morning, a document crossed my desk. It was a new course proposal, originating with Kevin and forwarded to me as the person responsible for editing such documents and passing them on for publication. This particular proposal described a series of introductory lectures on Christian theology, and I was particularly struck by one of the titles: “Will the Goof Prevail? The Meaning of Divine Providence.”

Now we all know how easy it is, working under pressure, to make typing mistakes. My first reaction, therefore, was to wonder whether I was encountering an example of textual corruption. Presumably Kevin had meant to write, “Will the Good Prevail?,” and his finger had slipped sideways from the letter “d” to the letter “f” on his keyboard. On the other hand, the colleague whom we honor in the present volume is noted for his literary flair. He was already well known at New College for producing eye-catching titles of lectures. So my second thought was that perhaps this was not a mistake after all—that the wording was deliberate. The sentence made perfect sense as written. It indicated a lecture about the providence of God in overruling evil—taking account of all the “goofs” perpetrated by mortal beings and then working all things together for good.

I was trapped in a readerly dilemma. How could I tell the difference between textual corruption, on the one hand, and literary artistry, on the other? Which text should I prefer, as representing Kevin’s communicative intent? For present purposes, the truth of the matter in this particular case is not important; the interested reader can get the answer straight from the author, if he even remembers now what his intention was. As Robert Browning is (apocryphally) reported once to have said to Elizabeth Barrett about one of his poems, “My dear, when I wrote that, only myself and God knew what it meant; now only God knows.” The point of my reminiscence is this: that pausing for second thoughts in such matters is a good practice. I was right not simply to assume that textual corruption had taken place, but to consider the alternatives. It would have been quite improper and unwise simply to proceed to “repair” the text according to my first intuitions, without considering whether those intuitions were reliable. If I had “repaired” it, indeed, I might well have missed something important about what its author wanted to say.

This brings me directly to the subject of this essay, which concerns the necessary interface between textual and literary criticism in the study of the consonantal MT of the OT—the basis for both modern scholarly work on the biblical text and modern Protestant (and more recently Roman Catholic) translations of the same.¹ My proposal is simple, but (I believe) important. One frequently gets the impression from scholars carrying out text-critical work on the MT that they have failed to engage in sufficiently deep thought about initially puzzling texts before proposing emendations. They may well agree in principle with Ernst Würthwein’s words concerning their discipline:

Textual criticism, like any other science, cannot achieve convincing results if it does not hold to a methodology which is appropriate to its subject matter and defined by it. An arbitrary procedure which hastily and unnecessarily dismisses the traditional text and puts one’s own ideas in its place leads to a subjective form of the text which is uncertain historically and can claim no theological relevance.²

Yet in practice scholars have often proceeded in precisely such a hasty and unnecessary manner, favoring emendations that permit texts to make immediate sense to the critics rather than pursuing with sufficient rigor the possible senses of texts as they stand, as pieces of ancient literary art. Evangelical scholars themselves have not always avoided this same tendency, despite holding a self-consciously “high view” of Scripture that one might have expected to generate pronounced hesitancy about emending the biblical text without very strong grounds for doing so. We should all commit to doing better, recognizing that critical methodology does indeed need to be “appropriate to its subject matter and defined by it”—which means that the excellent text critic requires always to be, at the same time, an accomplished literary critic.

Truth and Rhetoric

Undoubtedly one of the underlying causes of this tendency toward overly hasty emendation lies in the often-sharp distinction drawn in modernity between truth and rhetoric. Plato has in this respect (as in others) cast a long shadow over Western intellectual history, stressing as he did the importance of penetrating behind the appearance of things to their bedrock reality—moving beyond “opinion” about the world, founded on sense-perception, to the attainment of “knowledge” by way of rational contemplation. He took this position over against the Sophists of his own time, who tended toward relativism when it came to questions of truth and virtue, and who taught rhetoric simply as a set of skills to be deployed in pursuing the speaker’s goals, whatever they might be. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as many scholars became less interested in the transcendent and more so in the immanent, and as Plato’s rationalism was replaced in much prevailing philosophy by a commitment to empirical inquiry, this same dichotomy between truth and rhetoric nevertheless reappeared in a certain kind of academic biblical scholarship. Bible readers driven by a conviction that the rhetorically shaped text as we have it now obscures the True and the Good thought it right and proper to disregard it in pursuit of the real history of Israel and of the Church, and of the Bible’s real message. Rigorous scientific method, they believed, would get modern scholarship to its goal of secure knowledge, as it probed beneath the surface of the traditional but quite “unsatisfactory” text in pursuit of “the facts.” In a scholarly world dominated by source and form criticism, it was generally true by the late 1930s that “on almost all sides the final form of the Hexateuch ha[d] come to be regarded as a starting-point barely worthy of discussion, from which the debate should move away as rapidly as possible in order to reach the real problems underlying it”; this remained the prevailing mood in many quarters for decades afterward, and with respect to much more of Scripture than the Hexateuch.³ It is not surprising that in this context a significant amount of text-critical work gives the impression of viewing the MT only as a “starting-point barely worthy of discussion,” quickly and without good reason departing from it in pursuit of a “better” text that might have existed earlier.

Meshech and Kedar

Let us take as our opening example Ps. 120:5 as it is treated in the third edition of Biblia Hebraica, published from 1929 to 1937 (hereafter BH3). The MT is straightforward: אויה־לי כי־גרתי משך שכנתי עם־אהלי קדר. We may translate in this way: “Woe is me, for I have sojourned in Meshech, I have dwelt among Kedar’s tents.” Despite the text’s straightforwardness, however, BH3 suggests in its apparatus that we might wish to read MT’s משך (Meshech) instead as משא (Massa), introducing the name of one of Ishmael’s sons from Gen. 25:14. Alternatively, BH3 proposes, we might read משך as a participle preceding a now-missing noun: קשת משכי, “those who draw the bow.” The reference given in respect of this suggestion is Isa. 21:15, 17. In these other contexts from Genesis and Isaiah, the “Kedar” mentioned at the end of Ps. 120:5 is also found:

These are the names of the sons of Ishmael, listed in the order of their birth: Nebaioth the firstborn of Ishmael, Kedar, Adbeel, Mibsam, Mishma, Dumah, Massa. (Gen. 25:13-14)

They flee from the sword, from the drawn sword, from the bent bow and from the heat of battle. This is what the Lord says to me: “Within one year, as a servant bound by contract would count it, all the splendor of Kedar will come to an end. The survivors of the archers, the warriors of Kedar, will be few.” (Isa. 21:15-17)

But why is the emendation of Psalm 120 on the basis of these other “Kedar texts” necessary at all? It is not because of the versional evidence, although that has something of a tendency toward interpreting משך as a verb referring to the idea of prolongation.⁴ The editor of the BH3 text evidently did not, however, think that this evidence was actually worth citing. The emendation appears to be premised rather on the view that “Meshech” is unexpected alongside Kedar. Why might someone think so? It is a matter of geography. Ancient Meshech was located in the area between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea to Israel’s far north, while Kedar was one of the nomadic tribes of the Arabian Peninsula to the far south, and we know that this kind of “contradiction” vexed some of our forebears. How could the psalm’s author have lived in both places at the same time? Since he could not have done so, MT must be wrong, and it should be emended. Hermann Gunkel, for example, believed exactly this.⁵ The way in which the MT can be dismissed in such biblical scholarship with virtually a wave of the hand is nicely illustrated by Charles Briggs’s comment in the second volume of his ICC commentary on the Psalms, dating from 1907: “Meshek, referring to the Moschi of the region of the Black Sea, is a later conjecture of MT, and improbable.”⁶

Of course, this approach begs a huge question: Granted that from a particular perspective the text is “unexpected,” why should we not adjust our expectations rather than the text? What is to prevent us from reading the “geography” of Psalm 120 in terms not of the poet’s physical abode(s) but of his spiritual landscape? Nothing in fact prevents us from doing this. The psalmist’s enemies, from north to south, are no better than hostile barbarians, the text tells us, employing merismus to say so. This is a figure of speech whereby two extremes are mentioned as a way of including everything in between: “from a to b, from east to west, from the heavens to the world of the dead.” The barbarians in question, we note, are of a particular kind: they are accomplished bowmen. This is already clear from the reference to Kedar, but Meshech too was renowned for this skill. It was the homeland of the Scythians, bowmen of proverbial cruelty (2 Macc. 4:47). The very noun משך itself reminds us of the verb משך, “to draw a bow.” This is important, because there is a sustained play throughout the psalm ...