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Introduction to Biblical Hermeneutics
Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., Moisés Silva
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eBook - ePub
Introduction to Biblical Hermeneutics
Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., Moisés Silva
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About This Book
Since its publication in 1994, An Introduction to Biblical Hermeneutics has become a standard text for a generation of students, pastors, and serious lay readers. This second edition has been substantially updated and expanded, allowing the authors to fine-tune and enrich their discussions on fundamental interpretive topics. In addition, four new chapters have been included that address more recent controversial issues: • The role of biblical theology in interpretation • How to deal with contemporary questions not directly addressed in the Bible • The New Testament's use of the Old Testament • The role of history in interpretation The book retains the unique aspect of being written by two scholars who hold differing viewpoints on many issues, making for vibrant, thought-provoking dialogue. What they do agree on, however, is the authority of Scripture, the relevance of personal Bible study to life, and why these things matter.
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Études bibliques Part 1
THE SEARCH FOR MEANING: INITIAL DIRECTIONS
The very use of the term hermeneutics raises an important question: Why should Bible readers be expected to study principles of interpretation? In spite of what our day-to-day experience may suggest, the process involved in understanding a text is quite complicated. The difficulties surface especially when we try to read a book produced in a different culture or time, as some examples from Shakespeare can make clear. In the case of ancient documents written in other languages, we need to make a special effort to take into account their original setting through a method known as grammatico-historical exegesis. As a whole, the Bible is a fairly clear book to read, and it is helpful to specify in what areas the difficulties arise: language? literary style? application? Moreover, the divine character of Scripture suggests that we need to adopt some special principles that would not be relevant to the study of other writings.
Chapter 1
Who Needs Hermeneutics Anyway?
MOISÉS SILVA
The term hermeneutics (as well as its more ambiguous and even mysterious cousin, hermeneutic) has become increasingly popular in recent decades. As a result, it has been pulled and stretched every which way. With so many writers using the word, it seems to behave as a moving target, and some readers have been known to suffer attacks of anxiety as they seek, in vain, to pin it down and figure out what it means.
Its traditional meaning is relatively simple: the discipline that deals with principles of interpretation. Some writers like to call it the science of interpretation; others prefer to speak of the art of interpretation (perhaps with the implication, “Either you’ve got it or you don’t!”). Apart from such differences of perspective, the basic concern of hermeneutics is plain enough. It remains to be added, however, that when writers use the word hermeneutics, most frequently what they have in mind is biblical interpretation. Even when some other text is being discussed, the Bible likely lurks in the background.
This last observation raises an interesting question. Why should such a discipline be needed at all? We never had to take a class on “How to Interpret the Newspaper.” No high school offers a course on “The Hermeneutics of Conversation.” For that matter, even with regard to courses on Shakespeare or Homer, which certainly deal with the interpretation of literature, no hermeneutics prerequisite is ever listed. Why then are we told, all of a sudden in our academic training, that we need to become proficient in an exotic-sounding science if we want to understand the Bible?
One possible answer that may occur to us is that the Bible is a divine book, and so we require special training to understand it. But this solution simply will not work. As a Roman Catholic scholar has expressed it: “If anyone is able to speak in an absolutely unambiguous fashion and to make himself understood with irresistible efficacy, such a one is God; therefore, if there is any word that might not require a hermeneutics, it would be the divine word.”1 Protestants, for that matter, have always emphasized the doctrine of the perspicuity or clarity of the Scriptures. The Bible itself tells us that the essential prerequisite for understanding the things of God is having the Spirit of God (1 Cor. 2:11) and that the Christian, having received the anointing of the Spirit, does not even need a teacher (1 John 2:27).
It turns out, in fact, that we need hermeneutics, not precisely because the Bible is a divine book, but because in addition to being divine, it is a human book. Strange though that may sound, such a way of looking at our problem can put us on the right track. Human language, by its very nature, is largely equivocal, that is, capable of being understood in more than one way. If it were not so, we would never doubt what people mean when they speak; if utterances could signify only one thing, we would hardly ever hear disputes about whether Johnny said this or that. In practice, to be sure, the number of words or sentences that create misunderstandings is a very small proportion of the total utterances by a given individual in a given day. What we need to appreciate, however, is that the potential for misinterpretation is almost always there.
To put it differently, we do need hermeneutics for texts other than the Bible. Indeed, we need principles of interpretation to understand trivial conversations and even nonlinguistic events — after all, the failure to understand someone’s wink of the eye could spell disaster in certain circumstances. But then we are back to our original question. Why were we not required to take hermeneutics in second grade? Why is it that, in spite of that gap in our education, we almost always understand what our neighbor tells us? We have been taught hermeneutics all our lives. It may well be that the most important things we learn are those that we learn unconsciously.
The simple answer is that we have been taught hermeneutics all our lives, even from the day we were born. It may well be that the most important things we learn are those that we learn unconsciously. In short, as you begin a course in hermeneutics, you may be assured that you already know quite well the most basic principles of interpretation. Every time you read the newspaper or hear a story or analyze an event, you prove yourself to be a master in the art of hermeneutics!
That is perhaps a dangerous thing to say. You may be tempted to close this “useless” book immediately and return it to the bookstore, hoping to get your money back. Yet the point needs to be made and emphasized. Other than enjoying a right relationship with God, the most fundamental principle of biblical interpretation consists in putting into practice what we do unconsciously every day of our lives.
Hermeneutics is not primarily a question of learning difficult techniques. Specialized training has its place, but it is really quite secondary. What matters, we might say, is learning to “transpose” our customary interpretive routines to our reading of the Bible. Yet there precisely is where our problems begin.
For one thing, we must not think that what we do every day is all that simple. Before you could read a magazine, for example, you had to learn English. Do you think that’s easy? Ask anyone who tried to learn English after adolescence. Remarkably, you likely went through that difficult and complicated process with outstanding success in the first few years of your life. By the time you were four or five, you had already mastered hundreds and hundreds of phonological and grammatical rules. True, your vocabulary was rather limited, but learning vocabulary is the easiest part of language acquisition.
In addition, your mind has been receiving, day in and day out, countless numbers of impressions. They are the facts of history — primarily your personal experiences, but supplemented by the experiences of others, including information about the past — with all their associations, whether psychological, social, or whatever. In a way no less astonishing than language acquisition, your brain has carefully organized these millions of impressions, keeping some on the surface, others at a semiconscious level, still others in the equivalent of a trash can.
It is all an essential component of efficient interpretation. To follow up our somewhat fictional illustration: Every time you receive an impression, your mind verifies whether it is a fact already filed away; if not, it relates that new impression to previous ones so you can make sense of it. To use another common analogy, your brain is like a grid that filters all new data. If a previously unnoticed fact does not fit the grid, your brain has only two immediate choices: force it into the grid by distorting the evidence or reject it altogether. The latter is the unconscious equivalent of, “My mind is made up — don’t bother me with the facts.” There is, however, a third option: admit your ignorance and set the new fact aside until your grid is able to filter it.
We see, then, that our daily practice of interpretation is not so simple as we may have thought. It requires a fairly complex (though usually unconscious) process that focuses on language and history, using both terms in a fairly broad sense. Obviously, our understanding is curtailed to the extent that the language or the facts being interpreted are unfamiliar to us. If a lawyer uses technical legal language when seeking to strike up a conversation with a stranger in the subway, one can hardly expect much understanding to take place. Similarly, a person who has not kept up with developments in the U.S. government for an extended period of time will not be able to make sense of a newspaper editorial, or even of political cartoons.
The problem grows if there are significant linguistic and cultural differences between the speaker (or writer) and the hearer (or reader). Suppose that, having only a basic acquaintance with Shakespeare’s writings, we decide to tackle Othello. From time to time we would come across passages containing words that we have never seen before or that seem to have very unusual meanings. For example:
If I do prove her haggard,
Though that her jesses were my dear heart-strings
I’d whistle her off and let her down the wind
To prey at fortune. . . . (3.3.260 – 63)
Even after we find out that haggard = “hawk” and that jesses = “fastenings,” we may find it quite difficult to figure out Othello’s meaning, namely, that should his wife be shown to be unfaithful, he would allow his heart to be broken by letting her go.
Consider a more puzzling problem. Earlier in the play the duke of Venice and some senators are discussing recent news regarding a Turkish fleet, but there is considerable discrepancy regarding the number of galleys involved. The duke then says:
I do not so secure me in the error,
But the main article I do approve
In fearful sense. (1.3.10 – 12)
What may baffle us about a passage such as this one is that all the words are familiar to us — indeed, even the meanings of those words approximate modern usage — yet the total meaning seems to escape us. Unless we are quite familiar with Shakespearean literature, it may take us a while to interpret this statement correctly: in modern prose, “The fact that there is a discrepancy in the accounts gives me no sense of security; it is with alarm that I must give credence to the main point of the story.”
The most insidious problems, however, arise when a word or phrase is familiar and the meaning we attach to it makes sense in the context, yet our ignorance about the history of the language misleads us. When Iago reports something that Cassio said in his sleep, Othello calls it monstrous. Iago reminds Othello that it was only a dream, to which the latter responds: “But this denoted a foregone conclusion” (3.3.429). In our day, the expression a foregone conclusion means “an inevitable result,” and it is possible to make some sense of the passage if we take that to be the meaning here. In Elizabethan times, however, the expression simply meant “a previous experience”; Othello believes that what Cassio said in his sleep reflects something that had indeed taken place.
These are the kinds of difficulties we encounter when reading a work written in our own language and produced within the general Western culture of which we are a part. When we approach the Bible, however, we see a book written neither in English nor in a modern language closely related to English. Moreover, we are faced with a text that is far removed from u...