Theological Hermeneutics and the Book of Numbers as Christian Scripture

Richard S. Briggs

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780268103736
• eBook ISBN: 9780268103767
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

How should Christian readers of scripture hold appropriate and constructive tensions between exegetical, critical, hermeneutical, and theological concerns? This book seeks to develop the current lively discussion of theological hermeneutics by taking an extended test case, the book of Numbers, and seeing what it means in practice to hold all these concerns together. In the process the book attempts to reconceive the genre of "commentary" by combining focused attention to the details of the text with particular engagement with theological and hermeneutical concerns arising in and through the interpretive work. The book focuses on the main narrative elements of Numbers 11–25, although other passages are included (Numbers 5, 6, 33). With its mix of genres and its challenging theological perspectives, Numbers offers a range of difficult cases for traditional Christian hermeneutics. Briggs argues that the Christian practice of reading scripture requires engagement with broad theological concerns, and brings into his discussion Frei, Auerbach, Barth, Ricoeur, Volf, and many other biblical scholars. The book highlights several key formational theological questions to which Numbers provides illuminating answers: What is the significance and nature of trust in God? How does holiness (mediated in Numbers through the priesthood) challenge and redefine our sense of what is right, or "fair"? To what extent is it helpful to conceptualize life with God as a journey through a wilderness, of whatever sort? Finally, short of whatever promised land we may be, what is the context and role of blessing?

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: A Map of the Wilderness

1. This will emerge most fully toward the end of chapter 6 below. For further reflection see my “‘These Are the Days of Elijah’: The Hermeneutical Move from ‘Applying the Text’ to ‘Living in Its World,’” Journal of Theological Interpretation 8 (2014): 157–74.

2. To be precise, I found myself writing a range of papers on specific chapters in the book, for details of which see the bibliography at the end. These included studies specifically attuned to obscurity, moral complexity, and the need for specific textual focus in developing hermeneutical proposals.

3. Full documentation of all the writers and approaches mentioned here will be offered in the relevant chapters that follow.

4. As well as the various writers discussed in the body of the book, I am indebted here to the wide-ranging stimuli of the essays in Stanley D. Walters, ed., Go Figure! Figuration in Biblical Interpretation, Princeton Theological Monograph Series 81 (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2008).

5. Christopher R. Seitz, “History, Figural History, and Providence in the Dual Witness of Prophet and Apostle,” in Walters, Go Figure!, 5.

6. See initially Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.1.10.

7. Lewis Ayres, “The Word Answering the Word: Opening the Space of Catholic Biblical Interpretation,” in Theological Theology: Essays in Honour of John Webster, ed. R. David Nelson, Darren Sarisky, and Justin Stratis (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), 41, with various caveats, and noting indebtedness to Frei. The last major section of chapter 5 below will offer a fuller discussion of this “literal sense,” which can in the end only be defined with theoretical precision in light of attending to its possibilities in practice. Clearly such a literal sense is not a singular phenomenon, without it thereby following that “anything goes.” I intend to pursue this question of what might be called “the vulnerability of scripture” to multiple readings in a forthcoming project. A succinct pointer to the value (and indeed inevitability) of this multiple literal sense is Stephen E. Fowl, “The Importance of a Multivoiced Literal Sense of Scripture: The Example of Thomas Aquinas,” in Reading Scripture with the Church: Toward a Hermeneutic for Theological Interpretation, ed. A. K. M. Adam et al. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 35–50. The drift of the above discussion in my introduction is that the evaluation of the differences between various proposals in this area, such as those of Ayres and Fowl, will necessarily have some ecclesiological component.

8. Interestingly, of course, cases of polemical omission of data would serve as a counterexample to this kind of claim. I cannot engage with that matter here, and do not in fact think that it is all that relevant to Numbers, but for some reflections on how it works hermeneutically in a case where it most assuredly is relevant, in Genesis 1–11, see my “The Hermeneutics of Reading Genesis after Darwin,” in Reading Genesis after Darwin, ed. Stephen C. Barton and David Wilkinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 57–71.

9. Walter Brueggemann, “The Exodus Narrative as Israel’s Articulation of Faith Development,” in Hope within History (Atlanta: John Knox, 1987), 8–9. Brueggemann’s focus here is Exodus, but it seems to me even more appropriate to Numbers.

ONE: The Figure in the Wilderness

1. It was first published in 1896. The revised New York edition (c.1908) is available in Henry James, The Figure in the Carpet, and Other Stories, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin, 1986), 355–400.

2. James’s New York preface is reprinted in Figure, 44–46; citation from 46. Kermode’s introduction in the same volume (7–30) discusses the tale as a series of jokes, while also noting its significant influence on a whole range of critical disciplines including reader-response theory (26–28).

3. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 3–10 citation from 9–10.

4. See, e.g., Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, “Henry James and Reader-Response Criticism (The Figure in the Carpet),” Neohelicon 27, no. 1 (2000): 61–68.

5. See Stanley Fish, “Why No One’s Afraid of Wolfgang Iser,” in Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 68–86. Fish’s account has been rather influential, but a salutary caution here is argued by Zoltán Schwáb, who, in “Mind the Gap: The Impact of Wolfgang Iser’s Reader-Response Criticism on Biblical Studies—A Critical Assessment,” Literature and Theology 17 (2003): 170–81, shows that Iser operates with much the same kind of open-endedness to multiple readings that concerns Fish.

6. Steiner, Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), 1–50, especially 39, 49. We shall return to these comments below.

7. Steiner, Real Presences, 17.

8. Most famously in the “prefaces” written subsequent to his fiction, and also the 1884 essay “The Art of Fiction” (repr., Henry James, The Art of Fiction, and Other Essays [New York: Oxford University Press, 1948]).

9. This is a phrase drawn from Ricoeur’s treatment of “the rhetoric between the text and its reader” (164–66) in his Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); cf. especially the statement that “the illusion is endlessly reborn that a text is a structure in itself and for itself ” (164); “structuré en soi et par soi” (3:239 in the French original, for which a more dynamic translation could easily be “self-structuring in and for itself ”).

10. See Gordon J. Wenham, Numbers, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (Leicester: Inter-Varsity, 1981), 14–18; or Wenham, Exploring the Old Testament, vol.1, The Pentateuch (London: SPCK, 2003), 104.

11. See the discussion in chapter 3 below on Num. 10:35–36 for a further interesting point about “books” in this context.

12. See Baruch A. Levine, Numbers 1–20: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, The Anchor Bible 4A (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 47, citing b. Sotah 36b, also Mishnah tractate Yoma 7:1.

13. Franz Rosenzweig, “The Unity of the Bible: A Position Paper vis-à-vis Orthodoxy and Liberalism,” repr. in Scripture and Translation, by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, trans. Lawrence Rosenwald with Everett Fox (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 23.

14. Rosenzweig, “Unity of the Bible,” 23, and clarified by an editorial note (n. 4). It is also cited by Gerhard von Rad, Genesis, rev. ed., OTL (London: SCM, 1972), 42, although one wonders how many of von Rad’s readers have had ears to hear Rosenzweig’s subversive point.

15. Brevard S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), 129.

16. Dennis T. Olson, The Death of the Old and the Birth of the New: The Framework of the Book of Numbers and the Pentateuch, Brown Judaic St...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Frontmatter
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Authors
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: A Map of the Wilderness
• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Five
• Six
• Seven
• Eight
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Scriptural Passages
• General Index