Echoes of Exodus

Tracing a Biblical Motif

Bryan D. Estelle

• Verlag: IVP Academic
• Jahr: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780830882267
• Thema: Theology & Religion
• Thema: Biblical Studies

Israel's exodus from Egypt is the Bible's enduring emblem of deliverance. It is the archetypal anvil on which the scriptural language of deliverance is shaped. More than just an epic moment, the exodus shapes the telling of Israel's and the church's gospel. From the blasting furnace of Egypt, imagery pours forth. In the Song of Moses Yahweh overcomes the Egyptian army, sending them plummeting to the bottom of the sea. But the exodus motif continues as God leads Israel through the wilderness, marches to Sinai and on the Zion. It fires the psalmist's poetry and inspires Isaiah's second-exodus rhapsodies. As it pulses through the veins of the New Testament, the Gospel writers hear exodus resonances from Jesus' birth to the gates of Jerusalem. Paul casts Christ's deliverance in exodus imagery, and the Apocalypse reverberates with exodus themes. In Echoes of Exodus, Bryan Estelle traces the motif as it weaves through the canon of Scripture. Wedding literary readings with biblical-theological insights, he helps us weigh again what we know and recognize anew what we have not seen. More than that, he introduces us to the study of quotation, allusion, and echo, providing a firm theoretical basis for hermeneutical practice and understanding. Echoes of Exodus is a guide for students and biblical theologians, and a resource for preachers and teachers of the Word.

HERMENEUTICAL FOUNDATIONS

Mi amar le-mi u-matay (“who said unto whom and when”).1

CHANA KRONFELD

Theory was to be understood (by the Greeks) as
itself the highest realization of practice.

MARTIN HEIDEGGER

There is wide consensus among literary critics that Milton was a precursor to Wordsworth as Shakespeare was to Keats. These literary giants influenced subsequent poets.2 Can we observe the same kind of literary dynamic happening among biblical authors? For example, is Isaiah influenced by the creation account and the exodus motif when allusions are made in his writings? If so, how? Do the Gospel writers refer to the Prophets when they make allusions to the exodus? If so, how? More important, what does this tell us about how the Hebrew Bible is informing and influencing the narrative of Jesus as the agent of the new exodus? In the introduction we discussed motifs and their use in Scripture, highlighting their references to past events. In this chapter we will look at intertextuality, allusion, and typology.

Simply stated, intertextuality is the manner in which the various books of the Bible interact. In other words, authors in Scripture often allude to, cite, echo, comment on, and even at times “revise” or “accommodate” other scriptural texts.3 When studying a passage in the Bible that references another passage, we are given a window into an author’s understanding of the other scriptural texts, especially when metaphors are used. But the reader cannot be left out of the equation when it comes to understanding meaning, especially when it comes to identifying motifs and metaphors. Indeed, in the final analysis, “it is the reader who ‘completes’ the reading and engenders the metaphor’s tenor [i.e., meaning].”4 My primary goal in this chapter is to provide the reader with a brief introduction to intertextuality. A secondary goal is to look at the literary side of hermeneutics.

Hans-Georg Gadamer is well known in the field of philosophical hermeneutics. One chief concern of Gadamer’s was to develop what he called “effective history,” or Wirkungsgeschichte. This is essentially the historical continuum shared by an interpreter and the phenomena he or she studies, which is ultimately the basis of understanding.5 Enter the topics of allusion and typology.

Literary theorists suggest all kinds of reasons for the deliberate use of allusion. For example, Benjamin Sommer, an Isaiah scholar, introduces the notion of delight and pleasure.6 Playfulness may contribute to the use of allusion since we delight in alluding to other authors and we delight as human beings in recognizing allusions. The primary reason Scripture uses allusions, however, has to do with typology. “Allusions commonly merge with typology,” claims Bruce Waltke. He goes on to say, “The Old Testament is full of types of people and historical events, but none surpasses Moses and Israel’s exodus from Egypt.”7 Although typological interpretation has fallen on hard times in recent decades, it is a method of biblical interpretation with a time-honored pedigree in the church. The topic needs to be revisited in a serious manner, and the concept needs to be retrieved. In the discussion that follows, I will often use the terms figural reading and typology synonymously, although I realize that in much secondary literature distinctions are made between the two.

Finally, I will discuss the controversial concept of the rule of faith, or regula fidei. This hermeneutical principle was commonplace in the biblical interpretation of the early church. Recently, it has regained attention. The payoff is theological since, at its most basic level, the rule of faith is concerned to identify Christ with Yahweh as revealed in the Old Testament Scriptures.

A Brief History of Intertextuality

The term intertextuality was coined by the French literary theorist Julia Kristeva (b. 1941) in her 1969 book Σημειωτικη [Sēmeiōtikē]: Recherches pour une sémanalyse.8 Turbulent events in France in May 1968 provoked a crisis in literary criticism in order to attempt to transform society.9 Moved by what she perceived as a crisis in meaning within Western literature, Kristeva sought to mediate the ideas of Russian literary thinker Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) to the Western world.10 Bakhtin was one of the leading twentieth-century thinkers about the nature of literature and texts.11 He had analyzed Dostoyevsky’s novels and come to the conclusion that speaking merely of authorial intent in literature was shortsighted. Every character carries a voice that interacts with many other previous and contemporary voices inside and outside the text.

Consequently, to understand meaning in any given literary text, a reader needs to be aware of the myriad influences, cultural and intertextual, that are represented in the text. Kristeva’s methods were weighted more toward a synchronic than a diachronic approach. Looking at a topic synchronically means considering something across a slice of time, looking at language as a functional whole. In contrast, a diachronic approach is concerned with the text’s history, how it came into its present form through time. Here the aim is to give a historical evaluation of a topic through time. The synchronic approach is usually connected with reader-centered methods, whereas the diachronic approach is customarily joined to an author-centered methodology. This distinction is related to the thinking of the father of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). (The curious reader can learn more about him by turning to the appendix.)

Intertextuality and Biblical Studies

In biblical studies, the work of Michael Fishbane represents a seminal perspective on the field of intertextuality with his focus on the reuse of the Hebrew Bible within the Hebrew Bible itself.12 With methodological precision and clarity, Fishbane notes the many ways in which the scribes of the Hebrew Bible commentated on the received text (the traditum) by incorporating their own exegetical insights into a subsequent product (the traditio). He argues that at each stage of the development of the Hebrew Bible, the traditum was transformed, revised, and even reinterpreted for subsequent generations.

In New Testament studies, the work of Richard B. Hays on Paul has been groundbreaking with respect to intertextuality.13 This is especially the case with Hays’s use of metalepsis, or transumption, a poetic and rhetorical device in which a later author draws on older work in order to suggest a connection or interplay between the two texts.14 Specifically, metalepsis is the use of allusion that “evokes resonances of the earlier text beyond those explicitly cited. The result is that the interpretation of a metalepsis requires the reader to recover unstated or suppressed correspondences between two texts.”15 Following Fishbane and Hays, a deluge of papers, articles, and books on intertextuality have flooded the biblical studies guild.16 Some have suggested jettisoning the term intertextuality altogether because of the varied uses of the term. Rather, we must be more precise in our use of terms and concepts since failing to recognize intertextual links may result in a loss of meaning and falsely presuming intertextual links may result in a distortion of meaning.17

How are we to define intertextuality? A minimal definition is how “in one artistic text there coexist, more or less visibly, several other texts.”18 Applied to biblical studies, it is the recognition that “the interpretation of the Bible begins with the Bible itself.”19 Here Leland Ryken’s simple definition is helpful: intertextuality is “a situation in which the full meaning of a text depends on its interaction with another text.”20 Even at this point, one must recognize cultural influences on the Scriptures and the reader’s role as well. A definition commended by W. J. C. Weren is perhaps inclusive enough to capture all these factors, since by “intertextuality” he means “research into the relationships between texts and the functions of these relationships.”21 I appreciate the functional definition given by James H. Charlesworth also: “Intertextuality is the attempt to appreciate the meaning of a text by focusing on the text (or texts) within it; that is, quoted in it or echoed in it.”22 Such mental recognition by a reader often depends on what I am calling “allusion competence.”

A character portrayed in a novel may say to a jealous husband, “I will not have you misinterpret my handkerchief!”23 Readers may immediately recognize such an allusion if they are current on their Shakespeare. However, this requires some level of literary competence, which undergirds an allusion competence. The character could have said to her jealous husband, “I will not have you make me into a Desdemona,” or even more explicitly, “I will not have you make us into Desdemona and Othello from Shakespeare’s play Othello.”24 The latter examples are much more explicit. Even if readers don’t know the play, they can understand the allusion with a little bit of research.

In other words, in order for readers to recognize allusions, they must be aware of what is being referred to, which is an act of informed intelligence.25 In the interpretation of Scripture, the reader must keep in mind the human author as well as the divine author. The Old Testament can be used consciously by a New Testament writer, who can be...