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From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John
Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture
1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary
The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter
A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons
Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature
Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen
The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism
A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel
From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution
Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy
Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper
A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament
Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature
Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays
Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life
The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church
The Targum on the Song of Songs, deftly translated and annotated by Philip Alexander (The Targum of Canticles: Translated, With a Critical Introduction, Apparatus, and Notes (Aramaic Bible)
Augustine would have approved the gloss on the white teeth of the bride, which are “the Priests and Levites who offer up your offerings, and eat holy flesh, tithe and heave-offering, which are pure from any violence or robbery.” The temples like pomegranates are like the “King, who was their head” and “as full of precepts as a pomegranate” – understood, I expect, to mean “as a pomegranate is full of seeds.” The eighty wives and sixty concubines inspire an allegory of a Greek invasion and siege of Jerusalem: “the Greeks arose and gathered together sixty kings from the sons of Esau, clad in chain-mail and mounted on horses, and cavalry, and eighty commanders from the sons of Ishmael, riding on elephants, not to mention the rest of the nations, peoples and tongues that were without number, and they appointed the wicked Alexander as head over them, and they came to wage war against Jerusalem.”
A number of the basic moves in the Targum, though, are defensible and illuminating. For instance:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 6:56 am
In an 1837 exchange on the interpretation of the Song of Songs in The Congregational Magazine, one James Bennett argued that the Song had to be interpreted allegorically because a literal interpretation made the woman sound immodest: “What writer, with the feelings, or the reason, of a man, would begin a poem on his fair one by describing her as courting him?” This is not a cultural bias, he insisted: “It would be more abhorrent from the secluded, submissive character of Eastern brides to ask a gentlemen to come and kiss them, than it would be from the dignified confidence of British women.”
This is not cultural but natural: “Though men like to court, they do not like to be courted; and while they think it cruel to be rejected when they could, they without mercy reject her who courts them. . . . No man, therefore, in his senses, would think to compliment his fair one by writing of her, to her, as if she had lost her retiring modest, her female dignity, and degraded herself by doing that for which every man would despise her . . . . Till fishes mount to sing with larks on the shady boughs, and nightingales dive to the ocean’s depths to court the whales, no man, of any age, of any clime, of any rank, can be supposed to write ordinary love-songs in such a style.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, March 16, 2010 at 8:06 am
Stephen D. Moore (in an essay on “The Song of Songs in the History of Sexuality”) notes that the shift from allegorical to literal/sexual interpretations of the Song is connected to shifts in understanding of male love. Patristic and medieval commentators on the Song easily took the feminine voice of the Song as the voice of their own usually male souls, with results that often leave modern reader queasy. Moore puts it in a typically provocative form, but the point stands: The allegorical interpretation thrusts into plain view a relationship ordinarily closeted. It ‘outs’ the male believer.”
Nineteenth and twentieth-century commentators, working from the sharply defined sexual roles of the Victorian era, recoil against the confusions of the allegorical method, and turn the Song into a celebration of heterosexual love. Moore nicely shows, however, that this quickly turns into a new allegorism of its own, as each metaphor is unpacked as a euphemism: “these ‘new’ allegorists give a sexual reading even to details that are ostensibly nonsexual.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, March 16, 2010 at 7:55 am
Levin again: “Since, for Descartes, the senses are nothing but a source of deception and the body is nothing but perishable matter – that is to say, they are challenges, in both cases, to the power of the ego cogitans, the ego must ‘abandon’ them; the Cartesian ego is a cogito which has dissociated, split off, from its embodiment and taken itself as the object of its ‘love.’ In order to possess absolute certainty and security, Descartes undergoes a process of separation and withdrawal, methodically abandoning all the ‘objects’ of the body’s desires and taking himself, as purely thinking substance, for ‘object.’ This is the narcissistic process, homologous to the process clinically recognized as the defensive comportment of severe depression. In the isolation of human beings from each other and the separation of human beings from Being, there is indeed cause for deep depression. Without astonishing prescience, Nietzsche could already see the depression and interpret it as a signifier or nihilism.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, March 15, 2010 at 2:19 pm
Levin interestingly explores the question of whether human beings are completely determined by history by emphasizing human embodiment. He plays off of Heidegger, who abandoned the “analytic of Dasein” in his later work because he had come to see it as a continuation of the metaphysical tradition he was trying to escape. What Heidegger missed was the notion that “the human body [could be] an organ of Being” or the ”primal medium into which this pre-understanding of Being is always first inscribed.”
“By grace of the ‘flesh,’” he argues, Being is always sensed prior to any clear theoretical ontological understanding. A “felt sense” provides “our pre-ontological attunement.” As a result, “we are never completely ‘in the dark’” as regards Being. This sense is not complete: It “calls for a deep commitment to questioning and exploring its implicit potential: it needs to be recognized, made explicit, conceptually articulate, and clear.” But our embodiment means that we always already have a sense of Being and of transcendent being, and therefore “our pre-ontological understanding . . . is not totally reducible to the understandings imposed by our historical life.” Heidegger could have seen this had he not overlooked “the natural body, the wild body of metaphorical existence.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, March 15, 2010 at 12:58 pm
Merleau-Ponty asks, in Humanism and Terror, “What if it were the very essence of history to impute to us responsibilities which are never entirely ours?”
A very Augustinian, covenantal question.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, March 15, 2010 at 12:34 pm
False subjectivity has led to nihilism. To combat the nihilism of modernity, Levin says that we need to challenge the “timeless” Cartesian self by affirming a “self open to changes in itself; a self which changes in response to changes in the world; a self capable of changing the conditions of its world according to need.” In short, “I am not what I am and I am what I am not.”
That last sentence seems to me a fine way of stating the Protestant doctrine of justification. And I cannot see how Levin’s is/is not self can be anything but another, more intense form of nihilism, unless it is an eschatologically shaped doctrine of justification. That is: I am declared to be, and therefore I am, what I’m not yet.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, March 15, 2010 at 11:52 am
In his The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation
Essentially, subjectivity inverted into objectivity, and objectivity meant the destruction of subjectivity:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, March 15, 2010 at 11:25 am
1 Chronicles 12 is a little book of numbers, listing leaders of each tribes and the numbers of “mighty men of valor” that accompany them. They assemble with their “weapons” (vessels) to make David King (v. 22). It is reminiscent not only of the census of Numbers 1-2, but of the enumeration of offerings in Numbers 7, where leaders of each tribe bring tribute to Yahweh, vessels for the service of the tabernacle.
The big difference between the passages has to do with the king whose kingship is being acknowledged. Numbers 1-2, 7 are part of the ritual of Yahweh’s coronation; 1 Chronicles 12 is about David’s coronation. Since David is Yahweh’s prince, His son, the ceremonies are naturally similar. The tribes offer Yahweh vessels for the service of His house; the tribes offer David weapons and men of war for the service of his house and the land.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, March 15, 2010 at 6:08 am
The last sections of Matthew 27 link up with Matthew 28 to form a chiastic closure to the gospel:
A. Jesus’ burial, 27:55-61 (itself a chiasm, as I showed in a post last week)
B. Jews request a guard on the tomb to avoid deception, 27:62-66
C. Jesus rises from the dead, 28:1-10
B’. Jews perpetuate a deception about the resurrection, 28:11-15
A’. Jesus meets with His disciples in Galilee and commissions them, 28:16-20
Several notes on the structure:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, March 15, 2010 at 5:30 am
INTRODUCTION
Along with Paul (1 Corinthians 15:4), we confess Jesus’ burial as an essential part of the gospel. What does the burial of Jesus add to His death and resurrection?
THE TEXT
“And many women who followed Jesus from Galilee, ministering to Him, were there looking on from afar, among whom were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joses, and the mother of Zebedee’s sons. . . .” (Matthew 27:55-66).
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, March 15, 2010 at 5:16 am
In a stimulating but flawed 2008 article in the CBQ, Gerald Janzen recognizes that “under the sun” in Ecclesiastes draws on Genesis 1 to describe “the sun’s delegated rule over time.” He examines Isaiah 60 from this perspective, suggesting that the passage gives Israel hope that the Lord will one day replace the delegated rule of the sun with the light of His own presence:
“It is as though God has revoked the rule over time that in Genesis 1 was delegated to the sun and the moon. While ‘darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples’ (v. 2), Israel is to dwell in the “everlasting light” of God’s direct rule over Israel’s times. One is reminded again of how, in Deut 32:8-9, God had delegated rule over the other nations to the gods whom those nations worshiped; how, in Psalm 82, that delegated rule is revoked as God assumes direct rule over the whole world; and then again, how the geopolitical arrangements in place for so long in the ancient Near East are brought to judgment in the cosmic trial scenes in Second Isaiah. That the image in Isa 60:19-20, in which God replaces the sun as Israel’s light, remains alive as an eschatological trope is evident from its reappearance in Rev 22:5, which says, ‘Night shall be no more; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they shall reign for ever and ever.’”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, March 12, 2010 at 12:41 pm
Ezekiel stands in a valley of bones and prophesies. There’s a great noise, and a rattling of bones (called a seismos by the LXX, an “earthquake”). Soon an army is before him, but without breath (pneuma). So Ezekiel prophesies again and the wind (pneuma) stirs up until they come to life and have breath in them (37:8-10). So, Yahweh says, He will “open your graves” (anoigo humon ta mnemata) and cause Israel and Judah to emerge from exile (37:12).
Jesus is on the cross, on a mountain that is a “place of the skull.” He cries out in a loud voice, and gives up His Spirit (pneuma). There is an earthquake (he ge eseisthe) and graves open (ta mnemeia aneoxthesan) so that the dead can climb out and visit the holy city. Thus are Israel and Judah again called from exile.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 2:41 pm
In a 1985 article in Theology Today, James L. Mays notes how in Psalm 22 David is first surrounded by a demonic, bestial community to a community of friends, God-fearers, afflicted, and lowly, a group that is qualified as the “seed of Jacob”:
“the group who celebrate his deliverance with him have a theological spiritual identity. They are not simply family, friends, and neighbors, a company constituted by natural and accidental relations. They are brothers (v. 22) in a religious sense. All the different designations refer to this fraternal company: ‘fearers of the Lord’ (w. 23, 25), ’seekers of the Lord’ (v. 26), ‘the lowly’ (Hebrew ‘ânâwîm, RSV ‘afflicted’ or ‘poor,’ v. 26), ‘descendents of Jacob/Israel’ (v. 24). This last designation does not mean that Israel as a nation is the lowly, but rather that the lowly, seekers, fearers are the true Israel, the real congregation who live by the praise of the Lord.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 2:24 pm
The Jews mock Jesus for saying that He could destroy the temple in three days.
In fact, it hardly takes Him that long. Three hours is enough. Darkness falls, and three hours later Jesus speaks twice in a thunderous voice, and the veil of the temple tears. That’s the end of the temple, since there’s no use for temples without doors and boundaries to keep people out.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 11:56 am
It’s a stretch, but: Matthew uses the word pneuma 19 times, and uses the word with reference to the Holy Spirit 12 times (1:18, 20; 3:11, 16; 4:1; 10:20; 12:18, 28, 31, 32; 22:43; 28:19). That’s neat: A twelvefold Spirit for the twelve tribes of Israel.
But then there’s the ambiguous 27:50. When Jesus dies, He lets go of, sends out His pneuma. This could simply be a way of describing death, but in the presence of references to Elijah it seems plausible that Matthew intends more. The verb (aphiemi) might also suggest something more deliberate.
If so, then we’ve got 13 references to the Spirit, rather than 12. Number 12 is at 27:50, when Jesus dies as King of the Jews and releases His Spirit. Use number 13, which breaks out of the twelve tribes, is in the great commission, the command to disciple all the ethnoi in the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit, with the assurance that Jesus, who yielded His Spirit, is with them to the end of the age.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 11:48 am
Jesus cries out with a loud voice, and some say He calls for Elijah.
He cries out again with a loud voice (Matthew 27:50, and then Jesus gives up, or sends away, His spirit (Greek apheken to pneuma).
So too Elijah: At his sacrificial ascent in fire, he gives up his spirit to Elisha, as the Spirit of Jesus will clothe the disciples not many days after.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 11:24 am
Jesus cries out using the words of Psalm 22, and the people standing at the foot of the cross say He’s calling for Elijah. Why? They must be Jews, since they immediately associate “Eli” with “Elijah.” But if they are Jews, why don’t they recognize a quotation from one of the Psalms? Have they become so dull of hearing? Perhaps that’s Matthew’s point, since the Jews have clearly been incapable of noticing the fulfillments of Scripture that strew the ground all around Jesus’ cross – the very wording of the mockery, gambling for clothes, vinegar to drink, all of it is derived from the Scriptures but the Jews don’t recognize it.
Maybe. It’s a bit easier, though not easy, to determine why Matthew would have included the speculation concerning Elijah.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 11:17 am
“Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani,” Jesus cries on the cross. He’s crying out for Elijah, someone says.
But the Greek eli is exactly the name of another Old Testament figure, the High Priest Eli, priest during the childhood of Samuel (1 Samuel 1-4). That allusion works: Eli was a weak priest during a time of apostasy, when his sons were committed abominations in the house of Yahweh, abominations that would bring desolation. That is the first-century setting as well, as Jesus has told us in Matthew 24.
More immediately to the context, Jesus goes to the cross as the living temple of God, to be torn down. That is precisely the story of 1 Samuel 1-4 – the dismantling of the tabernacle. The banner over Eli’s term as high priest carried the message “Ichabod,” the glory has departed, and on the cross God forsakes His living tent, though He returns when He raises up this tent as a glorious temple (cf. 2 Corinthians 5).
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 8:24 am
Exum notes that for the lovers of the Song “nature in all its glory reflects and participates in their mutual delight. And everything is experienced more intensely, from the thrill of watching a lavishly outfitted palanquin approach from a distance . . . to the pleasure derived from the intimate contemplation of the beloved’s attributes . . . , from the anguish caused by the beloved’s absence, to the joys found in an exotic pleasure garden fit for a king.”
Not just for the lovers of the Song, of course. For those who are in love, everything is tinted by that love. If it doesn’t arouse anticipation at the lover’s presence or melancholy at his or her absence, it still is something to share, its pleasure doubled.
That must be a figure of what it’s like to love Yahweh your God with your whole heart.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, March 10, 2010 at 3:16 pm
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