Sapiential hermeneutics

Elisha's anger toward Jehoash seems unfair (2 Kings 13). He tells him to shoot arrows, and then pound them on the ground. How was Jehoash to know that pounding on the ground symbolized victory over Aram? Well, for one thing, Elisha told him that the arrow is the arrow of victory over Aram. And for another, Elisha expects the king to be able to unravel the sign that he gives him.

This incident reminds us of the anger of Jesus at His disciples and others when they failed to recognize the significance of what was happening around them. Jesus rebuked the two disciples on the road to Emmaeus as "foolish men and slow of heart to believe" what the Scriptures had taught. We read that and think Jesus was being unfair. How were they supposed to know? How could they have interpreted the Bible the way that Jesus says?

But Jesus expected them to know. He rebuked them for a hermeneutical failure, which he said was a result of folly and unbelief. Their hermeneutical failure was not an intellectual failure, but a failure of faith, a slowness of heart.

In both of these incidents, faithful and wise hermeneutics, believing and wise interpretation of God's words and God's signs, means being able to unravel and understand the knotty symbols that God gives us, being able to untie the riddling knots that we encounter in His word and in His world. This is what wisdom is all about, as Solomon tells us: "The proverbs of Solomon the son of David, king of Israel . . . to understand a proverb and a figure, the words of the wise and their riddles" (Proverbs 1:1, 6).

Many are simpletons in their reading of Scripture, and in their reading of the various signs that the Lord places in life. For Solomon, a simpleton is someone who fails to see the point of the signs, and interpreters who fail to see that the signs are signs are perhaps the most simple of all. Wise interpretation acknowledges the plain sense, but wise interpreters see that the plain sense is a riddle to be loosed.

To put it provocatively: Grammatical-historical exegesis is the exegesis of simpletons.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, February 26, 2006 at 08:48 AM

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