Torah Old and New: Exegesis, Intertextuality, and Hermeneutics

Preface: Laying Down the Law

An Egyptian priest named Moses, who possessed a portion of the country called the Lower Egypt, being dissatisfied with the established institutions there, left it and came to Judaea with a large body of people who worshiped the Divinity. He declared and taught that the Egyptians and Africans entertained erroneous sentiments, in representing the Divinity under the likeness of wild beasts and cattle of the field; that the Greeks also were in error in making images of their gods after the human form. For God [said he] may be this one thing which encompasses us all, land and sea, which we call heaven, or the universe, or the nature of things. ..... By such doctrine, Moses persuaded a large body of right-minded persons to accompany him to the place where Jerusalem now stands.

—Strabo, The Geography, 16.35, 36

I am firmly convinced that the passionate will for justice and truth has done more to improve man’s condition than calculating political shrewdness which in the long run only breeds general distrust. Who can doubt that Moses was a better leader of humanity than Machiavelli?

—Albert Einstein[1]

The trouble begins with the word itself. Torah in its broadest sense means instruction, which of course includes law, commandments, imperatives, and statutes. The author of Psalm 119 has a seemingly endless supply of equivalent terms to talk about laws. But that Psalm, like the Mosaic tale of the Ten Commandments, calls law the Word of God. Indeed, the Ten Commandments themselves are originally just called the ten words (of God).

The trouble gets worse when we get to the LXX translation of the term torah, in that it is rendered nomos, which has a narrower spectrum of meaning and is rightly translated most of the time as law. Were that not enough, by the time we get to the New Testament (NT) era, the Law is a cipher for the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, which, not incidentally, are not primarily a collection of laws. In fact, the majority of the Pentateuch is narrative of one sort or another, except in the case of Leviticus.[2] But of course, Pentateuchal narrative also can be and is a form of instruction, though of a more complex sort than law. With narrative, one has to ask ethical questions like, is the reader to take this story as implying go and do likewise, or on the contrary, as implying go and do otherwise, or sometimes a bit of both? Or is this merely intended as commentary meant to prompt theological reflection on the ways of the God of the Bible with human beings? Or should we only think we are getting clear guidance when the voice of God speaks in such narratives? Narratives are not oracles, though they may contain them, any more than songs or psalms are oracles or late words from God, though they, too, may contain them.[3]

If we are going to explore Torah Old and New and by that mean the material we find in the Pentateuch, then we will necessarily be dealing primarily with two types of literature: narrative and commandments of various sorts. Yes, there is the occasional poetic piece or song to be found in the Pentateuch, for instance in the poetic prose of Genesis 1 or the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32, but for the most part we are dealing with prose in various forms. And while narrative has context, it doesn’t come with a guidebook as to how this or that episode ought to be read. The problem with commandments, on the other hand, is often they are contextless, or almost so, and thus often we don’t have clues from the context as to the meaning of the words being examined. This becomes especially an issue with lists of various commandments, such as the Ten Commandments. No wonder there has been such debate about the dictum no killing (Exod 20:13), which offers no context to help us understand its relationship to the killing that happens elsewhere even in the books of Torah.

This subject matter largely distinguishes this particular volume from our previous two volumes in this series, Isaiah Old and New and Psalms Old and New, the former of which presented us with prophetic poetry by and large, and the latter of which provided us with liturgical poetry used as lyrics to songs sung in the temple and elsewhere. Like the Psalms, we are not dealing with prophecy for the most part in the Pentateuch (there are exceptions), and importantly, the use of the law in the NT does not focus on those exceptional parts of the first division of Tanak.[4] It is the commandments of the books of Moses, and also some narratives from those books, that come in for heavy use in the NT, as we shall see.

At this juncture, a few more preliminary remarks are in order. All of the Pentateuch was viewed as Scripture, or God’s word, by the writers of the NT and by Jesus himself. There is no need to debate this point. But a distinction has to be made between how Jesus and his followers used the Pentateuch as Scripture, and how, or to what extent, they considered it binding law. The key here has to do with the whole notion of covenant. For various writers of the NT, perhaps particularly Paul, the author of Hebrews, and Luke, the followers of Jesus were not under the Mosaic covenant and therefore not bound to keep the Mosaic law, except where some part of it had been reiterated by Jesus, or Paul, or other leaders as part of the new covenant. And clearly, only a minority of the Mosaic law is reaffirmed in the NT as binding on Christians. Instead of the covenant sign circumcision, they were commanded to practice baptism (Matthew 28) as the entrance ritual into the new covenant, along with other commandments, some of which were old and some of which were new.[5]

Yes, there is law in the new covenant as there was in the old one, and it has long since been the case that we should recognize that a strong contrast between law and grace does no justice to either the OT or the NT, not even to the teachings of Paul. Law, or instruction, in either testament is teaching for devotees of God who have already been called, chosen, saved (choose what terminology you like) by a gracious and merciful God who nonetheless requires justice and righteousness of his people, as a reflection of his own character. Law in neither testament is about getting in, but it has something to do with  staying  in.  The  rub  comes  when  one  debates  the  various views of ongoing salvation and its relationship to obedience to commandments.

However, and it is a big however, none of these sorts of discussions meant that even the nonreaffirmed portions of the law, those portions seen as no longer obligations for followers of Jesus, ceased to be Scripture for Christians. Clearly, this was not true, as we shall see. What happens is that such materials are used christologically, or by way of typology or analogy, or homiletically, when it is applied to this or that Christian group by Paul or others. It was still the living word of God, but the primary use of the material would be theological rather than legal. We will have much more to say about all this as we go along, but here it is sufficient to say with Saint Paul that the law is holy, just, and good (Rom 7:12). It is God’s word. The question is: How does it function in the new covenant, and what does it mean in that different setting?

One more thing of importance needs to be reiterated, especially in light of Reformation history and its continuing influence. The setting up of a paradigm of law vs. grace, or of works of the law vs. salvation by grace, has in some important ways skewed the conversation about the law and its possible roles not only in the life of the church but earlier in the life of Israel and early Judaism. A concern for, and honoring and keeping of, the law is by no means the same thing as legalism, or as works religion for that matter. As E. P. Sanders showed some time ago, covenantal nomism is a good description of OT religion, which involves responding to the initial and initiating grace of God by keeping the covenant with God, including obeying its laws. There is plenty of grace in the OT, and there is also law in the NT, not least in the teachings of both Jesus and Paul. While the Mosaic law is not simply the same thing as the law of Christ (though there is overlap), nevertheless, both the Mosaic and the new covenants indicate that the proper response to God’s grace is not merely gratitude but obedience. Of course, it is true that in the case of some practitioners of Judaism and Christianity, the law came to be used in legalistic and even casuistic ways that violated the spirit, the  character,  and  the  emphasis  of  both  OT  and  NT  teaching on obedience.

It is also true that from a Christian theological point of view, a distinction has to be made between the intent of the Mosaic law and its effect on fallen human beings, perhaps especially on those seeking to reestablish a relationship with God. While the good and holy Mosaic law could inform a person of what they ought to do, it could not enable them to do it. That required the grace or Spirit of God. Furthermore, law functions differently when one believes the Savior has already come and provided salvation and righteousness apart from the keeping of the Mosaic law.[6] We will need to discuss these matters in some detail as we work through the torah Old and New, but for now it is sufficient to say these things require wisdom, and hopefully, some of that will be on display in the chapters that follow. Before we get down to brass tacks, however, it is important to say a few preliminary things about evaluating narrative.

I was enjoying the 2006 World Series opening broadcast when the anonymous voice playing on top of images of previous Series games said, tell me a fact and I will know, tell me the truth and I will believe, tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.[7] But what is the story, or are the stories, that the Law/Pentateuch is telling us? It clearly is not telling us the story of everyone and everything. It does not provide a historical account of all of humanity. Instead, the Bible is primarily interested in telling the story of God’s chosen people, from creation to sin (or fall), to various acts of redemption, and on finally to a new creation. Other peoples, such as the wives of Cain and Abel, or the Assyrians, Hittites, Philistines, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, and others come into the story only insofar as they interact with God’s people. And God’s people are the Hebrews or Israelites, or as they would later be known, the Jews.

The Bible is written by this particular people (with perhaps the exception of one or two NT books such as 2 Peter) and about this particular people, even when the story takes an unexpected turn in Acts, the letters of Paul, and other later NT documents and involves an inordinate amount of gentiles in addition to the Jewish leaders of the Jesus movement. That later surprising development is at most barely foreshadowed in the Pentateuch in an idea such as Abraham’s descendants being a light to the nations.

When it comes to just the first five books of the Bible, the authors are telling us the story of the origins of creation and, most importantly, of God’s people all the way back to Adam and Eve, followed by tales of their descendants Noah, Abraham, and so on. The Pentateuch does not get us beyond the point in the narrative where God’s people are about to enter the promised land, Canaan. That means we are at a juncture where the liberation of God’s people through the exodus and Sinai events has happened, and they are just barely beyond the wilderness wandering period.[8]

It has become commonplace in narratological studies of literature, including the Bible, to say that human beings tend to make sense of their world through the vehicle of story. Whether that broad generalization can be applied to all peoples in all ages, it is certainly true that it applies to the persons who wrote the Pentateuch, Moses and his successors and editors. But the Pentateuch was clearly felt to be, and seen to be, a story badly in need of a sequel, hence the book of Joshua and subsequent historical stories labeled Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles.

To judge from the Pentateuch alone, Hebrews made sense of their world in terms of both narrative and more didactic instruction in the form of laws, commandments, and precepts, not least because one of their most foundational stories has to do with God giving Moses commandments. It is this interweaving of law and narrative that characterizes the first five books of the Bible; and the proof that these stories, even the earliest sagas about Adam and Eve, are meant to be seen as historical stories is the use of genealogies, again and again, to link various parts of the story. The Hebrews, as we shall see, while they borrowed ideas from other ancient Near Eastern (ANE) cultures at times, were not a myth-making people, by and large; indeed, they deconstructed ANE myths, like the combat myth about creation, in order to speak about their God, whom they saw as the creator of all things, a God who was constantly involved in the history of his people.

Bearing these things in mind, we can now turn to our exploration of the stories and laws in the Pentateuch and how they are used in the NT.[9] For those wanting to see how the narrative material in Genesis still affects Christian thinking about evolution and whether there was a historical Adam and Eve or not, Appendix 2 provides an extended discussion of a recent important book entitled Adam and the Genome.[10] The final appendix, Appendix 3, deals in some depth with the complex issues of intertextuality raised by one of the most difficult passages in the NT in 1 Peter 3, the story of the spirits in prison, which owes something not merely to Genesis 6:1–4 but to its ongoing history of interpretation in Judaism, including in 1 Enoch.

Albert Einstein, Moral Decay, in Out of My Later Years (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950). ↵

John Van Seters, The Pentateuch: A Social-Science Commentary (London: T&T Clark, 2015), 16 Furthermore, the Hebrew term Torah, ‘Law,’ is a little misleading as a description of the content of the Pentateuch, since it consists of about one half law and the other half narrative. ↵

See the second volume in this series, Psalms Old and New: Exegesis, Intertextuality, and Hermeneutics (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017) for the discussion of the nature and character of the Psalms. ↵

TANAK is a conventional abbreviation for the Hebrew Torah, Neviʾim (Prophets), and Kethuvim (Writings), the three components of the Hebrew Bible. ↵

This, of course, is a controverted issue and one which I have dealt with in considerable depth especially in my commentaries on Paul’s letters, especially Ben Witherington III, Grace in Galatia: A Commentary on St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998) and Witherington and Darlene Hyatt, Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), and also in my volume New Testament History: A Narrative Account (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003). In my view, there were a spectrum of views about the Mosaic law among the followers of Jesus, and they did not fall neatly along Jewish and gentile lines, by which I mean some of the Jewish followers, like Paul and the author of Hebrews, seem to have taken more radical views than some of the gentile followers as well as various Jerusalem followers of Jesus. ↵

E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977); cf. D. A. Carson, Peter Thomas O'Brien, and Mark A Seifrid, eds., Justification and Variegated Nomism, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001–2004). ↵

See the details in my citation in Ben Witherington III, New Testament Theology and Ethics Volume One (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2016), ii. ↵

See the discussion about narrative and how it functions in Ben Witherington III, Reading and Understanding the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). ↵

I have pointed out at length the danger of taking a history-of-ideas approach to the material in the Bible in order to abstract some sort of theology or ethics from it. To put the matter bluntly, even in the case of someone like Saint Paul, he is theologizing and ethicizing out of his storied world and into particular situations he is addressing involving his converts. The narrative thought-world of most of the biblical writers, including the constructors of the Pentateuch, is the matrix out of which theological and ethical ideas come to light, not in the abstract. So, when Paul thinks about sin, he thinks of the story of Adam; when he thinks about law; he thinks of Moses; when he thinks about faith, he thinks of the story of Abraham; and so on. The ideas arise in and out of the stories, and if you strip the ideas of their narrative contexts you are bound to distort and misunderstand them. This is just as true of the Pentateuch as it is of Paul. Law has to be evaluated in the context of the ongoing story. See the discussion in Ben Witherington III, Paul’s Narrative Thought World: The Tapestry of Tragedy and Triumph (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994). ↵

Dennis R. Venema and Scot McKnight, Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2017). ↵

1

The Law by the Numbers and Its Influence in Early Judaism

Love of God, he said slowly, searching for words, is not always the same as love of good, I wish it were that simple. We know what is good, it is written in the Commandments. But God is not contained only in the Commandments, you know; they are only an infinitesimal part of Him. A man may abide by the Commandments and be far from God.

—Herman Hesse[1]

I have wondered at times what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the U.S. Congress.

—Ronald Reagan

According  to  my  count,  using  the  twenty-eighth  edition  of  the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graecae (NA²⁸) as a basis for comparison (see Appendix 1), there are some 236 quotations, allusions, or echoes of Genesis in the NT (with Acts being by far the largest user of the material); 239 quotations, allusions, or echoes of Exodus; 87 quotes, allusions, or echoes of Leviticus; 89 quotations, allusions, or echoes of Numbers; and 205 quotations, allusions, or echoes of Deuteronomy, making Deuteronomy the most directly and frequently quoted of the Pentateuchal books, not counting allusions or echoes. Not one of these books individually comes up for as much use as Isaiah or the Psalms.[2] The grand total, then, is 856 uses of the Pentateuch in the NT. Compare this to the over 600 uses of Isaiah alone in the NT, or the 300 or so uses of just the Psalms. Clearly, Genesis, Exodus, and Deuteronomy were especially important to the NT writers, but some of the most directly and frequently cited verses come from elsewhere in the Pentateuch (e.g., the love commandment in Lev 19:18). This raises the question about the use of the Pentateuch in early Judaism, the matrix out of which both Jesus and his movement came. It will be profitable to examine that subject first before we turn to the forward and backward reading of the Pentateuch in the OT and NT that is the main focus of our study.

The Explosion of Literature on Genesis

From the second century BCE through the first century CE, there was nothing short of an explosion of commentary on and discussion of the book of Genesis in early Judaism. Unlike later rabbinic commentary on particular discrete books of the OT, this literature mostly dwelt on important figures in Genesis, as can be seen just from the titles of some of these works—The Life of Adam and Eve, the Testament of Adam, the Apocalypse of Adam, 1 and 2 Enoch, The Testament of Abraham, The Apocalypse of Abraham, The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, The Prayer of Jacob, Joseph and Aseneth, The History of Joseph. There are, furthermore, two other fascinating works of note from the second century BCE: the Genesis Apocryphon and the book of Jubilees, which reflects a dependence on the narratives from Genesis 1 through Exodus 19. Then, too, one can mention the Pseudo-Philo work Liber antiquitatum biblicarum, which relies on Genesis through 1 Samuel.

In the NT era itself, we can point to the first book of the Sibylline Oracles (part of which may be older), which deals with the Genesis story about paradise (as does 2 Enoch and the Life of Adam and Eve), and the considerable interest in Genesis 6:1–4 (on which see the following chapter); and, of course, there are the various allegorical commentaries of Philo (ca. 20 BCE–50 CE) on the Pentateuch, focusing mainly on Genesis and to a lesser degree on Exodus. Flavius Josephus, in the latter part of the first century CE, was to make extensive use of Genesis in his account of Jewish Antiquities, his largest and most masterful work. To say that Genesis was the subject of much discussion in early Judaism, especially in its more literate circles, would be to put things too conservatively. But what prompted all this going back ad fontes? Why especially this focus on narrative and major characters in the Genesis narrative, a focus we also find to some degree in the teaching of Jesus (e.g., the first couple, Noah, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah) and even more in the letters of Paul (Adam, Abraham) and in Hebrews (Abraham, Melchizedek, Jacob, Joseph)? My suggestion would be that the answer has to do with the considerable turmoil of the period.

Jews had briefly gained their independence from Hellenistic rulers during the Maccabean period, and then promptly lost it again to the Herods (who at best were only partially Jewish, being of Idumean descent as well) and then to Rome, first in Judaea, and then by the time of Josephus’s written works, throughout Israel. In order to understand the meaning of their current situation, they turned back to the stories of the origins of their people. They looked back to hoary antiquity for clues to their present and future. In essence, they relied on a salvation historical review, especially in its very earliest stages.

It is interesting, then, that when we find such reviews in the NT, for example in Acts 7 or in 1 Corinthians 10, the focus is not primarily on Genesis but rather on Exodus, on the wilderness wandering generation that set up the pattern of grumbling, of unfaithfulness, of being, as Stephen later calls it, a stiff-necked people about whom the prophets were later to complain, again and again. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. It will be well here to have some discussion of works of early Judaism that involved Genesis rebooted, rewritten, and rethought, for example, Jubilees and the Genesis Apocryphon.[3]

Jubilees is surely the older of these two documents, perhaps predating the Qumran community. The book is ostensibly presented as a revelation to Moses through an angelic mediator while he was on Mt. Sinai (see, e.g., Gal 3:19; Acts 7:38). The vast majority of this book is a rewriting of the primeval history (Jubilees 2–10) and the history of the patriarchs (Jubilees 11–45), delivered after the setting of the book has been introduced in the first chapter, namely, that Moses received all this while he was up on Mt. Sinai. But Jubilees is hardly just a rehashing of Genesis and a part of Exodus. It has value added, probably chiefly from the Enoch traditions (see Jubilees 4:15–26; 5:1–12; 7:20–39; 10:1–17).[4] It is possible that 4Q Visions of Amram (4Q543–4Q549) is also drawn on in Jubilees 46 as van Ruiten suggests.[5] The NT work that is most like this sort of combination approach to Genesis and Exodus read through later Jewish literature is Jude, and interestingly, the editor of 2 Peter who draws on Jude in 2 Peter 2 is apparently not happy about the use of later Jewish materials, as he eliminates the material from Enoch and the Apocalypse of Moses that is alluded to in Jude.