Understanding Midrash and the Bible better

Koot van Wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD)

Visiting Professor

Kyungpook National University

Sangju Campus

South Korea

Conjoint Lecturer of Avondale College

Australia

25 February 2011

Most scholars associate midrash with Judaism and that is not farfetched. What midrash is, books were written on. When the Word of God is taken, a pericope selected, pondered on, cut away and added to in order to express clearly what the one who is meditating on it concluded, then this explanation or description or transformation is called midrash. It can vary from a mild paraphrase to a serious reworking, almost a new creation. The purpose is, among else, to turn what it meant into what it means. René Bloch did a serious investigation on the interaction of midrash and scripture. He pointed out that there is a reuse of transmitted sacred texts with a religious reflection on their content, the past to which they witness, with the contemporization which relates them for a practical end (Bloch 40). What Bloch is doing, is to point out that all the books of the Old Testament did just this. And, looking at the books of the Old Testament, the authors definitely operated with this concept. Bloch says that the biblical sources of the Old Testament has furnished the prophet Ezechiel not only with his general doctrinal theme, but also with the details of his allegories (Bloch 39). For Adventists this is nothing new. They are familiar with the Old Testament use in the New Testament and especially the role of the Old Testament in the book of Revelation.

But at this point, Adventist scholars are careful. The prophet John in the book of Revelation is not stuck with a vacuum of ideas and then remember a theme or concept in Moses, or Ezechiel or Isaiah and plagiarize it to fit nicely into his own frame, and then present it to us as if an angel said it anew to him. No, says Adventists, the prophet is citing the tip of the iceberg in the Old Testament and assume that readers or listeners understand very well the rest of the iceberg spread out all over the Old Testament. And this is where systematic theology and theology of the Old Testament comes in. One is suppose to collect all the patches and pieces of the puzzle with the same colors and bring them together and fit them nicely and in a harmonizing way together to provide a picture, image, scenario, series of events, either in the past or present or future. Bloch is not interested in this nice picture. Neither in harmonizing. What Bloch wants to do is to say that the transposition of history with midrash as genre is the development of religious ideas and at the same time reveals, according to him, the immediate goal of the sacred later writer, which Bloch thinks was to legitimize the privilege of the Levites. He argues that the Chronicler of the books of Kings and Chronicles took the ancient materials and reworks them according to his theological conceptions and his own apologetic aims. Adventists will explain that the conceptions or data of events are well known to the later author, but instead of narcistically using the facts or events for selfish reasons that serves his own purpose, chop off and chuck away the rest as trash, in our view, the author is constantly trying to point out the God of history and the role of the character of God behind events.

In the Wisdom literature of Proverbs 1-9, Bloch thought that there is a transposition of Torah into Wisdom. He feels that the data of Deuteronomy, Jeremiah and Isaiah 40-60 was manipulated in the data of Proverbs 1-9 to such an extend that a new doctrine of wisdom originated: temple of Jerusalem now becomes the temple of wisdom (Bloch 41). Bloch is methodologically in hot water. Chronological markers in the texts are ignored as to the dating of the various books, for example Proverbs as after Jeremiah and Isaiah. Secondly, true wisdom existed since Moses in Deuteronomy equally as they existed in Proverbs. Solomon was wise by bringing together the wisdoms of the experience of his ancestors resulting from their relationship with God and this is a unique wisdom or Israelite wisdom. To keep the Torah was a wisdom since the beginning of the world.

When Bloch came to apocalyptics (Bloch 45), he felt that the restrained narratives of the Bible is amplified anew with many details by a later author in a midrashic way, and in places details are transposed to represent the later writer's current circumstances.

Adventists emphasize that one must be very careful in analysis. There are doublets in the Old Testament so that when one reads them, one may think that either different authors wrote them, or all used a similar source and made errors, but that is exactly what hermeneutics of suspicion is. Hermeneutics of affirmation works harmoniously, so that the same author may have repeated himself later from memory, and the historiographer of Israelite history, well aware of transpositions, cannot just edit the sources to harmonize absolutely. He has to honor the data and keep to the exactness of the form of the text. The same author may have faced two different kind of audiences, and thus some explanation was needed for some geographical detail that is not mentioned in an earlier version dictated directly to a scribe by the same author. Psalm 18 is such an example (A. Bentzen in Introduction to the Old Testament Vol. II 90ff. on Samuel and Kings is an example of seeing conflicts between Psalm 18 and 2Sam 21:15-22. He operates with a hermeneutics of suspicion and talks about "inconsistencies" and "telescoping of events into other reports"). There are many doublets and they are all collected by a Jewish scholar (Abba Bendavid) printed in Hebrew Parallels in the Bible and with red letters marking the differences between the doublets.

Bloch maintains that when one studies the versions or translations of the Hebrew text, then one can see that they are also privileged witnesses to the development of religious ideas and that they are equally important for a study of ancient Jewish exegesis. Again, there is an element of truth in what Bloch is saying, since there were similar trends in the exegesis or understanding of difficult words, concepts, etc. in the Targums and Ancient translations. Babylon is Rome etc. And that can be found in Jewish tradition as well as in the versions, like the Syriac version. What concerns us, is whether a particular idea is viable within the confines of the covers of the canon, and here is where Seventh-day Adventists will try to put on brakes. If the entertaining thought is not within the covers, and in fact, it may be against one or two verses within those covers, the thought will be rejected.

The difficulty with Bloch is how he would describe the living tradition of the scriptures that are constantly in progress, deepening, reflecting on itself and the revelation which it transmits (Bloch 49). How would he describe the fixation of the canon when it was completed in conjunction with Judaism that transforms that same fixity into something fluid to such an extent that the original fixed concepts of the biblical canon are only vaguely recognized in the Jewish tradition, whether commentary of Rashi, Redak, Kara, Ibn Ezra, Talmud, Mishna, Halacha or others like Targums. Many of the readers of the Jewish canon's minds are flying and the problem with them is, they ignore that there are rules and links that prevent the mind from taking off in eratic behavior. That been said, sometimes it was found that the minority Middle Age rabbi view, was actually the correct understanding of a pericope or verse, and although it seemed he was flying in the 9th century saying it, nevertheless advanced Seventh-day Adventist prophetic hermeneutics find itself more at home with that single rabbi than the majority vote of the rest of the rabbis.

One positive thing Bloch said, is that the Hebrew text remained the "norm or basic authority even for the Hellenistic Judaism" (Bloch 56). Despite deviations in the later translations (versions) of the Christian church with the Hebrew Masoretic text, Bloch is claiming that they purposed to follow this Hebrew text. One example that Bloch gives is in Exodus 1:22 where the LXX renders it different than the Masoretic Text and Bloch feels that it is the role of Midrash, Rabbinic literature and Palestinian tradition on the translators. He felt it was Alexandrian tradition that is rewriting Palestinian tradition, reformulating, adapting, but the core is still rabbinic traditional content. For the versions, Bloch is correct. As long as he stays away from this methodology for example for the biblical writers internally with each other.

The biblical author cannot think without his baggage of ancestor sources full of love for God and dealings of God with them in a love relationship, so that his description of his meeting with God, whether reflection, whether historiography, whether poem, whether event, whether revelation by vision or dream, cannot bypass that baggage on his back of his mind. Familiarity with the ancestor sources like Moses, David, Isaiah, Salomon, could lead them to cite selectively and wisely whenever necessary not for one moment intending to adapt or change Moses into a neo-Mosaic idea. Continuity was the key word in their writing. That continuity may seem to bring extra elements at a later stage but by closer inspection, those so-called extras can also be found either implicit in the text, or could have been known earlier so generally that inclusion at an earlier time was deemed necessary.

We conclude that not all midrash is biblical. Some later extra-biblical midrash is nothing but eisegesis with no biblical foundation. Midrash is sometimes operating in the Bible among authors, but in the good sense of the word, not intending to differ, change, confront, disagree, misrepresent the original intent or content of the message. The moment a scholar is trying to put one passage or verse of the Bible against another to elevate the difference, a yellow card can be issued and a red one will follow soon. That reader is not familiar with the biblical text and did not take the hours meditation requires in order to see the answer to the assumed but non-existent paradox. One can see paradoxes in a totality but in fragmented, excerpted pieces from reality of the past, it is not possible to claim inconsistencies, paradoxes or errors. Gaps of no data, leaves the criticism hanging in the air together with the absence of data, for the possibility of the alternative to have existed but intentionally omitted, would cancel the criticism of the critical operating with a hermeneutics of suspicion.

Bad midrash change the Bible but good midrash brings out explicitly what is implicitly there in the canon, the Protestant canon, not the Catholic canon, since that includes only the consonantal text of the Masoretic tradition, nothing more, nothing less plus the New Testament, not in the versions but in the Greek form only.

One more point is necessary to be mentioned: Ferdinand Deist thought that one should not try to link early concepts of canon with early concepts of textual criticism, but in our understanding, textual analysis is a better word since they had a normative authoritative approach to the text, even in translations. When they ended up with degenerative texts, it was due to circumstances beyond their control, persecutions, book burning, forbidden literature (vaticinia ex eventu books) etc. Deist main point is that the people who canonized books did so due to doctrinal reasons and not due to textcritical reasons (F. Deist, Towards the Text of the Old Testament, 257 footnote 12 at 4). It is true but also not. Textual analysis made them cling to one text only as the authoritative representative text that should be canonized and considered to be the original in exactness. The textual condition of the form did matter. One must remember that Deist in the late seventies belonged to a group of thinkers that became later the conventional thinking that the textual condition of the Second Temple period was fluid and that there was no authoritative text, a fact that is contradicted at Qumran, but which they refuse to pay attention to, for example 4QDana. Only after the 3rd century CE, Deist thinks, did Hebrew reworkings took place, but even this is not correct. The truth is that defective reworkings took place at Alexandria in the library, after Antiochus Epiphanes so that two sets of LXX's were available, the current survived "corrupt text" and the strict literal translation of the consonantal text of the Masoretic tradition, like evidence at Qumran indicate: 4QLXXNum and 4QLXXLev. That is why Bloch is in a way correct, that the study of versions can give as evidence of midrash of a wrong kind in the third century CE but they are not helpful in establishing the original Word of God.