Bible: Interpretation – Page 7

Insider and outsider language

My recent post about the altar inscription Paul saw in Athens–did it say “To an unknown god” or “To the unknown God”?–was prompted, as I noted there, by a conversation I had with a friend who does sociolinguistic analysis of the New Testament and early Christian literature. One thing she has helped me see much more clearly is the way biblical characters employ either “insider” or “outsider” language depending on the audience. (To give a contemporary example, a follower of Jesus today might speak of “the Lord” to a known fellow believer, but of “God” instead to someone whose faith they aren’t sure of.)

Since this conversation I’ve been seeing more ways in which recognizing “insider” and “outsider” language can help us appreciate the possible dynamics of biblical episodes. Consider, for example, the episode in Acts in which a believer named Ananias is asked to visit Saul of Tarsus (later known as Paul) right after Jesus has appeared to Saul on the Damascus Road.

Ananias first greets him as “Brother Saul” (Saoul adelphe). This is how followers of Jesus addressed one another. Does this mean that Ananias is immediately acknowledging Saul as a fellow believer? Not necessarily. This is also the way one Jew would typically greet another in the Roman Empire. My friend thinks, and I agree, that the original audience of Acts would have sensed the ambiguity here, and many of them may have thought, “Okay, he’s playing it safe, appealing to their shared Jewish identity to create some common ground with this man who, for all he knows, might still be an enemy.”

However, Ananias says next, “The Lord has sent me” (ho kurios apestalken me), using insider language for Jesus (“the Lord”), as if he were sure that Saul really was a follower of Jesus now. This suggests that “brother Saul” maybe was intended as the greeting of a fellow believer.

But then it appears that Ananias worries he may have gone too far out on a limb too early, because he immediately qualifies who “the Lord” is: “Jesus who appeared to you on the road as you were coming here.” This is outsider language: the proper name Jesus with a descriptor, like “Jesus of Nazareth . . . a man accredited by God” in Peter’s Pentecost sermon.

We don’t get much more of the dialogue, but I’m sure that when Ananias saw the scales fall from Saul’s eyes, he was probably comfortable going back to “the Lord” as a name for Jesus! But the movement from language that could be taken “safely,” to insider language, to outsider language shows that Ananias was obediently going into a dangerous situation courageously but carefully. (As we all should do when God–you know, the Lord–sends us into one.)

What “insider” and “outsider” language are you seeing as you read the Word–you know, the Bible?

What is a chiasm?

Q. Can you explain what a “chiasm” is? I often hear people use the word when they’re talking about things in the Bible, but I’m not quite sure what it means.

Simply stated, a chiasm is an arrangement of materials into nested pairs. For example, in a simple, four-part chiasm, the first and last elements would be paired with each other, and the middle two elements would also be paired together:

God created mankind
in his own image,
in the image of God
he created them.

Sometimes interpreters label the parts of a chiasm with capital letters to show these relationships more clearly:

A God created mankind
B in his own image,
B in the image of God
A he created them.

The word chiasm comes from the Greek letter chi, which looks like an X. If you go from top to bottom down this letter, it’s wide, narrow, narrow, wide–that’s why the letter is used for the name of this arrangement.

Hebrew authors considered chiasms to be an especially elegant and refined kind of literary creation, so they occur often in the First Testament. Since most of the New Testament authors were Jews, many chiasms are found there as well.

As illustrated above, brief chiasms can be found in lines of poetry. But chiasms can also be used on a larger scale. Psalm 103 as a whole, for example, is a five-part chiasm. (In a chiasm with an odd number of parts, the middle element stands alone, giving it a particular emphasis.) This psalm begins with an extended call to praise the Lord; it makes a short assertion about God’s reign; it describes God’s character; it makes another short assertion about God’s reign; and it ends with another call to praise the Lord.

In the gospel of John, the account of Jesus’ arrest and trial is arranged as a seven-part chiasm:

A The Jewish Leaders Demand Execution
B Pilate Speaks with Jesus About Kingship
C Pilate Declares Jesus Innocent; The Jewish Leaders Shout for Barabbas
D The Soliders Beat and Mock Jesus
C Pilate Declares Jesus Innocent; The Jewish Leaders Shout for Crucifixion
B Pilate Speaks With Jesus About Authority
A Pilate Agrees to the Demand for Execution

The account of the crucifixion is then arranged as another seven-part chiasm:

A Jesus is Brought to the Place of Execution
B Pilate Refuses the Jewish Leaders’ Request to Change the Inscription
C The Soldiers At the Cross Cast Lots for Jesus’ Clothes
D Jesus Entrusts Mary into John’s Care
C The Soldiers At the Cross Give Jesus Wine to Drink
B Pilate Grants the Jewish Leaders’ Request to Speed the Executions
A Jesus is Taken from the Place of Execution

Sometimes even longer stretches of narrative are arranged as chiasms. For example, the account of Noah and the flood is an extended nine-part chiasm, with a key theological emphasis in the middle element:

A Noah’s actions in building the ark
B God addresses Noah: “Go into the ark”
C Noah and the animals enter the ark
D The flood waters rise
E God remembers Noah
D The flood waters fall
C Noah and the birds verify that the flood has ended
B God addresses Noah: “Come out of the ark”
A Noah’s actions in offering sacrifice

In Genesis the lives of Abraham and Jacob are also related in nine-part chiasms, and chiasms are used to structure many other narratives and poems throughout the Bible.

So learning to recognize chiasms can give us many insights into the structures, themes, and emphases of biblical writings. The only danger in knowing about chiasms is a tendency to want to find them everywhere in the Bible. They’re not exactly everywhere. But they certainly are used frequently.

Why did Jesus say we should hate our families?

Q. Some of Jesus’ teachings have puzzled me over the years. While some may have been part of a parable, others were definitely spoken directly to people as instructions. Take this one: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.” I thought we were supposed to love even our enemies. So why does Jesus say we should hate our families?

In this earlier post I explain that when Jesus says we should love our enemies, he doesn’t mean that we’re supposed to feel a warm and delighted attraction to people who have hurt or betrayed us, a feeling that makes us want to be in a close relationship with them.

Rather, we should understand “love” in this case to be a commitment, not a feeling. We commit to doing whatever is in that person’s best interests, in the hopes that this will help them realize that they’ve done wrong and lead them to pursue restitution and reconciliation.

It’s just the opposite when Jesus says that we should “hate” our families. He’s not saying that we should be committed to doing whatever is most harmful or hurtful to them. Rather, in this case, he’s talking about a feeling, not a commitment.

Jesus is saying that we should be so devoted to him as his disciples that if anything or anyone should ever threaten to come between us and him, we would react to this with a strong feeling of antipathy and revulsion that makes us choose Jesus over that person or thing, without hesitation.

In the culture in which Jesus lived, family loyalty was probably the thing that was most likely to come between a would-be disciple and Jesus. (The same is still true in many parts of the world today.) And so Jesus is saying that if your family members try to keep you from following me, you have to react with such horror and revulsion that you’re prepared to lose your relationship with them in order to become and remain a disciple of mine.

Beyond this, however, Jesus told his followers to be very careful to follow the commandment to honor their parents. This included doing such things as providing for them in their old age. Jesus’ earliest followers similarly taught the importance of caring for family. So Jesus’ words about “hating” family must be understood only in the context of never letting anything come between us and our loyalty to God.

To state the matter simply, when Jesus says we should love our enemies, he’s talking about a commitment, not a feeling. When Jesus says we should hate our families (if they would come between us and him), he’s talking about a feeling, not a commitment.

How could Melchizedek have had no father or mother?

Q. How can the book of Hebrews say that Melchizedek, the priest who blessed Abraham, was “without father or mother” and “without beginning of days or end of life”? Wasn’t he human?

Here’s what I say about this in my study guide to Deuteronomy and Hebrews, where I note that the author of Hebrews talks about Melchizedek in the third of the four messages or sermons that make up the book:

* * * * *

This message is based primarily on Psalm 110, but in it the author characteristically draws on other Scriptures for support, in this case the story in Genesis that describes who Melchizedek was.

The author first translates the word Melchizedek, explaining that it means “King of Righteousness.” Melchizedek was most likely not a given name, but an honorary title of the Jebusite kings who formerly ruled in Jerusalem, including the one in the Genesis story who greeted Abraham. (A similar example of an honorary title is the name Pharaoh that was given to all the rulers of Egypt.)

After the Israelites conquered Jerusalem, their own kings took over the title Melchizedek. Since the Jebusite kings had been priests, the Israelite kings also assumed an honorary role as priests and interceded for the nation in prayer. But they were not allowed to offer sacrifices; this was reserved for the descendants of Aaron under the law of Moses.

The author next explains that King of Salem (that is, of Jerusalem) means “King of Peace.” By translating these two terms, the author identifies Jesus, who is a priest in the order of Melchizedek by virtue of being the Messianic king of Jerusalem, as someone who helps people become righteous before God and so find peace with God.

Now come some more significant details—or rather, a significant lack of them. The Hebrew Scriptures usually introduce a new figure into their narratives by describing the person’s parentage and ancestry. They usually also report when a figure dies. But the book of Genesis doesn’t do either of these things in the case of Melchizedek.

This allows the author of Hebrews to observe that, when considered only in light of what the Scriptures say about him, Melchizedek seems to have no origin or ending. He appears to “remain a priest forever.” In this way he “resembles the Son of God,” and this allows him to serve as an earthly representation of the Messiah. This is why the Lord chose to name him as the head of the order of priests to which the Messiah (represented in Psalm 110 by the Davidic king) would belong.

This is a classic example of the author’s typological method, which is based on the understanding that transcendent spiritual realities are reflected in earthly replicas. A little later in this message the author makes the basis of this method explicit, noting how the earthly tabernacle had to be modeled after the heavenly pattern Moses was shown. The Greek word is typos, the source of the English word type, and so this interpretive method is known as typology.

* * * * *

To summarize what I say in the guide, the author of Hebrews is able to establish a connection between Melchizedek and Jesus by considering Melchizedek in light of what the Scriptures say about him (that his title means “king of righteousness” and that he was king of Salem = “peace“), but only in light of what the Scriptures say about him, not what they don’t say. Since the details of his parentage, birth, and death aren’t reported, this allows an even stronger typological connection to Jesus, who has a permanent priesthood “on the basis of an indestructible life.”

In other words, the key to understanding how the Bible could say that Melchizedek was “without father and mother” and “without beginning of days or end of life” lies in appreciating the distinctive typological method of the book of Hebrews.

What is the meaning of 666, the number of the beast in the book of Revelation?

In response to my last post about secret codes in the Bible, a reader commented that the number 666 in the book of Revelation is also an encrypted word. That’s quite true. Let me summarize here what I say about this in my Daniel-Revelation study guide.

In many ancient languages, letters were used to represent numbers. (One example of this is the “Roman numerals” we know today: Super Bowl XLVI means Super Bowl 46.) Words and names in such languages had a total value, the sum of the values of their individual letters. This total value could be used as a kind of symbolic code in place of the word. (This practice is known as gematria.) For example, as I discuss in an earlier post, the value of the Hebrew letters in Hezekiah’s name adds up to 130, and in tribute to him, 130 proverbs were placed in the collection that was created under his patronage.

As I’ve show in another post, apocalypses like Revelation evoke the symbolic significance numbers. 666 suggests having pretensions to divinity or perfection, but falling short of it, since it’s symbolized in the book by the number 7. But whose name adds up to this total, revealing the hollowness of his pretensions to divinity?

To answer this question, we need to understand the book of Revelation in light of the first-century events that occasioned its writing. The book was written to warn followers of Jesus, who had experienced persecution under Nero, that persecution would resume under the current emperor, Domitian. So they needed to be faithful unto death in order to win the crown of life. When the book is understood this way, its figure of a “beast” is recognized to be a depiction of Domitian as if he were Nero come back to life.

The number 666 is part of this depiction. John writes that understanding this code “calls for wisdom,” meaning that the puzzle has a trick to it. The secret is, even though John is writing his book in Greek, the numerical values will be those of Hebrew letters. As many scholars have recognized, the consonants of “Neron Caesar” in Hebrew add up to 666. Tagging Domitian with the name (or in this case, the number) of Nero is like drawing a Hitler mustache on a leader’s picture today. Domitian thinks he’s “lord and God” (as he proclaims on his coins), but he’s really just another evil emperor.

So the meaning of the “number of the beast,” 666, has a unique solution based on the conventions of apocalypses and the facts of history. Its main purpose is to delegitimize Domitian’s claims to divinity and to strengthen followers of Jesus who are being pressured by the emperor cult. But evil rulers in other places and times may also revive the tyrannical spirit of Nero, and they’ll have to be resisted with suffering and endurance. That is the significance of the number 666 for all who live after the time of the book of Revelation.

For some historical evidence that the earliest Christians understood 666 to mean “Nero Caesar,” see this post.

For the significance of the number 144,000, see this post.

Is “Atbash code” found “throughout the Old Testament,” as Dan Brown claims?

Q. Dan Brown claims in The DaVinci Code (p. 304) that “text encrypted with Atbash” is found throughout Jewish mystical writings and “even the Old Testament.” Is this true?

Thanks to reader Don Johnson (see comment below), I am now offering an updated version of this post.

Exactly two words in the Bible are encrypted in a code known as Atbash.

The name Atbash comes from the first, last, second, and next-to-last letters of the Hebrew alphabet: Aleph, Taw, Beth, Shin. The name shows how this code works: the first and last letters are substituted for each other; the same for the second and next-to-last letters; and so forth.

An equivalent code in English would be called AZBY:
A <-> Z,
B <-> Y,
C <-> X,
and so forth.
In AZBY the word “Bible,” for example, would come out “Yryov.” This is how this kind of code works.

God gave the prophet Jeremiah the assignment of publicly announcing his judgment on the nations, including the Babylonian empire, which would soon conquer Jeremiah’s own country of Judah. This assignment was fraught with danger for the prophet, so he spoke the word “Babel” (the Hebrew name for Babylon) in Atbash code, and it came out “Sheshak“:

“This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, said to me: ‘Take from my hand this cup filled with the wine of my wrath and make all the nations to whom I send you drink it. . . . After all of them, the king of Sheshak will drink it too.'”

Enough of Jeremiah’s listeners could apparently decrypt this code that the promise of ultimate deliverance could be spoken without the prophet’s life being unnecessarily jeopardized.

Later in the book there’s another prophecy in which Jeremiah was able to speak more freely (perhaps because it circulated privately until it could be shared more openly), and in that prophecy he leaves no doubt about identity of the earlier Sheshak:

“How Sheshak will be captured, the boast of the whole earth seized!
How desolate Babylon will be among the nations!”

At the start of that prophecy he also identifies Babylon with Leb Hamai, Atbash code for Chaldea, another name for the Babylonians:

“See, I will stir up the spirit of a destroyer
against Babylon and the people of Leb Kamai.”

But Babel and Chaldea in Jeremiah are the only two words in the Bible that have been put in Atbash code. So we shouldn’t search the Scriptures for mysterious encrypted messages the way the characters would in a Dan Brown thriller. There aren’t any messages of that type there.

Instead, we should be inspired by the faith and courage of prophets like Jeremiah, who were agents of a divine resistance movement that proclaimed the time when earthly pretenders would be put down and God’s kingdom established throughout the earth. And we should ask how we can be the same kind of agents in our own place and time.

How does knowing about Hezekiah’s name and the 130 proverbs help me to be more like Jesus?

Okay, you’ve convinced me that there are 130 sayings in one of the collections in the book of Proverbs because this is the numerical value of Hezekiah’s name in Hebrew. But how does knowing this help me be a better Christian? How will it make me more like Jesus?

Many of us may have been encouraged to look, every time we read the Bible, for some specific thing that we should believe or do to become more Christ-like. This, we’ve been told, is how God speaks to us through the Bible and how reading it helps us grow. And so we look for what one person called their “gem of the day,” a bright and inspiring thought to carry with us as we go about our activities.

There’s a real danger to this approach, however. It risks turning us into moralists who are trying hard on their own, in small ways each day, to become better people—to be able to say, as Émile Coué put it, “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.” What we should want instead is to become genuine followers of Jesus who are implicated in the grand story of God, which Jesus brought to its culmination, followers who are creatively and courageously living out that story in their own lives.

Knowing about Hezekiah’s name and the 130 proverbs won’t help you become a better moralist. But it will help you appreciate more about the story that you find yourself in, if you do want to become more like Jesus.

For one thing, it gives you a better understanding of what the Bible actually is. The Bible isn’t a loose compilation of thousands and thousands of discrete propositions that we need to select and arrange in order to get guidance on various subjects. Rather, it’s a carefully crafted and curated collection of literary compositions, some as short as poetic couplets (proverbs), others as long as the sprawling histories in Samuel-Kings or Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah. Seeing the care and intentionality behind the collection of proverbs “compiled by the men of Hezekiah” can help you appreciate the nature of the Bible and the crucial role that God allowed human agents to play in its composition and collection over the centuries. In the Bible, God was letting us humans write his story with him. And that’s what he still wants us to do in our lives today.

Seeing the honor that Hezekiah’s men paid to their royal patron by making sure their collection of proverbs came out to the right total (even though they had to repeat some proverbs from the earlier collection of Solomon’s sayings to reach that total) helps us recognize that at a particular moment in Israel’s history, after godless kings had suppressed devotion to the true God, a new righteous king was reshaping the affairs of the kingdom and allowing biblical scholarship to flourish once again. Behind that little number, 130, there’s quite a story about what it took and what it cost to give us the Bible. I personally find this much more inspiring than any “gem of the day” my eye might happen to glance upon and isolate from the flow of the text that makes up the flow of the story.

So, to sum up, details like the 130 proverbs help us appreciate the fabric of the Bible, how it has been woven together from real stories of real people who were striving and struggling to serve God in their own places and times, and who are implicitly calling on us to do the same. When we do, we become more like Jesus as we continue in our own lives the story, of which he is the center, found in the pages of the Bible.

Are the numbers 3, 4, 7, 10, etc. intentionally symbolic in the book of Revelation?

Q. In your Revelation study guide you say that there’s a symbolic meaning for the numbers in the book. 3 means God, 4 means creation, 7 means perfection, 10 means completeness, and so forth. Did John really write with all of this in mind?

(The Revelation study guide can be read online or downloaded for free from this link.)

I believe he definitely did. Throughout the book of Revelation, John is drawing on a stock of recognizable symbols from the First Testament. This stock includes some commonly-used numerical symbols that would have been meaningful to John’s readers.

For example, in the First Testament, 10 represents completeness in the human dimension, since people usually have ten figures and ten toes. That’s why God gave an epitome of the law in the Ten Commandments. The number is also used in this sense when Job says to his friends, “Ten times now you have reproached me.” This is not a literal count, because the friends have only spoken five times to that point in the book. But the number means “You’ve reproached me as many times as a human can bear.” Ten meaning what is complete or ultimate in human experience is also seen in Daniel’s vision of the four beasts. The last one, representing a supreme empire, has ten horns. The image and the number with its significance are echoed in John’s description of the dragon in Revelation.

To give another example, since there were twelve tribes of Israel, the number 12 represents the covenant community in the First Testament. In the New Testament, Jesus himself appealed to this symbol when he chose 12 apostles. Through this number he was declaring that a new kind of covenant community was coming into existence through his life and ministry. In Revelation the number 12 is used throughout the book to represent the community. See how many times it’s used in the depiction of the New Jerusalem, for example. (See the Daniel-Revelation study guide, p. 131.)

Twelve can also be used in multiples and in combination with other numbers. There are 24 elders in the heavenly throne vision to depict the continuity of the first and new covenant communities. The number 144,000, for its part, comes from 12 x 12 x 10 x 10 x 10, representing the fullness of the community of believers throughout time and space from the first and new covenants. (I have a separate post about this, “Who are the 144,000 in the book of Revelation?“)

Examples like these show us what an intentional part numbers play in the book of Revelation’s symbolism, echoing the First Testament background. As for some of the other numbers in the book, as I write in my Daniel-Revelation study guide:

• 3 represents God, who’s often described in three-part phrases (“who was, and is, and is to come”) and ascribed triple attributes (“holy, holy, holy”; “glory and honor and power.”)

• 4 is the number of creation. It’s represented in the heavenly throne vision by four living creatures, and it’s also described as having four parts: heaven, earth, under-earth, and sea. The song of every creature ascribes four attributes to the Lamb: praise, honor, glory and power. There are other uses of the number 4 to symbolize creation later in the book, for example, in the following vision, “four angels standing at the four corners of the earth holding back the four winds”.

• The number 7 (4+3) represents perfection and completeness. The Lamb has seven horns and seven eyes; these symbolize his absolute power and knowledge. The scroll has seven seals because it contains the definitive judgments of God. The seven churches at the beginning of the book are symbolized by seven lamp stands and seven stars. While these are actual churches, they’re also representative of the church as a whole; what’s written to them is also addressed to the wider community of Jesus’ followers. The throne vision depicts the “seven spirits of God.” As a translation note in the NIV explains, this is the “seven-fold” Spirit of God–the perfect (divine) Holy Spirit. The angels, in their song, ascribe seven attributes to the Lamb, acknowledging his divine perfections.

We see in all of these ways, as I write in my study guide, that “in addition to visual symbols drawn from earlier Scriptures, the book of Revelation also uses numerical symbols. Certain numbers in the book are like ‘logos’ that point to key characters and themes.”

For the symbolic meaning of the number 666, see this post.

Why did Jesus say he wasn’t going to the Festival of Tabernacles and then go?

Q. In John 7, Jesus tells his brothers he’s not going to go to the Festival of Tabernacles, but then he goes anyway. By faith I’m accepting that this is not sinful deception, but do you have any thoughts about why it’s not?

I don’t address this question specifically when I come to this episode in the John study guide, but I do note earlier in the guide (pp. 27-28) that often in conversations between Jesus and others:

“Jesus speaks of spiritual realities, but his listeners misunderstand him and think he’s speaking about material realities. They ask questions to try to clear up the confusion, and this gives Jesus (or John, speaking as the narrator) the opportunity to explain the spiritual realities further.”

I discuss this dynamic specifically in the cases of people like Nicodemus and the woman at the well, and the same thing is going on when Jesus speaks with his brothers here.

When he says, “I am not going up to this festival, because my time has not yet fully come,” his brothers think he’s speaking on a material level and saying that it’s not a convenient or strategic time for him to travel to Jerusalem. But since he does then go to Jerusalem, readers of the gospel are supposed to understand that this wasn’t what he meant. Instead, his reference to “my time” (a richly symbolic phrase in this gospel) shows that he means he won’t be “going up,” that is, ascending to the Father after dying as the Savior of the world, at this particular festival, but rather at a later Passover.

Raymond Brown, in his excellent commentary on John in the Anchor Bible series, observes that “John is giving us a play on the verb anabainein, which can mean go up in pilgrimage to Mount Zion and Jerusalem, and can also mean ‘to ascend.’ In 20:17 Jesus uses this verb when he speaks of ascending to the Father, and that is the deeper meaning here.”

So this is one of the many places in John’s gospel where a deeper meaning lies behind Jesus’ words and where the difficulty we have in understanding those words should drive us to seek that deeper meaning. (“How can someone be born when they are old? Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb!” “You have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water?”) Accepting by faith, as you did, that Jesus is not being deceptive is the first step in discovering the true, rich, saving meaning of his words.