Holding Forth the Word of Life

Essays in Honor of Tim Meadowcroft

John de Jong, Csilla Saysell

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781725258785
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Holding Forth the Word of Life is a collection of essays offered to honor Tim Meadowcroft on his retirement from Laidlaw College. An international authority on Daniel, over the last twenty-five years Tim has established himself as one of New Zealand's leading biblical scholars. While specializing in Old Testament, Tim has taught and published in New Testament as well as hermeneutics and theological interpretation of Scripture. Beyond academic work he has also remained committed to the church and its voice in wider society. This collection of essays, written by leading scholars from New Zealand and beyond, covers all of these areas--Old Testament, New Testament, intertestamental texts, hermeneutics, theological interpretation of Scripture, reception history, and theological reflection on pressing issues facing society.

1

Daniel Compares Notes with Jeremiah

John Goldingay

Write something on Daniel, the editors said, because Daniel is an interest that you and Tim have shared. Indeed, we have. Twenty-five years ago, I took part in Tim’s PhD viva (defense, in US-speak) in Edinburgh. I remember raising with Tim a question about his interpretation of a particular tricky passage in Daniel and asking whether one might think about the passage in light of the framework suggested by the question of readerly perspectives on texts. He gave his doleful look and murmured ruefully, “Oh dear, that kind of question gives me a headache.” It was funny at the time, and over the years it became funnier, because Tim was already ahead of the curve in thinking innovatively and literarily about Daniel, and during subsequent decades he has thought as much as anyone about postmodern approaches to Daniel. Which maybe gives me the excuse for the present essay, which has hints of intertextuality, canonical interpretation, postcolonial interpretation, reception history, and theological interpretation.

I myself am thinking about Jeremiah at the moment, so I wondered about relating Daniel and Jeremiah. Ironic implications attach to the idea of linking them. Daniel 9 explicitly refers to Jeremiah, and Daniel 1:1 sets Daniel in the same chronological framework as Jeremiah. On the other hand, critical commentators do not attach any historical credence to the opening verses of Daniel, with their reference to Daniel and his friends being in Jerusalem in the time running up to the moment when Jeremiah 36 has Jeremiah dictating his messages to Baruch, and they may attach little credence to Jeremiah 36 itself. Yet the book of Daniel in effect invites its readers to imagine Daniel and his friends in that setting.

Symbolic but Real Action

Daniel and Jeremiah suggest the value of symbolic action. Daniel becomes a vegan and a teetotaler (Daniel 1); Jeremiah urges people not to shop on Sunday (Jer 17:19–27). Neither commitment is a timeless or universal one. The Torah did not require either commitment. But Daniel and Jeremiah were inspired to see that these actions were the concrete expression of commitments that the Torah did advocate.

Nebuchadnezzar put Daniel and his friends under pressure in a number of ways. He forced them to migrate to a foreign country. He enrolled them in Babylonian degree programs. He allocated Babylonian food and wine to them. And he gave them Babylonian names that would speak of the names of Babylonian gods, as Israelite names such as Hananiah and Azariah spoke of the name of the God of Israel. Whether Nebuchadnezzar intended it or not, all these moves could have had the effect of making them forget where they came from. The story safeguards against this possibility in a number of ways. God gave them supernatural academic results. The story bowdlerizes their names: most obviously, Abed-nego is a distortion of Abed-nebo (servant of Nebo). And it reminds us that they outlived not only Nebuchadnezzar but the entire Babylonian empire and lived to see the ascendancy of Cyrus, who freed Judahites to go back home. But the one thing that they themselves did was take on a vegetarian and alcohol-free diet in order to avoid being defiled.

Whether or not they were specifically trying to avoid infringing the rules in Leviticus, they were working with a similar assumption to those rules: that there is something to be said for symbolic actions that express our relationship with such important realities as food—and sex and death, the other main preoccupations of those rules in Leviticus. Because we are bodily people, what we do with our bodies makes a difference, and it makes a difference to our attitudes. Food, sex, and death: what could be more important? And symbolism is important, as we recognize when we eat special food and put on special clothes for special occasions.

When Jeremiah urges people not to engage in trade on the Sabbath, he too is relating to an area of life that the Torah covers, yet not working directly with the Torah’s own rules, in that the Torah forbade work on the Sabbath but made no mention of trade. Perhaps the development of urban life in Israel made it necessary to think further about the implications of Sabbath observance. Before urbanization, people mostly grew and made things for their own consumption as a family, though they would ideally have something left over for sharing with needy people and for bartering. There are now, in Jeremiah’s time, people living and working in Jerusalem who need to buy provisions from people who grow them and who are in a position to sell jewelry and pottery and metal implements to the people who come into the city with the provisions. So, the Sabbath rule requires stretching to cover that situation.

Jeremiah implies two reasons for its observance, neither of which is anything to do with rest or refreshment. There is an economic reason and a theological one. A willingness to set aside productive work and trade for one day each week suggests a repudiation of the assumption that economics is everything. It suggests a turning aside from coveting, the last of the commands in the Decalogue. In harder times, it suggests a willingness to trust God for what one eats, drinks, and wears (Matt 6:24–34). The economic significance of the Sabbath is thus its spiritual significance.

Which leads into a consideration of its theological significance—or another aspect of its theological significance. Observing the Sabbath does not imply legalism. Paradoxically, it signifies a recognition that every day belongs to God, as tithing one’s possessions and thus holding back from using all of them signifies a recognition that all one’s possessions come from God. Tithing thus (again paradoxically) sanctifies them all. In a parallel way, keeping one day off signifies a recognition that all one’s time comes from God, so that it sanctifies all one’s days. It is a meaningful piece of symbolism that expresses something theological as well as something economic. It invites its readers to recognize the sacred.

A feature I have noticed in sermons is that the texts from which preachers start are often concrete in the stories they tell or the exhortations they issue, yet the exhortations the preachers issue are quite general—for example, that we must advocate for justice or for action to take better care of the world. Daniel and Jeremiah suggest we need to discern action that is concrete, symbolic, and significant; generalizations are not enough. If eating meat (particularly beef) is a major contributor to global warming, maybe we should imitate Daniel. If air travel stands alongside eating meat in this connection as one of the biggest polluters of the atmosphere and biggest generators of CO2, supposing we were to give up air travel? Supposing we were to give up meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature? Supposing someone who left California but missed the beach and the sun gave up the idea of an occasional flying visit? Supposing someone who lived in the Antipodes stayed there?

Involvement with the Empire

Daniel and Jeremiah know how to read empires. They know that the king of Babylon is God’s servant (e.g., Jer 25:9; 27:6; Dan 2:37–38), they recognize the emperor, and they win his recognition (e.g., Jer 39:11; Dan 2:46). They also know that Babylon is wicked and is doomed, and Daniel tells Nebuchadnezzar so (Jeremiah 50–51; Daniel 2; 4). Nebuchadnezzar was the second and longest-living king of the short-lived neo-Babylonian empire; he was responsible for reasserting control of the western part of the former Assyrian empire and for substantial building projects in Babylon itself. The book of Jeremiah portrays him with straight-faced seriousness; the book of Daniel lampoons him. Jeremiah discovers an ambiguity about recognizing him as God’s servant: the Jerusalem administration understandably perceives his recognition as an act of treachery. The stories in Daniel do not suggest any ambiguity about Daniel’s recognition of Nebuchadnezzar, though a postcolonial perspective might ask questions about the compromise inevitably involved in supporting the oppressive imperial regime. It has been argued that “it’s impossible to understand Daniel unless one understands the perspective of a colonized person.”1 Decades before the word postcolonial existed, people in Korea during Japanese occupation particularly valued the book of Daniel, and their overlords banned it.2 And Daniel has particularly attracted interpreters who appreciated its implied exhortation to resistance but not to violence.3

The ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Daniel Compares Notes with Jeremiah
• Chapter 2: Job the (Im)Pious: Theological Exegesis and Ambiguity
• Chapter 3: Was Ruth a Festschrift?39
• Chapter 4: The Blood Manipulation of the Sin Offering and the Logic of Defilement64
• Chapter 5: Nothing Was Made without Him (John 1:3)
• Chapter 6: Love’s Four Objects and the Pursuit of Peace118
• Chapter 7: “Saints by Calling” in Romans 1:7 and 1 Corinthians 1:2
• Chapter 8: ΛΟΓΟΝ ΖΩΗΣ ΕΡΕΧΟΝΤΕΣ (Holding Forth the Word of Life)
• Chapter 9: “You Have Come to Mount Zion . . . ” (Heb 12:22)
• Chapter 10: The Disembodied Womb and the Disappearing Mother in Hosea 13:13
• Chapter 11: What About the Women of Ḥesed?
• Chapter 12: Tiptoe through the Minefields
• Chapter 13: Holy Love: Seeking a Unified Theology in a Divided Church
• Chapter 14: The Gospel of John as a Defense of Jesus’ Honor?
• Chapter 15: Whakawhiti Kōrero: Theology and Social Vocation564
• Chapter 16: The Early Greek-Language Tradition behind the Gospels
• Chapter 17: Textual Criticism, the Textus Receptus, and Adoniram Judson’s Burmese New Testaments623
• Chapter 18: Reception History: Signaling Change in Biblical Studies654
• Chapter 19: Is There a Fish in this Cognitive Environment?
• Chapter 20: Linguistics and Hermeneutics
• Chapter 21: A Mimetic Model of Hermeneutics
• Chapter 22: The Bible as Sacred Re-Membering