The Lost World of the Torah

Law as Covenant and Wisdom in Ancient Context

John H. Walton,J. Harvey Walton

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780830872572
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Our handling of what we call biblical law veers between controversy and neglect.On the one hand, controversy arises when Old Testament laws seem either odd beyond comprehension (not eating lobster) or positively reprehensible (executing children). On the other, neglect results when we consider the law obsolete, no longer carrying any normative power (tassels on clothing, making sacrifices). Even readers who do attempt to make use of the Old Testament "law" often find it either irrelevant, hopelessly laden with "thou shalt nots, " or simply so confusing that they throw up their hands in despair. Despite these extremes, people continue to propose moral principles from these laws as "the biblical view" and to garner proof texts to resolve issues that arise in society. The result is that both Christians and skeptics regularly abuse the Torah, and its true message often lies unheard.Walton and Walton offer in The Lost World of the Torah a restorative vision of the ancient genre of instruction for wisdom that makes up a significant portion of the Old Testament. In the ancient Near East, order was achieved through the wisdom of those who governed society. The objective of torah was to teach the Israelites to be wise about the kind of order needed to receive the blessings of God's favor and presence within the context of the covenant. Here readers will find fresh insight on this fundamental genre of the Old Testament canon.The books in the Lost World Series follow the pattern set by Bible scholar John H. Walton, bringing a fresh, close reading of the Hebrew text and knowledge of ancient Near Eastern literature to an accessible discussion of the biblical topic at hand using a series of logic-based propositions.

PART 1

METHODOLOGY

Proposition 1

The Old Testament Is an
Ancient Document

Any readers who have already been introduced to the Lost World series will recognize this as one of the first propositions in each of the books. The fact that the Old Testament is an ancient document means that we cannot read it as if it were a modern Western document. Its words are laden with cultural content that its audience intrinsically understood but is often opaque to a modern reader.

For instance, let’s use a reverse example: imagine someone from another culture (whether contemporary with us or from ancient times) encountering an American who referred to “flying ‘Old Glory.’” Even some Americans (depending on age and geographical location) may not be aware that Old Glory refers to the American flag. But let’s pursue the inquiry further. In an ancient culture they would have no concept of a flag as a symbol of a country so knowledge of cultural symbolism is necessary. Second, only knowledge of semantic range would inform a reader that flying a flag is not like flying an airplane but refers to displaying it prominently. Third, they might then wonder why one would fly a flag, and our reply may have to do with patriotism, a cultural value. Patriotism would be a foreign concept in many ancient cultures since they would not have necessarily felt compelled to express loyalty to a nation-state (though they might understand the importance of loyalty to a king). Discussion about that would then open up an interesting conversation about whether national entities have value and what that value might be. Finally, we would discover that national values of today may differ considerably from national values in another culture (where their values would be cultural values rather than national values). This is simply an arbitrary example of how language is full of cultural meaning. Just as someone from an ancient culture would have difficulty understanding our ideas (even if the words were properly translated for them), we also find ourselves struggling to understand all the cultural ideas that are carried in words from ancient texts.

Translation of cultural ideas is difficult for many reasons. One of the most important is that often a target language does not have the words that would represent all the ideas and nuances present in the words of the source language. But beyond the obstacles presented by inadequate vocabulary, we encounter ideas communicated from within and with reference to an unfamiliar cultural framework. We are inclined to interpret texts from the perspective of our own cultural network without accounting for the cultural framework native to the text we are reading.

A useful metaphor for describing this phenomenon of diverse cultural settings is that of cultural rivers.1 In our modern world, the cultural river is easily identified. Among its American (and often global) currents are various fundamentals such as rights, freedom, capitalism, democracy, individualism, social networking, globalism, market economy, consumerism, scientific naturalism, an expanding universe, empiricism, and natural laws, just to name a few. Some may well wish to float in these currents while others may struggle to swim upstream against at least some of them, but those in our modern world inevitably are located in its waters. Regardless of our diverse ways of thinking, we are all in the cultural river and its currents are familiar to us.

In the ancient world, a very different cultural river flowed through all the neighboring cultures: Egyptians, Phoenicians, Assyrians—and Israelites. Despite important variations between cultures and across the centuries, certain elements remained largely static. Continual course adjustments have little effect on the most persistent currents. People from various times and cultures may indeed face some similar challenges common to humanity, but few of the currents common to the ancient cultures are found in our modern cultural river. In the ancient cultural river we would find currents such as community identity, the comprehensive and ubiquitous control of the gods, the role of kingship, divination, the centrality of the temple, the mediatory role of images, the effectual and essential role of sacrifice, and the reality of the spirit world and magic.

The Israelites sometimes floated on the currents of that cultural river without resistance, and we would be neither surprised nor critical. At other times, however, the revelation of God encouraged them to struggle out of the current into the shallows, or even to swim furiously upstream. Whatever the extent of the Israelites’ interactions with the cultural river, it is important to remember that they were situated in the ancient cultural river, not immersed in the currents of our modern cultural river.

It is this “embeddedness” that we seek to understand so that we may be faithful interpreters of the biblical text. God communicated within the context of their cultural river. God’s message, God’s purposes, and God’s authority were all vested in Israelite communicators for Israelite audiences, and the message took shape according to the internal logic within their language and culture. We cannot be assured of authoritative communication through any other source, and we must therefore find the message of God as communicated through those intermediaries in their ancient cultural river.

This means that if we are to interpret Scripture so as to receive the full impact of God’s authoritative message, and build the foundation for sound theology, we have to begin by setting aside the presuppositions of our cultural river, with all our modern issues and perspectives, in order to engage the cultural river of the ancient communicators. The communicators that we encounter in the Old Testament are not aware of our cultural river, including all its societal aspects; they neither address our cultural river nor anticipate it.2 We cannot therefore assume that any of the constants or currents of our cultural river are addressed specifically in Scripture. This does not mean, however, that the Old Testament becomes irrelevant to us.

How then should we proceed in order to decipher the relevance that the biblical text has for us? Our first step involves good translation of the language, but that is only the beginning. If we have any hope of understanding texts that are resident in another cultural river, we need the service of a “cultural broker.”3 Thinking back to the example used above concerning flying Old Glory, we found that understanding was not accomplished by simply translating the words. The role of cultural broker is played by someone who is sufficiently knowledgeable in both the source culture and the target culture to identify what hurdles might be encountered in trying to understand and then give explanation in terms that will make sense. As another example, consider the relatively recent practice of celebrating “pie day.” At the level of translation, it sounds like an opportunity to celebrate by eating some pie, and it is, but why celebrate on March 14? For that a cultural broker is necessary. In our culture we can use a numerical notation for dates, and in America March 14 would be 3/14. A mathematical technicality is associated with these numbers when we replace the slanted line with a decimal point: 3.14, thus representing a rounded number that expresses a mathematical constant of the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter (a detail widely known but not universally or innately even in our culture). But still that is not enough information to make the connection. A cultural broker would next have to explain that mathematicians have agreed to represent this constant by the Greek letter pi, which happens to be a homonym to the English word pie, a delectable pastry. We therefore discover that the connection also makes use of wordplay.

Modern Bible readers need cultural brokers who can move beyond the translation of the ancient legal sayings of the Torah (e.g., Deut 22:11: “Do not wear clothes of wool and linen woven together”) to offer an explanation of the thinking behind those sayings (why would wearing such clothes of mixed materials have been a problem in the ancient world?). A cultural broker helps build bridges between people of different cultural backgrounds in order to facilitate communication. The resulting negotiation could involve spoken words, terminology, or texts. A cultural broker must understand the values and beliefs of both cultures and be willing and able to bridge the given cultures’ belief systems. This interpretive approach works on the primary assumption that various cultures do not simply have different words for the same basic ideas; they have fundamentally different ideas that they use their words to convey, and those words often have only a superficial similarity to the words another culture might use.

Torah is part of the ancient text we know as the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament. That Bible is written for us (i.e., we are supposed to benefit from its divine message and expect that it will help us to confront the currents in our cultural river by transforming us), but it is not written to us (not in our language or in the context of our culture). The message transcends culture, but it is given in a form that is fully immersed in the ancient cultural river of Israel. This means that if we are to interpret Scripture so as to receive the full impact of God’s authoritative message, we have to set our cultural river aside and try to understand the cultural river of the ancient people to whom the text was addressed. The Bible was written to the people of ancient Israel in the language of ancient Israel; therefore, its message operates according to the logic of ancient Israel.4

We can begin to understand the claims of the text as an ancient document first of all by paying close attention to what the text says and doesn’t say. It is too easy to make assumptions that are intrusive based on our own culture, cognitive environment, traditions, or questions. It takes a degree of discipline as readers who are outsiders not to assume our modern perspectives and impose them on the text. Often we do not even know we are doing it because our own context is so intrinsic to our thinking and the ancient world is an unknown. The best path to recognizing the distinctions between ancient and modern thinking is to begin paying attention to the ancient world and at the same time imposing methodological constraints to minimize the impact of anachronistic intuition. This is accomplished by immersion in the literature of the ancient world. This would by no means supersede Scripture, but it can be a tool for understanding Scripture.5

We have to suppress our intuition because we are naturally inclined to read the biblical text intuitively. When we do so, we unconsciously impose our own cultural ideas on the text. We cannot help but do so—no reading is culturally neutral. Since reading instinctively inherently imposes modern cultural thinking on the text, we conclude that such reading is at least potentially unreliable. Some may object that if we read it in light of the ancient world, we are imposing that world on the text. We cannot impose that world on the text because the text is situated in that world. No one would ever object to using the Hebrew language to understand the biblical text by claiming that the interpreter was imposing Hebrew on the text. We cannot impose Hebrew on the biblical text—it is written in Hebrew. In the same way, we cannot impose the ancient world on the biblical text since the ancient world is its native context.

The authority of the text is found when we read it for what it is—no more, no less. For those who pride themselves on interpreting the text “literally,” we can only say that a person cannot read the text more literally than to read it as the original author intended for it to be read. That is our goal, and being faithful interpreters of God’s Word allows for nothing less. It takes work, and well it should. It is worth the effort.

Some would claim that such an approach takes the Bible out of the hands of the ordinary reader and might even suggest that it runs contrary to the objectives of the Reformation—that every ploughman might be able to read the Bible and understand it. We need to realize, however, that the ploughman’s gain is to be able to read the Bible in his own language. The Reformers never expected that every ploughman would achieve autonomous expertise as exegete or theologian. When the Reformers insisted on the clarity of Scripture for any reader, they were contrasting the surface reading of Scripture (well informed linguistically, literally, theologically), in which anyone could engage, with a mystical or esoteric interpretation of the text available only to the initiated. Perspicuity does not override the need to acquire the arcane and esoteric skill of cultural brokerage any more than it overrides the need to acquire the arcane and esoteric skill of learning to read (whether Hebrew or Greek or one’s own native language). The Reformers did acknowledge a need to translate the Bible, and cultural brokerage is part of the translation process.6 We should not imagine that the Reformers would have refused to use any newly discovered texts from the ancient world. The Reformers themselves were bringing something new to the interpretation of Scripture that none of their precursors for fifteen hundred years had had—the knowledge of the Hebrew language. The fact that those before them did not have access to Hebrew did not deter them from using it for new insights. We should always use whatever tools are available to us whether others had them or not.

The Reformers certainly did not believe that all of Scripture and every aspect of Scripture were accessible and could be penetrated by any layperson regardless of training. If the Reformers had believed that, they surely would not have felt compelled to write hundreds of volumes of commentary and theology. Anyone who is literate can read that someone named David took a census (2 Samuel 24), but not everyone can read about David’s census and know why he would have thought of doing such a thing, or why he thought that doing it would be a good idea, or why it turned out not to be.

Scholars have a role in the body of Christ just like everyone else does. One cannot object that it is somehow elitist for scholars to t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: Methodology
• Part 2: Function of Ancient Near Eastern Legal Collections
• Part 3: Ritual and Torah
• Part 4: Context of the Torah
• Part 5: Ongoing Significance of the Torah
• Summary of Conclusions
• Appendix: The Decalogue
• Further Reading
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Notes
• Praise for The Lost World of the Torah
• About the Authors
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright