Against the literal-grammatical-historical method
An example from Judges 3 of how reading the Bible like a textbook turns many of its elements into meaningless noise.
Last week I wrote on how “re-enchantment” is not about restoring a paranormal worldview — it is about restoring biblical meaning-making. We need to learn and apply the biblical hermeneutic at every level of life, to discern and integrate the meaning in all things.
I said at the end of this missive that our approach to meaning-making has significant implications for our doctrine of translation, because hermeneutics is fundamentally about what things mean, starting with words themselves. Or, perhaps a better way of saying it: hermeneutics is about how words mean.
This week I want to illustrate this point. Biblical, imaginative/integrative meaning-making differs from Enlightenment, analytical/reductionist meaning-making in significant respects — with serious practical and theological ramifications.
My contention is basically this:
Analyzing scripture by itemizing its grammatical and historical components is of little value in discerning its meaning.
I am not saying there is no value in understanding the linguistic and historical situation of the text. I am saying there is little value in doing this in itself — because it is only one precondition to understanding the text. Or, put differently:
The meaning of the text is not primarily in its grammatical and historical elements — but rather in how these relate to the rest of scripture.
Unfortunately, while grammatical-historical analysis can be useful, the literal-grammatical-historical hermeneutic (LGH) is often positively counterproductive — because it is employed unto the end of stripping out from the text every element which does not yield a literal grammatical or historical meaning. “Understanding the text” comes to be simply giving an account of its historical and linguistic features: i.e., of reducing it to facts about history and grammar. (This is what you will find in most commentaries; and it is presupposed by modern translation philosophy.)
The upshot is that if an element of the text doesn’t translate into a grammatical or historical fact that “does” something, it is discarded as noise.
In this regard, the LGH is very much a scientific method. Its approach to the text is the same as the approach of scientists to DNA. If they can’t see an obvious and immediate use for it, they assume it is vestigial. The LGH produces enormous amounts of “junk DNA” in the text of scripture, by assuming that the words and patterns God chose have value only isasmuch as they “carry” the “real” meaning.
But I have now multiplied a lot of abstract and theoretical assertions, with nothing to hang them on so you can understand what I am claiming. Let’s investigate one of my favorite passages of scripture to see how it works in practice.
Judges 3
I’m going to consider just the most notable elements of this story (there are many others), and contrast the LGH hermeneutic with the one that scripture actually demands — a kind of “robust analogy of faith.” In other words, I am going to assume that nothing in the text is noise without meaning: that God is sending a “signal” in the denotations of words, and in the form of the text itself, and in how he uses these patterns across scripture.
So here we have Eglon, a famously obese Moabite, oppressing Israel…
Eglon means bullock
It is from the same root word that is consistently used of the golden calf that Aaron made in Exodus 32; and the calf which he had to sacrifice as a sin offering for himself.
So what? Under the LGH, this is a mere coincidence. How can you read anything into a name, which is just a happenstance of history?
But who superintends history? Is Eglon not a golden (i.e., kingly) calf that Israel has been bowing down to? And does the text not draw considerable attention to his obesity? So he is also a fattened calf, ready for slaughter.
We can, at least, wonder if he represents both the idolatry of Israel, which must be mortified and destroyed; and the sacrifice that will cover that idolatry, as a sin-offering for the priests’ failure to shepherd Israel in true religion.
We can wonder. But theological speculation is so dangerous (we are told). Very well, how might we confirm our musings?
Ehud delivers a “tribute” to Eglon (v. 15)
This tribute is the same word used of the one brought to God by Cain and Abel (Gen 4); and of the “meal offering” in Leviticus. (The Hebrew in Leviticus does not say meal offering; it says tribute — a topic for another time.)
“Tribute” is thus a word freighted with sacramental significance. I don’t mean that it is exclusively sacramental — it literally just means a gift. But it is often sacramental. Under the LGH, this fact is mere noise in Judges 3. But under an “imaginative” reading of scripture, which seeks to integrate all the textual data to find its fullest meaning, this is an illuminating fact, in view of Ehud bringing this “offering” to a fattened calf.
The tribute is “brought near” (vv. 17–18)
Twice the text also describes him as “bringing near” this tribute — repeating the phrase for emphasis. This is the same term used throughout scripture to speak of approaching the throne of God with an offering. Where you will read of offerings in Leviticus, the Hebrew is often actually “near-bringings” (e.g., Lev 4:23). And in the same way, the book of Hebrews bids us to bring ourselves near to the throne of grace through Christ (Heb 4:16). As we gain access to communion with God when we bring near ourselves as offerings, so Ehud gains access to communion with Eglon by bringing near a tribute.
But communion is a dangerous thing. It is a time of judgment — which is why we have a solemn warning associated with taking it: if you partake unworthily, you will not receive blessing from the Lord, but rather cursing. Some of the Corinthians even died (1 Cor 11:29–30).
In the same way, Eglon dies when he takes this “sacramental” offering. I don’t mean that he is actually taking communion, of course; only that the Spirit ascribes the same sacramental pattern to the event, through his choice of words and phrases. Ehud draws near with a tribute, and brings judgment with him.
The judgment is a “word” which is a “sword” with “two mouths”
Ehud tells Eglon that he has a word from God (v. 20) — but it is a word enacted, rather than spoken. It comes in the form of a sword with two mouths (v. 16). Translations obscure this too, saying merely a “double-edged sword” — because under the LGH, the mouths of the sword have no meaning aside from a quaint idiom.
But what if they do?
Surely they have at least the additional implication of a double-judgement. The sword both “speaks” to Eglon, and “devours” him, with not just one mouth, but two. Edges, by contrast, neither talk nor eat.
More importantly, perhaps, the fact that swords in scripture have mouths, and that the word of God is a sword (Eph 6:17; Heb 4:12), and that this sword proceeds from the mouth (Rev 1:16), cannot be relegated to mere idiomatic curiosity. To assume that the mouth of the sword means nothing but the edge, and thus to translate it edge instead of mouth, is to do simple-minded violence to God’s own words which doesn’t end in Judges — it carries through all the way to the end of time, because it has great import for rightly understanding the sword that proceeds out of Christ’s own mouth, with which he smites the nations (Rev 19:15). Is this a literal sword, or a symbolic one? The difference could not be starker in terms of understanding the end times. Either Revelation 19 is depicting the triumph of the gospel (spiritual warfare), or it is depicting a physical battle (“literal” warfare). The telos of the gospel itself is at stake here.
The assassination occurs on a high place
We are specifically told, several times, that the assassination takes place in an “upper room” (vv 20, 23, 24, 25). The quadruple emphasis suggests the detail is important; yet under the LGH, it is just an incidental curiosity; a fact included for historical completeness; a detail to reassure us it really happened. Its meaning is exhausted in architectural topology.
But the word in Hebrew derives from alah, which means ascension — the same word used of the chief atoning sacrifice in Leviticus, the so-called “burnt offering.” (If you get me started on all the words butchered in English translations of Leviticus, though, we will be here all day.) In the New Testament, of course, the upper room becomes associated with the last supper and with Pentecost. That is where the disciples gather: a high place where they share communion with the Lord, and later fire descends upon them — the same pattern as Sinai: a meal with God, and fire on the mountain.
Here in Judges 3, the upper room is also a high place to God, where a sacramental event takes place, and a life is offered in sacrifice.
The fattened calf is devoured by flame
Translating the Hebrew literally, we read that “Ehud sent forth his left hand, and took the sword from off his right thigh, and drove it into his belly; and the post also went in after the flame, and the fat shut on the flame…” (vv 21–22). Taking the LGH approach, this is grammatical curiosity both trivial and confusing to the English reader, and thus must be discarded. The flame going in after the post is noise; the signal is that the blade went in after the hilt.
But it only takes a little thought to see the connection between fire and swords, and it is a connection explicitly made many times in scripture itself. If you ask a child to draw flames, they will draw you curvy blades; and blades themselves produce fiery pain when they go into your flesh. That the sword is described as a flame can hardly be a coincidence given all the other sacrificial imagery and language that has already been used! The word of God brought to Eglon is a flame that consumes him, just as the flame consumes an offering on an altar (a miniature high place).
The sword’s hilt, by turn, is called the “post.” This particular word is used only here in the Hebrew Bible. Why? Perhaps because of the significance of its root: a word which is almost universally used of erecting altars, creating pillars, and making Asherah-poles. You post an altar, you create a post of stone, you carve an Asherah-post. It is also used of the three angels posting themselves near Abraham in Genesis 18:2; the angel of God posting himself in the way of Balaam and his donkey in Numbers 22, and many other semi-sacramental or religious events and things in the Torah.
Applying the imaginative hermeneutic further
The sword goes into Eglon’s “belly” — the same word in Hebrew as the word for “womb.” Eglon has been devouring the Israelites for 18 years; now we see what the fruit of his great pregnant belly is, and it is nothing good. In Leviticus, the dung of the animal sacrifices must be burned. Here, the same word is used: as the flame goes in, it burns out the dung. Meanwhile, the fat — the part reserved for God — shuts on the blade; and Ehud shuts the doors on Eglon (v. 23). This is also religiously-freighted language: not only is it the same word used in Genesis 7:16 of Yahweh shutting the door of the ark “on” Noah, but it is generally used in one of only two ways in scripture: either of making atonement “on” the sins of the people (in Leviticus); or praying “on” Yahweh in behalf of someone (in the rest of scripture). Thus further sacramental connotations are brought into the story through this somewhat unusual word choice.
Is this just noise?
On the literal-grammatical-historical method, it is “dangerous” to engage in “subjective” and “speculative” readings of the text like this. Where are the guardrails? How can we know we’re not just making things up, seeing what we want to see, engaging in gross pareidolia? How can we tell the difference between such imaginative readings of the text, and eisegesis?
But suppose I cannot answer — suppose I don’t have a hard and fast rule on how to tell when we’re going too far.
So what?
These details in the text aren’t just noise — and simply explaining them like I have above proves that they aren’t to anyone with eyes to see. Do you really want to go back to reading the text in black and white, rather than color? Do you really want to cling to an extra-scriptural theory about how the signal of God’s word is carried, if it causes you to comprehensively discard pervasive parts of it as noise? Do you really want to strip the meaning from scripture because meaning-making requires more work than you originally thought?
More importantly…how dare you?
For a fuller explication of the sacramental elements in this passage, see my sermon here:
Do you have any qualms with Augustine’s fourfold interpretive method? (Literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical)?
This was great, definitely made me think of the usefulness of the Quadriga. Peter Leithart has some good stuff on the Quadriga. When I preach, that is the hermeneutic I use.