\nAnd so the well which was with the Israelites in the wilderness was a rock<\/strong>, the size of a large round vessel, surging and gurgling upward, as from the mouth of its little flask, rising with them up onto the mountains, and going down with them into the valleys.\u00a0 Wherever the Israelites would encamp, it made camp with them<\/strong>, on a high place, opposite the entry of the Tent of Meeting.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/peteenns.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/moses-strikes-rock.jpg\")
There is a certain \u201cancient logic\u201d at work here. After all, the Israelites had manna given to them miraculously every morning along with a nice helping of quail meat. But what about water? Are we to think that the corresponding miraculous supply of water was only given twice, 40 years apart!? Of course not.\u00a0So to \u201csolve\u201d this problem, the water supply became mobile\u2014a portable drinking fountain.<\/p>\n
Evangelicals could write off this bit of biblical \u201cinterpretation\u201d as entertaining or just plain silly, but 1 Corinthians 10:4 complicates things\u2014Paul refers to Jesus not just as \u201cthe rock\u201d but \u201cthe\u00a0accompanying<\/em>\u00a0rock.\u201d<\/p>\nPaul,\u00a0a Jewish interpreter<\/em>, is showing his familiarity with\u00a0and acceptance of<\/em>\u00a0this creative Jewish handling of the \u201cwater from a rock\u201d incident.<\/p>\nLet me put a finer point on that: the Old Testament says nothing about a portable supply of water from a rock, but Paul does. Paul says something about the Old Testament that the Old Testament doesn\u2019t say. He wasn\u2019t following the evangelical rule of \u00a0\u201cgrammatical-historical\u201d contextual interpretation. He was doing something else\u2014something odd (for us), something ancient and Jewish.<\/p>\n
Once I saw this, I knew the Bible was no longer protected under glass. It was out there, part of an ancient world I really didn\u2019t understand\u2014and was never really prepared to handle.<\/h2>\n
For Paul\u2014an inspired apostle\u2014to accept such a strange legend and treat it as fact is not something that can be easily brought into an evangelical framework. \u201cBut Paul is inspired by God! He would never say something like this!!\u201d<\/p>\n
But he did.<\/p>\n
And it struck me that Paul probably couldn\u2019t get a job teaching at the seminary that taught me about Paul.<\/p>\n
This aha moment didn\u2019t happen in isolation. It came in the context of years of pretty intense and in-depth doctoral work where my main area of focus was Second Temple biblical interpretation.\u00a0But here, at this moment, the light turned on, some tumblers clunked heavily into place, and I was seeing a bigger picture, not just about this one verse but about the Bible as a whole.<\/p>\n
I was seeing right before my eyes that Paul and the other New Testament writers were part of this ancient world of Jewish traditions of biblical interpretation. And what seems so odd to us was right at home in Paul\u2019s 1st century world.<\/p>\n
Evangelical attempts to make Paul sound more evangelical and less Jewish\u2014to make him into a \u201csound\u201d interpreter of scripture\u2014immediately rang hollow, and continue to.<\/h2>\n
And I knew back then, as I do now, that the model of biblical interpretation I had been taught was not going to cut it if I was going to try to explain<\/em> how my Bible works rather than defend<\/em> a Bible that doesn\u2019t exist. I couldn\u2019t deny what I was seeing. I knew I had some thinking to do.<\/p>\nThat happened nearly 30 years ago, and the memory is still vivid. And it\u2019s fair to say this aha moment, along with others before and since, have shaped my life\u2019s work of trying to understand the Bible rather than defend it. And that is, to me, much more interesting, meaningful, and spiritually enriching.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Following on an earlier post, here is the issue that made it impossible for me to shake the feeling that something was wrong with how I was taught to think about the Bible. The Bible just wasn\u2019t behaving as I had always been told it\u00a0most certainly does\u2014needs to\u2014behave. This happened while in graduate school and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8829,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[]},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8828"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8828\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}