Readings in Old Testament Studies

Muhammad Wolfgang G. A. Schmidt

LIST OF CONTENTS

The Need to interpret the Bible ... 1
Interpreting Old Testament Scripture in Translation ... 3
Literary forms of the Old Testament ... 5
Literary forms and Interpretation ... 8
Literary forms and Inspiration ... 9
Exegetical Procedures ... 12
The Components of Old Testament Narrative ... 21
Interpreting Old Testament Narrative ... 23
The Accuracy of Historical Narrative ... 27
How A Covenant functions ... 30
How Law functions ... 34
EXEGESIS I ... 36
EXEGESIS II ... 38
EXEGESIS III ... 41
Interpreting Oracles of Salvation ... 47
Announcement of Judgment ... 49
EXEGESIS IV ... 57
Lament and Praise ... 64
Proverb and Wisdom ... 68
EXEGESIS V ... 73

The Need To Interpret the Bible

The basic need to interpret Biblical texts (in general) must be considered in terms of the dimensions of time and the audience addressed. All the Biblical texts were written more than two-thousand years ago, and with no doubt have ways of living and the context settings in which these divine words and thoughts were uttered very much changed since then. Such context settings were meaningful to the contemporaries of their respective time, but this is not necessarily the case with contemporary readers of nowadays.

Such contextual settings relate to a) historical, b) cultural, c) spiritual circumstances at the time when these divine words were uttered. To understand the the spiritual message (the “kerygma”) of a biblical periocope, we need to “explore” such background of settings to answer important questions such as: (i) What was the reason of such message from God?, (ii) what was the content, and (iii) what objective did it have to have An impact on the lifes of the people (audience) addressed? Only after having succesfully answered such questions, can we develop the “kerygma” behind and apply to our lives today. These are methodical requirements of such a preliminary procedure to “dig out” the kerygma behind, and in doing so, we avoid misinterpretation of the divine message in presenting biblically incorrect conclusions that lead people astray from what the Lord really wanted to communicate to mankind. Doing this is an analytic effort of some intellectual standing that we have to follow each time when teaching or preaching to other people around us. It must be done not only out of highest respect for God´s Word delivered to mankind but also of the huge responsibility we have in delivering it “uncorrupted” to our audience, without adding or missing anything that was transmitted to us. Church history, in the past and recently, teaches us a very important lesson: The fact that so many different denominations evolved during the course of time in the period after the Early Church in Jerusalem points out to differences in doctrine that have split Christianity and continue to do so today. They all have “interpreted” portions or the whole of the Bible in “their way”, and exactly this shows the high potential of “private ontology” that can influence conclusions and concepts claimed to be in accord with the Bible but which are nothing else than human based “errors”. Our point of orientation is that what the Bible actually says and not what we think it says. Therefore, we need proper analysis by means of exegesis before turning to working out the “kerygma”, i.e. application in hermeneutical terms.

A second important issue is the historicity of divine message transmission in the Bible down to us in these days. The first audience addressed were the writers of these biblical texts who delivered it – either in speaking or writing – the audience of their times, i.e. their contemporaries. The third in line would be the reader of these texts nowadays. This is a line (sequence) of communication stages with the contemporary reader at the end of the transmission chain. Original manuscripts were lost during the course of time, and so the Biblical scholar depends on secondary literary sources which may be copie from copies from copies, etc. “Establishing the authentic text” is an absolutely essential prerequisite, and scholars have done this for us- -the preachers, teachers and pastors in the various congregations. Ours then is the part to make good and responsible use of the results of this scholarly work in terms of a proper and methodically correct way of interpretation and application of biblical texts.

Interpreting The Old Testament In Translation

Every interpretation must,of course, be based on an authentic text, and if translations, due to their shortcomings they may always have in one form or the other, are such authentic texts would then be a good question to ask. In the long and dascinating history of Bible translation there always have been instances of translation influenced by doctrinal preconceptions, and this then in concequence may have contributed to unauthentical rendering of the original Biblical text in the target language. Another obstacle may be the availability of manuscripts in the original biblical language from which translation into the target language is to be made: Martin Luther used an edition of the Greek New Testament by Erasmus of Rotterdam, and he and his team (in partiular with Philipp Melanchthon, German: “Schwarzerd”) may have faced similar restrictions on authentic text sources when translating portions of the Old Testament. Especially since the discovery of new text witnesses in the latter half of the 19th centrury, many more sources of text “originals” (we better may term them “text witnesses”) are available to us. This also holds true for OT text sources, of course. 

However, text variants in the various text witnesses seem to be of less significance as one might expect, and in general, these witnesses do confirm a more or less authentic transmission of their first originals.

There are basically two ways to render an original text into a target language: a) literal and b) so-called free translation, the latter of which would be a kind of paraphrase of the content in the original text. Both ways may have their potentials and also their limitations. While it is clear that the objective of translation should be an authetic rendering of the original text (either spoken or written) not adding or missing anything contained in the original, it depends very much on the details of genre, text structure, and context settings which determine the translator to decide on either approach of translation. Literal translations normally keep very close to the text original in terms of lexis (vocabulary), grammatical structures employed, and perhaps even “style”. This could be useful when the objective would be to document what and how the content was commuicated in the original. It may be less or even not useful at all when the aim is understanding, and the audience addressed by this translation has a distance in terms of time and culture to the audience addressed in the original. A translation is not only to bridge a linguistic gap – that between a source and a target language, but also a cultural gap as well. The broader the gap, the more careful you must be in your literal translation when it is to be understood by a broad audience in the target language with people from all walks of life (and the Bible, most certainly is such a text). Idioms in the source and their adequate rendering into the target langauge are a good example here to illustrate this “conflict”. Free translation, on the other hand, differs from literal translation insofar that it attempts the communicate the original message as authentical as possible to the audience in the target language by using lexic, structures and style appropriate to their linguistic environment, by thus departing from lexic, structures and perhaps stylistic means of expression in the source language.

Also culture sometimes sets limits for literal translation: Everyone knows what a house is but houses in different cultures are also different, and one aspect of house in the culture of the source language may play a crucial role in the text of the original language, and it may totally different in the culture of the target language. How do you translate items then? ---You would have to find some examples from the target culture to illustrate what the text original tried to say. Or, how do you translate certain passages with reference to camels, for example, made into the language of the eskimos of Greenland (Innuit)? 

The main objective in communication always is that the addressee understands what the writer/speaker wanted to say, and this objective also applies in translating such communicative content. Idiomatic expression, for example, then may be rendered in free translation while other portions of the text may rendered in a more literal way. The art of the translator would be to do a good combination of these two approaches whenever required and to bring them into a whole harmonious complete form. In Bible translation, you might follow a guideline such as this: Wherever possible, translate literally , but where this may be an obstacle in understanding for the audience of the target language in mind,use free translation!

As translators, we never translate lexical, grammatical, or even genre meaning. These are artificial divisions for heuristic reasons. In practice, we translate something more complex than that: communicative meaning, and this is made up of such subcomponents that linguistis may call “lexical”, “grammatical” meaning. Communicative meaning is that what finally is being perceived and received by the end user of the translation product --- human language and communication is in the way it is: it is more than purely linguistic material for which translational equivalences in the target language must be found, and it is so very much even in our own, in anybody´s, native tongue.

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Muhammad Wolfgang G. A. Schmidt, Jg. 1950. Studium der Sprachwissenschaften, Afrikanistik, Sinologie, Traditionellen Chinesischen Medizin, Theologie und Religionswissenschaften an Universitäten in Deutschland, China und den USA. Promotion und Habilitation. Langjährige Lehr- und Forschungserfahrung an Universitäten in Fernost (China und Korea), Nordafrika, Europa und den USA. Z.Zt. Professor für Vergleichende Religionswissenschaft an der NationsUniversity, West Monroe, La., USA. Autor zahlreicher Lehr- und sonstiger Fachbücher zu Sprache/Kultur Chinas und Koreas, Traditionellen Chinesischen Medizin und zu Theologie und Religionswissenschaft.