Hermeneutics – Not From Around Here

An Approach to Learning Isaiah

I’m still learning how to study my bible, so I figured I’d post this approach to Isaiah that I’m taking in case it helps someone find some direction for their own study.

I’m currently digging into Isaiah because Paul establishes much of his thinking, purpose, and ministry on the ideas and words in Isaiah. My approach is this:

1. Listen to Isaiah

Listening to the scriptures is how much of the ancient Jewish world absorbed them. And like a school of fish in water, the ancient Jews understood their scriptures not just as a component of their culture, but their culture itself; the environment they lived, worked, and breathed in. My goal here was to get the big picture; understand where ideas, topics, and audiences shifted; and to see Isaiah come to life in my mind like a movie. Aside from audible chapter breaks, there would be no verse numbers or chapter headers distracting me.

Listening took me about three days to do so as contiguously as possible. I’ve worked hard at learning how to pay attention to audio study as I’m going about day-to-day activities, e.g., driving or cleaning around the house. And when I can’t pay attention, like when I enter the grocery store to pick up a few items, I pause the audio. I know I want to pay attention, and I have to modify my behavior in order to do this effectively. I know that looking for items on the store shelves will require more attention than I have to also hear what’s playing through my headphones. So I pause. When I listen, I listen at 1.5x speed. If you listen to The Bible Project podcasts, you’ll thank me for that if you aren’t already listening at 1.5x.

2. Listening to audio, write down 3-10 key ideas and details for each chapter

This took a couple of weeks. I couldn’t do this in the car. I had to do this sitting down, closing my eyes, and hitting play on the bible app. I would listen to each chapter in its entirety, listening carefully, making mental notes, and then pause at the end of the chapter to write down some bullet points.

I use Logos to support my study. It will read the audio, allow me to adjust the speed, and provide a single repository for all my notes in a tag-able, searchable format. I know YouVersion will play audio for free. And probably other apps too.

3. Transcribe Isaiah chapter-by-chapter

Yes, I’m typing the words of Isaiah from the ESV into my Logos notes as I read them out loud to myself. While I’m doing this I also have the interlinear pane turned on so that I can see the Hebrew and have quick access to Logos Word Studies that give me fingertip access to meanings and context.

In my transcription I substitute Yahweh for LORD, Yaweh sabaot (Lord of hosts – the leader of Yahweh’s army), El or el / Eloha / Elohe / Elohim for God, elohim for god (when distinguishing between Yahweh the El of Israel and the other gods / el/elohim of other nations), Qadosh Israel (Holy One of Israel), and Adonai for Lord (the English translators use “lord” to mean a few different things) in order to help me make the words I’m reading very clear to me so I get the right understanding, e.g., which god are we talking about, or which form or role of the Hebrew God is in play.

Taking this approach gives me an opportunity to understand what the original writers were thinking. This all helps with clarity of meaning of the text. As I write this on Dec 28 I’m around chapter 50.

You can find free interlinears online. Logos interlinear is a paid feature (I think around $20) and well worth the cost for the extremely effective formatting and the integration with the entire Logos platform.

Try following this example.

This is my transcription of a segment of Isaiah 41. Notice the “god” words. Qadosh is Holy One; Yahweh is usually translated LORD; and Elohe is god/God, so in this case it’s the God of Israel (as opposed to another god).

Transcription Example: Notice the “god” words

Here is what the interlinear in Logos looks like and what I used to make my English substitutions. When I click on a word in the text, the interlinear pane at the bottom of the screen highlights the current word and provides context. In this case I’ve highlighted “the God” and you can see in the interlinear that the transliteration (English spelling of the Hebrew sounds) is Elohe. Logos will tell you what part of speech the word is and even pronounce it for you.

Sometimes I come across an English word in the ESV that just doesn’t sound right in the context of what I’m reading. One of those cases for me is the word “savior” as used a few times in Isaiah. I’m thinking that they aren’t talking about a savior the way modern evangelicals think about Jesus and that this word can confuse ideas and lead to a misunderstanding of Isaiah. I use the interlinear to help me understand what’s happening behind the English translation. In this case I’m thinking “deliverer” provides a clearer understanding of the point Isaiah makes.

The Hebrew linguistic context of the English translation Savior in Isaiah 43

Without departing too far from my workflow, I can quickly get additional context in Logos by right clicking a word. Logos provides a number of options to drill into.

Right clicking on “Savior” provides this contextual menu of options in Logos

If I choose Bible Word Study near the top right of the context menu, Logos provides, well, a Word Study tool where I can get an understanding of the word, its meaning, and how its used throughout both scripture and other non-biblical content that I own in my Logos library.

4. Chapter-by-chapter notes and in-depth contextual study

Once I complete the transcription I’ll leverage my Logos library (in which I’ve invested quite a bit) to support my study. I’ll take notes on my findings as I spend time reading passage-by passage through Isaiah again, accessing dictionaries and commentaries, soaking in the history and looking up words I don’t know. Places and geography matters. Finding these on maps will further refine my understanding. Most of this work I can do in Logos without having to keep hard copy books open on my desk. Having multiple monitors helps keep all the content accessible.

This will have been my fourth pass through Isaiah, getting a bit deeper with each pass.

5. Understanding the interconnections within the text

One of my goals in this phase of the study will be to identify and understand where and why Paul refers to Isaiah as he corresponds with the different churches as well as the record of Paul’s behavior in Luke’s account of Acts. How did Paul’s understanding of Judaism change? How does he understand his role in God’s unfolding plan? What is Paul’s understanding of the meaning of scripture? There are many questions here.

In one sense this is pretty easy to do. Most English bibles footnote the New Testament text where the writers refer to Old Testament passages. So just follow the footnotes.

In another sense, this is crazy stupid hard to do because you have to channel your inner ancient Israelite in order to really get it. New Testament writers don’t refer to an Old Testament passage just for the passage’s sake. That’s called proof texting, and the ancient Israelites didn’t handle their scriptures that way. Because the ancient community is as familiar with their heritage as a fish is with water, when the writer refers to a passage, that writer also assumes the reader or hearer will pull in all of the Old Testament context associated with that passage in order to understand the point. As modern readers, we don’t get that context at all by just following the footnotes. In order to understand our New Testament the way the NT writers meant us to, we have to not just know the words in our OT, but also their context and meaning. They need to live within us. For me, everything I outlined above is the foundational work that helps me get ready to do the hard work of interconnection.

I have Matt Halstead’s book Paul and the Meaning of Scripture on my list. It’s not in Logos yet, so I’m debating on the Kindle version now ($10), or wait. NT Wright’s academic work on Paul is also on my list, but it’s a 1,600 page slog. Both of these will make the connections between the Jewish scriptures and Paul’s thinking that will provide context for New Testament readers. I do own the Dictionary of Paul and his Letters which I expect to aid in my research. What’s nice about Logos is that I don’t have to remember what content I own. I perform the searches I need to do, and Logos returns the hits across my library.

So that’s how I’m approaching my Isaiah study. I hope this helps.

Debunking the Hermeneutic of Obedience and the Deprioritization of the Old Testament

Evangelicalism suffers from the hermeneutic of obedience, and by implication the deprioritization of the content of the Old Testament. The New Testament fundamentally depends on the Old Testament, and to marginalize its importance is harmful and dangerous.

A hermeneutic is a lens that you use to support interpretation. If you’re aware of the lens, then you can adopt a given lens to do some interpretation. When you’re done you probably adopt another lens to do a different kind of interpretation. In biblical studies, examples include the tried-and-true standard historical-grammatical academic hermeneutic that aims to discover an author’s original meaning. An alternative might be the African-American hermeneutic that Esau McCaulley adopts in his book Reading While Black.

Evangelicals seem to suffer from what I’ll call the hermeneutic of obedience where they read the bible looking for commands to obey. I won’t say this is an invalid hermeneutic, but when it’s a preacher’s primary lens for how they read their bible, it’s harmful and downright dangerous. In my experience, every sermon, no matter which passages are used, becomes a lesson of “You’re not good enough.” This lens also robs a person of the opportunity to have a good conscience towards God. Instead, their behavior is an exercise of trying to obey in order to relieve the guilt.

If it’s not obvious, there are a number of strong qualitative reasons to choose a different hermeneutic as your primary lens on the bible. We’re not going to look at the qualitative reasons in this post. Instead we’re going to take a quantitative, data-driven, look at the hermeneutic of obedience, first, because it should be obvious just how bad it is after doing so, and second because the graphs just look cool.

When I hear preachers camp on obedience, the other thing I tend to hear is that the Old Testament isn’t that important. That shouldn’t surprise us because, as we’ll see, the Old Testament isn’t full of commands to obey. The fact that the bible of the early church, the bible of Acts 2, was the Jewish scripture (yes, that body of work we call the Old Testament) is completely lost on them. It shows just how little these people understand their bible. In my sphere of information, this hermeneutic seems endemic in evangelicalism, but I get a sense the tides are shifting given the tremendous access of good bible teaching at our fingertips. Hopefully it’s a short matter of time before we can bury this one.

I use Logos as my bible study tool. It’s not inexpensive. If you’re just a bible reader, don’t get it. But if you want to invest time and money to learn how to study your bible, then perhaps give it a spin. If you do want to try it, contact me as I get access to discounts from time to time.

If you take a look at the video, I walk through the Bible Books Explorer in Logos. The tremendous value of Logos is the work they do to tag EVERYTHING to so many different taxonomies. You can slice and dice biblical data in ways unimaginable a couple decades ago. The Bible Books Explorer adopts the taxonomy work of Robert Longacre to categorize the biblical text into

Narrative – story telling
Procedure – think Levitical laws
Behavior – commands to obey
Exposition – what things are like

At a glance in the video it’s obvious that those who subscribe to the hermeneutic of obedience have to deprioritize the Old Testament because there just aren’t a lot of commands to obey. What’s missed is that even the New Testament contains significantly little command language relative to the entire body of New Testament content. To adopt this approach essentially means ignoring more than half of the New Testament.

Sometimes Acts 2:42 is used to support deprioritizing the Old Testament because the disciples “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching . . .,” and you find the apostles’ teaching in the New Testament. The problem is that most of the apostles didn’t contribute to the New Testament, and all of the apostles taught from the Old Testament (sort of, but we’ll just say that to simplify things).

In the video you’ll see how literally dependent on the Old Testament that the early church is.¹ For us today, without a deep understanding of the Old Testament you’re going to get your interpretation of the New Testament wrong. Or at best be woefully incomplete. You just are. And frankly, if you find yourself in a community where obedience is valued and the Old Testament is deprioritized, you wouldn’t be faulted for taking whatever is taught with a grain of salt.

Without getting into the detail here, the early church is a sect of Judaism. There isn’t a conversion per se to Christianity. So it’s not so much that the early church was dependent on the OT as much as the OT is their scripture. To be blunt, even after ALL the New Testament is written, the Old Testament is still the church’s scripture. It doesn’t stop being the foundation of all they know and believe just because Paul and others explained the implications of Jesus in documents that were shared among the believers.

5 Steps to Supercharge Your Bible Study

Ok, clickbait. Sort of. There are 5 steps. If you already have a mature study discipline these probably aren’t new. If you’re not sure how to study your bible, these straightforward steps will begin to take you from reading your bible to studying your bible.

So maybe we need to define studying and think about that with respect to how we tend to interact with our bible. This could be oversimplifying, but maybe not. We tend to read, rather than study, our bible. We tend to read a chapter or two at a time. We tend to look for passages that we can apply to our life (think hope, grief, morality, encouragement, etc.). We tend to spend more time in the New Testament and less in the Old. We tend, probably unintentionally, to think the bible was written for me. At least that’s how we talk about it: “This passage encouraged me because I know that God understands my struggle.” To sum it up, we tend to read the bible pretty me-centrically. I have 20 minutes for a quiet time today. I need to improve; I need to work on this sin; I need to pray more. What can I get out of my reading, and what can I apply to my life today. I suppose we’ve all heard someone say at one time or another something like, “I’m not done with my quiet time today until I find something I can apply to my life.”

In contrast, let’s define bible study as the practice of trying to understand what the authors say and what the original reader would have understood. This is not straightforward. Not because we can’t read the words, but because we don’t live in the culture. It’s like reading Shakespeare. His plays at the time they were written were entertainment for the masses. From the lower classes to the higher classes, everyone got the innuendos, the sarcasm, the idioms and plays on words. They understood the language. But today the average English speaker has to struggle and pay close attention to sort of get most of what’s happening in a Shakespeare performance. We miss the cultural connections and the word plays. That’s the dynamic we face when interacting with our bible. The goal of bible study is to get into the setting of the author and who that author writes for.

The discipline of bible study will challenge and excite you for the rest of your life if you let it. These five practices will get you started.

1. Read the entire letter or book in one sitting

You’re looking for the big picture here. Why was this thing written? Why is the writer responding and what is he responding to?

This is best practice especially for the letters in the New Testament. What is a letter after all if not a personal communication. Like getting an update from a friend who sends a letter with a holiday card. Or a long email discussing a family reunion as a destination vacation. You don’t start by turning to page two and reading the third paragraph. First you read the whole thing so you can figure out the big picture of what’s going on.

Reading, say, a chapter at a time and one chapter a day of Hebrews, you’ll read the whole book in 13 days. By day 5 or 6 you’ve forgotten the important details of chapters 1 and 2. By chapter 10 you may forget the book is about the superiority of Jesus to Torah and that the works of the law won’t “save” you. You’ll wind up reading verse 25, “not neglecting to meet together,” and come to a conclusion that if you’re not at all the church meetings then you’re in sin. Which is sort of not the point of, well, any of Hebrews.

For most letters of the New Testament you might spend 45 to 90 minutes reading from beginning to end. Some are a 10-minute read. Some Old Testament books might take a couple hours. If you have YouVersion read Hebrews to you, that takes about 50 minutes. You might need to do this on a weekend or a day off if your general bible reading is a half hour or so. Set aside the time and plan for it so you can read from beginning to end uninterrupted. You might need to do this a couple of times for each letter if you’re not used to reading this way. The first time might just be too jarring as you try to take in and understand so much detail.

2. Read your bible like a novel, read a letter like a conversation at Starbucks

The bible is not a math, or science, or legal textbook where you learn formulaic processes to solve problems. It’s not a checklist of do’s and don’ts. Rather it’s the story of God and his people. Again oversimplifying, the Old Testament tells God’s story from creation to Noah, to Abraham, to David, to Jesus and the restoration of God’s creation. The New Testament authors tell about the life of Jesus and work out what their scriptures (the Old Testament) mean in light of Jesus and how our purpose in our Jesus communities is to partner and participate in the restoration work of God as he restores his creation through the resurrected Messiah.

Read the Old Testament books, the gospels, and Revelation like a novel. You don’t open a novel and start on page 87. No, you start on page one and read to the end. Why? Because the detail on page 132 is important and connects back to page 49. The author wrote, edited, and revised the story to make these connections. It’s deliberate and purposeful. The biblical authors and editors wrote with the same intentionality. Read it like a story so you can make the connections. And don’t skip the Old Testament or think that the value is its wisdom. Literally the ENTIRE New Testament is founded on all sorts of detail in the Old Testament. Just look at all the footnotes in your New Testament, especially if you read ^*the NET bible. The New Testament is, dare I say, incoherent without a firm grasp of the Old Testament. This will ground you in God’s story.

Read the letters in the New Testament like you’re having a conversation at Starbucks with a friend. That friend is talking to you about something very meaningful. You listen intently to make sure you understand them because you deeply care for your friend and get the sense that what they are telling you has profound implications on your life. In a conversation with a good friend you don’t generally sit there waiting for commands to be told to you. You actively listen. You ask clarifying questions. You respond. Communication goes both ways.

3. Identify who the “you” and the “we” or “us” are in the New Testament letters

There is this passage in 2 Corinthians from 2:14 – 6:13 where Paul finds himself defending the role of the apostles to the believers, the Jesus community, in Corinth. Right. Maybe slow down and read that again. Paul, a man with extensive education and context, who has been taught by Jesus himself, has to defend himself to other Christians. And he also stands up to the Corinthians in defense of the other apostles.

A segment of this passage in 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 reads

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

This is the kind of passage heard in sermons regularly encouraging us to not lose heart in the face of health issues, or financial problems, or marriage and family struggles, because these are “light momentary affliction.” And of course that’s true. But it’s not the point of this passage. The “we” here is the apostles. In the sense of “we,” Paul talks about the struggles of being an apostle and why the apostles are able to persevere – even against their own brothers and sisters in Christ. The sense of “we” is clarified in 4:15 because Paul contrasts “we the apostles” with “you the Corinthians.” Paul says, “For it is all for your sake . . .” Again in 5:12 Paul makes this clear saying, “We are not commending ourselves to you again but giving you cause to boast about us . . .”

This use of “we” meaning not you the reader, and “you” meaning you the reader (sort of – we’ll get to that in the next point) is prevalent in the New Testament letters. Your understanding of quite a bit of what’s going on will be flipped on its head once you get this. And back to the first point, you’ll probably miss it if you don’t read the entire letter in one sitting.

4. Figure out if “you” and “your” is singular or plural

The word “you” in English is ambiguous. Does it mean “you that person?” Or “all of you in the crowd?” Only through context does the sense of you being singular or plural get clarified. That actually becomes a huge obstacle to understanding our bible. Does an important passage apply to me specifically? Or my Jesus community that meets in my church building? Or a network of house churches addressed in Hebrews and Romans? Or maybe all the churches in my city? How you read and apply “you” changes dramatically how the world around us experiences Jesus and the gospel.

Take for instance Romans 12:1-2

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

In this passage the “you” in most cases is Greek plural, something like “all of you.” To clarify what the author intends to communicate to the original audience in Greek, the passage would read something like this in English:

I appeal to all of you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present all of your bodies together collectively as one living sacrifice [singular sacrifice], holy and acceptable to God, which is your collectively unified act of spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but each one of you be transformed by the renewal of your [singular in this instance, thus each one of you] mind, that by testing you, together as a community, may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

The living sacrifice is singular. The plural “you” instructs the collective audience to come together around the idea of a living sacrifice. However good it is that you or I might individually and sacrificially serve, love, and give of ourselves, that’s not where this passage is going. Rather, the passage points to the world-changing, creation-restoring power of God’s mercy as our Jesus communities together worship God as a singular sacrifice. That is an entirely different level of meaning for us as Christians and how we intentionally come together, because, Jesus. And in this case it profoundly affects how the world around us sees Christianity. This meaning is dependent on understanding who is included in the “you.”

You can determine the use of “you” in a tool called an interlinear bible. Here’s a link to Romans 12 in a free online interlinear. Open it up and take a look. You should get the basic idea of what’s going on as each Greek word or phrase is augmented with explanatory detail.

This screen shot contains annotations of an instance of “you” and the living sacrifice in this passage. The “you” is identified as plural, and the living sacrifice as singular. To use the interlinear, open up the verse you’re looking for and hover your mouse over the details.

#5 – Ask yourself questions about what you just read

When we read the bible as a text book, a checklist of commands to obey, or, basically, not as a story, then everything is a fact being spit out *at* you. That might be fine if it’s the very first time you’ve read your bible, but after a year or so of familiarity you want to grow to a point where the details startle you, or make you ask why, or cause you to compare what you just read with a passage you know that maybe contradicts it. You’re trying to get at the author’s point to his audience or why this particular detail is important to the story.

For instance, in Acts 4:36 we get the detail that Joseph, a Levite, sold a field:

Thus Joseph, who was also called by the apostles Barnabas (which means son of encouragement), a Levite, a native of Cyprus, sold a field that belonged to him and brought the money and laid it at the apostles’ feet.

Ok, whatever. If you know your Old Testament you might wonder why Joseph had land to sell because the Levites were not given land in the distribution to the tribes. So you can walk through some lines of reasoning to fill in the details. Maybe the Levites weren’t prohibited from buying land for themselves. Or Joseph, being from Cyprus, would not have owned land in Israel, but maybe the land he owned was in Cyprus.

Another example might be Paul not being ashamed of the gospel in Romans 1:16

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”

Maybe the gut reaction for a modern reader is, “Of course not. I’m not ashamed of the gospel. I know it’s my purpose to share my faith and make disciples.” And that’s fine. Yet given Paul’s education, the amount of suffering he’s been through for the name of Jesus, his need to spend 10 years reworking everything he knew about Judaism and the scriptures in order to land where he has on the expected Messiah, you would not be faulted for thinking it’s gotta be deeper than that.

The question you might ask is, “Why does Paul even have to note that he’s not ashamed of the gospel?” Could he have left this detail out and not changed the message to his audience? Paul doesn’t just add extraneous detail. It must mean something. In the passage he mentions Jew and Gentile. This is a touchy area for the Jews; you don’t associate with Gentiles. And if you’re familiar with Paul’s communications you know that the Jew-Gentile relationship, and the Gentile inclusion in God’s family, is foundational to how Paul understands the work of Jesus. In that case, perhaps he’s doubling down on not only not tiptoeing around the issue but raising it in the opening of his communication. Maybe there are other reasons he could be ashamed but isn’t. The gospel crescendos with the kingship and lordship of Jesus as opposed that of Caesar. Paul’s proclamation of the gospel undermines and subverts the government, the lordship of Caesar, and the gospel attached to Caesar, and Paul’s not ashamed to subvert this.

Asking questions of the bible will help you identify topics for further study in order to understand its context. That will help you get a better grasp of what your bible means, not just what it says.

Wrapping Up

Understanding the bible is difficult because we don’t live in the context of the original author and audience. These practices will help you start to get into their minds and that context. If you add these to your discipline of bible study you’ll open up more meaning in the bible you read.

* You can add the NET bible for free on YouVersion and other apps. With nearly 61,000 translator notes hyperlinked right in the text, it’s a super easy way to check what you’re hearing in a sermon in real time. You know, like the Bereans.

Evaluating Commentaries

Mike Heiser provides illuminating guidance on what makes an effective commentary. In my thoughts about his notes I also understood where my own laziness keeps me from digging deeper and stretching my comfort zone with my bible study.

Part 1 – Aside from page count, there are many other differences between commentaries. All commentaries are not created equal. Not even close. I have had hundreds of students that simply don’t realize that. They presume that since the commentary exists and has lots of pages, it must be something that really digs into the biblical text. That’s a myth.

Part 2 – Yes, this really is the commentary on 2 Cor 4:1-6. Completely unhelpful. Where is the interpretive beef? It’s hard to know that it’s even the right passage. This is a classic example of talking about the text (loosely speaking) and not giving people the text. At best one could read this after spending some time in the actual passage. But if this is what pastors give their people in the pulpit, they shouldn’t expect them to grow in the knowledge of the Word. They’ll be lucky to find the Word in all that.

In Part 2 Heiser also points us back to his initial thoughts that took him down this road

One of the hardest lessons I’ve had to learn as a professor and in my role at Logos is that most Christians think Bible reading is Bible study. It isn’t. This is followed by the corollary that what most people do beyond Bible reading isn’t going to get them very far into the text, either. That is, what most people think of as Bible study isn’t real biblical research.

He then compares popular commentaries, expositional commentaries, and scholarly commentaries, and the characteristics that make a commentary useful. The note ends with the value of scholarly commentaries that point out patterns, and why patterns are more valuable than exposition.

Zechariah’s Judean and the Fringe of Jesus’ Garment – Part 2

In part 1 we explored how Matthew explicitly connected Jesus to Zechariah’s singular Judean, and in doing so he demonstrated that Jesus is Emmanuel – God with us. We’ll continue working through Amy Elizabeth Richter’s work on this topic in her dissertation The Enochic Watchers’ Template and the Gospel of Matthew (156-160).

Grasping the fringe of Jesus’ garment provided healing power. This is a common understanding, and Matthew draws attention to this again in 14:36 enforcing the point that Jesus is God with us.

³⁴And when they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret. ³⁵And when the men of that place recognized him, they sent around to all that region and brought to him all who were sick ³⁶and implored him that they might only touch the fringe of his garment. And as many as touched it were made well.
Matthew 14:34-36, ESV

For Matthew, Jesus is the Judean whose fringe is grasped in Zechariah 8. While Zechariah points to a future time in an eschatological sense for this fulfillment, Matthew’s account of the bleeding woman, and then the crowds being healed, illustrates that the future is now. “Jesus’ identity as Emmanuel, which begins in Matthew’s infancy narrative, means that eschatological righteousness has become a present reality in Jesus” (Richter 159).

Richter then points to work done by Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis that connects the fringe incident to a priestly tradition in Ezekiel arguing that “Jesus saw himself as the eschatological high priest, ‘the physical, human, embodiment of the divine Glory'” (Richter 159). Apparently holiness is contagious, communicated through the touch of a garment.

¹⁶They shall enter my sanctuary, and they shall approach my table, to minister to me, and they shall keep my charge. ¹⁷When they enter the gates of the inner court, they shall wear linen garments. They shall have nothing of wool on them, while they minister at the gates of the inner court, and within. ¹⁸They shall have linen turbans on their heads, and linen undergarments around their waists. They shall not bind themselves with anything that causes sweat. ¹⁹And when they go out into the outer court to the people, they shall put off the garments in which they have been ministering and lay them in the holy chambers. And they shall put on other garments, lest they transmit holiness to the people with their garments.
Ezekiel 44:16-19, ESV

We find a similar idea in Exodus with respect to the priestly instruments.

²⁵And you shall make of these a sacred anointing oil blended as by the perfumer; it shall be a holy anointing oil. ²⁶With it you shall anoint the tent of meeting and the ark of the testimony, ²⁷and the table and all its utensils, and the lampstand and its utensils, and the altar of incense, ²⁸and the altar of burnt offering with all its utensils and the basin and its stand. ²⁹You shall consecrate them, that they may be most holy. Whatever touches them will become holy.
Exodus 30:25-29, ESV

So there is this idea that simply touching even the fringes of the garment transmit contagious holiness, and this idea is held by the woman and the crowds. If a connection can be made between Jesus’ garments and those worn by the high priest that also transmitted holiness, then Jesus is the high priest – and possibly something more.

Fletcher-Louis thinks the fringe of Jesus’ garment is the tassels described in Numbers.

³⁷The Lord said to Moses, ³⁸“Speak to the people of Israel, and tell them to make tassels on the corners of their garments throughout their generations, and to put a cord of blue on the tassel of each corner. ³⁹And it shall be a tassel for you to look at and remember all the commandments of the Lord, to do them, not to follow after your own heart and your own eyes, which you are inclined to whore after. ⁴⁰So you shall remember and do all my commandments, and be holy to your God.
Numbers 15:37-40, ESV

These tassels are worn by the general Jewish population. In this case they are not priestly ornamentation.

In the Masoretic Text (MT), the word used for tassel is tzitzit. Here is the Numbers 15 passage in the MT.

³⁷Adonai said to Moshe, ³⁸“Speak to the people of Isra’el, instructing them to make, through all their generations, tzitziyot on the corners of their garments, and to put with the tzitzit on each corner a blue thread. ³⁹It is to be a tzitzit for you to look at and thereby remember all of Adonai’s mitzvot and obey them, so that you won’t go around wherever your own heart and eyes lead you to prostitute yourselves; ⁴⁰but it will help you remember and obey all my mitzvot and be holy for your God.
Numbers 15:37-40, Complete Jewish Bible

Fletcher-Louis points out that the tassels – the tzitzit – are the ordinary person’s “equivalent of the tsits, the rosette that bears the Name of God on the high priest’s forehead” (Richter 160). Following this line to a conclusion, the argument is that because all Israelite males wear the tassels, then the entire nation is a kingdom of priests, e.g. Exodus 19:6.

⁵Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; ⁶and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.
Exodus 19:5-6, ESV

Fletcher-Louis’ argument goes something like this:

The tassels that the people wear are an equivalent of the rosette that the high priest wears. The people share in the priesthood as a “kingdom of priests”
Jesus mediates contagious holiness, the evidence of which is demonstrated through the touching of the fringe (tassels) of Jesus’ garments.
Perhaps Jesus was interested in the fulfillment of the call for the nation to become a nation of priests sharing the contagious restorative holiness of the high priest.

Richter concludes her ideas saying the idea of a kingdom of priests fits well with Matthew emphasizing the participation of Jesus’ followers in all aspects of his ministry, including teaching:

¹⁸And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. ¹⁹Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, ²⁰teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Matthew 28:18-20, ESV

Matthew’s Jewish audience would have understood the implications of the fringe, tassels, and the transmission of holiness through priestly garments. Matthew puts an exclamation point on the identification of Jesus as the eschatological fulfillment of Zechariah’s Judean.

Bibliography

The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. (2016). (Mt 14:34–36). Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles.

Complete Jewish Bible: an English version of the Tanakh (Old Testament) and B’rit Hadashah (New Testament) (1st ed., Nu 15:37–40). Clarksville, MD: Jewish New Testament Publications.

Zechariah’s Judean and the Fringe of Jesus’ Garment – Part 1

she, perhaps even unwittingly, shows Jesus to be Zechariah’s Jew whose tassel is grasped because his presence mediates God’s presence.

I’ve posted a couple times about content in Amy Elizabeth Richter’s dissertation, The Enochic Watchers’ Template and the Gospel of Matthew. The details are interesting. Richter spends some time explaining the relationship of Jesus as Emmanuel, or God with us, to the singular Jew in Zechariah 8:23. This is part 1 of 2 where we’ll work through Richter’s thoughts. You can find her exposition on pages 156-160.

Matthew writes to a Jewish audience. It’s natural that he uses examples and Old Testament passages that his audience would be familiar with. In 9:20-22 Matthew recounts the story of the bleeding woman. In this case she touched the fringe of Jesus’ garment.

And behold, a woman who had suffered from a discharge of blood for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his garment, for she said to herself, “If I only touch his garment, I will be made well.” Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.” And instantly the woman was made well.
Mt 9:20-22, ESV

And this detail in Matthew that a broader Jewish audience understood that those who touched the fringe of Jesus’ garments were made well.

And when the men of that place recognized him, they sent around to all that region and brought to him all who were sick ³and implored him that they might only touch the fringe of his garment. And as many as touched it were made well.
Mt 14:35-36, ESV

Matthew chooses the Septuagint (LXX) as a frame of reference for “fringes.” A Greek speaking Jewish audience would most likely be familiar with translation and phrasing, and these passages in Numbers 15:38 and Deuteronomy 22:12 would come to mind.

And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying“Speak to the children of Israel and instruct them that they should make fringes for themselves upon the borders of their garments throughout their generations, and place upon the fringes of the borders a blue thread. ³⁹And so it will be for you in the borders, and you will see these things, and you will recall all of the commandments of the Lord, and you will do them; and you will not distort them according to your intentions and your eyes, by which you committed fornication by going after them, ⁴⁰so that you will recall and observe all my commandments and will be holy to your God. ⁴¹I am the Lord, your God, the one who led out you of the land of Egypt to be your God. I am the Lord, your God.”
Numbers 15:37-41, LXX

You shall make twisted braids for yourself on the four edges of your cloak that you throw around yourself.
Deuteronomy 22:12, LXX

The Numbers reference makes clear the purpose of the fringe to take the Jewish mind back to God’s commands and drive observance as a holy people (Num 15:40)

Broadly, eschatology is the study of the final events of history and the ultimate destiny of humankind. Zechariah points to “those days” (Zech 8:23) in an eschatological sense as a time when people of all nations return to Jerusalem to seek the face of the Lord.

And the word of the Lord Almighty came to me, saying, ¹⁹“The Lord Almighty says, ‘The fourth fast and the fifth fast and the seventh fast and the tenth fast will be for the house of Judah for joy and merriment, and for a good feast, so you will rejoice and love truth and peace.’ ²⁰This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘Yet many people will come, even ones who dwell in many cities. ²¹And those who dwell in five cities shall come together into one city, saying, “Let us go to pray before the face of the Lord and to seek out the face of the Lord Almighty; and I myself will go.” ²²And many people and many nations will come to seek out the face of the Lord Almighty in Jerusalem and to make atonement _⌊before_⌋ the Lord.’ ²³This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘In those days if ten men from every tongue of the nations should seize, then let them seize the fringe of the garment of a Judean man, saying, “We will go with you, because we have heard that God is with you.”
Zechariah 8:18-23, LXX

The grasping of the fringe by men of all nations signifies the eschatological realization that God is with the Jews. Matthew leverages this thinking and makes the explicit connection that God is with us through a Judean man – Jesus.

The eschatological significance of Matthew’s retelling of the incident becomes clearer against the retellings of Mark and Luke. Mark does not refer to the fringes of the garment.

²⁷She had heard the reports about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his garment. ²⁸For she said, “If I touch even his garments, I will be made well.” ²⁹
Mark 5:27-29, ESV

And Luke, while appealing to the eschatological sense of the fringe, has the woman somewhat arbitrarily touching the fringes without her statement to herself that she would be made well by doing so.

⁴³And there was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for twelve years, and though she had spent all her living on physicians, she could not be healed by anyone. ⁴⁴She came up behind him and touched the fringe of his garment, and immediately her discharge of blood ceased. ⁴⁵And Jesus said, “Who was it that touched me?”
Luke 8:43-45, ESV

In any case, it may be the woman does not understand the eschatological significance of her action – that “she shows Jesus to be Zacharias’ [Judean] whose fringe is grasped because his presence mediates God’s presence.” (Richter 158). But Jesus surely does. Unlike the accounts in Mark and Luke where Jesus asked who had touched him, in Matthew “Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.” Jesus knows she has touched his fringe because of her faith and perceives the significance of her actions, even if the woman herself does not. Jesus is Emmanuel – God is with us, foretold in Zechariah and witnessed by the bleeding woman.

Bibliography

Brannan, R., Penner, K. M., Loken, I., Aubrey, M., & Hoogendyk, I. (Eds.). (2012). The Lexham English Septuagint (Dt 22:12). Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.

The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. (2016). (Mk 5:27–29). Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles.