On Right Reading of the Old Testament (conclusion)

Continuing our posts on right reading of the Old Testament, we come today to the third installment and conclusion in our series dealing with authority of Old Testament passages and reconciling aspects of the Old Testament that, at a glance, may seem at odds with Church teaching. Parts one and two of this series are recommended before looking at this article. In the first article we established the first principles that the Old Testament is truly the Word of God, that there is no one interpretive scheme that fits the whole Old Testament, and that assigning a high value to the Old Testament texts was a characteristic of patristic exegesis. In the second article, we looked at distinguishing the ceremonial, levitcal law from the moral law as well as some general guidelines for understanding the place of Old Testament texts in the New Testament age. Today we answer three more questions as we continue to explore this issue:

• How much authority do Old Testament verses retain in contemporary arguments?
• How to understand questions of historicity relating to the authority of any Old Testament book or passage?
• What do we derive from passages where the Old Testament morality seems to be at odds with current Church teaching?

How much authority do Old Testament verses retain in contemporary arguments?

In contemporary Catholicism there are a whole host of debates to which Old Testament passages are particularly relevant but are unfortunately seldom appealed to. This is sad, because many Old Testament passages provide fundamental contexts in which to understand these issues. Let us look at some examples.

The issue of war is a one such subject. There are those in the Church today, mainly on the progressive wing, who argue that there really is no such thing as a just war; that war per se is always evil, and, in a misguided appeal to the Church Fathers, advocate a strict pacifism. However, this is easily rebutted by the Book of Ecclesiastes, which tells us:

"All things have their season, and in their times all things pass under heaven.

A time of love, and a time of hatred. A time of war, and a time of peace" (Ecc. 1:3,8).

Another common point of debate is the issue of usury-interest understood in its modern context. Traditional Catholics obviously tend to uphold the traditional condemnation of usury and understand it broadly as the taking out of interest on a loan; other Catholics see interest as a good and necessary part of the free market (an quantification of risk) and take a narrower definition of usury as excessive interest or interest on a non-productive loan. We can similarly appeal to Scripture here:

"O Lord, who may abide in your tent?
Who may dwell on your holy hill?
Those who walk blamelessly, and do what is right,
and speak the truth from their heart;
who do not slander with their tongue,
and do no evil to their friends,
nor take up a reproach against their neighbours;
in whose eyes the wicked are despised,
but who honour those who fear the Lord;
who stand by their oath even to their hurt;
who do not lend money at interest,
and do not take a bribe against the innocent" (Ps. 15:1-5).

Or this passage from Ezekiel:

"If he has a son who is violent, a shedder of blood, who does any of these things (though his father does none of them), who eats upon the mountains, defiles his neighbor’s wife, oppresses the poor and needy, commits robbery, does not restore the pledge, lifts up his eyes to the idols, commits abomination, takes advance or accrued interest; shall he then live? He shall not. He has done all these abominable things; he shall surely die; his blood shall be upon himself." (Ezk. 18:10-13).

Or these from Proverbs and Nehemiah:

"He that by usury and unjust gain increaseth his substance, he shall gather it for him that will pity the poor" (Prov. 28:8).

"So I said, ‘The thing that you are doing is not good. Should you not walk in the fear of our God, to prevent the taunts of the nations our enemies? Moreover, I and my brothers and my servants are lending them money and grain. Let us stop this taking of interest. Restore to them, this very day, their fields, their vineyards, their olive orchards, and their houses, and the interest on money, grain, wine, and oil that you have been exacting from them.’" (Neh. 9:5-11).

These are only a few examples; there are many, many more. Clearly the Old Testament condemns the practice of usury and sees it as the taking of interest simple. The context of these passages make its sinfulness obvious; it is lumped together with robber, adultery, shedding innocent blood, bribery and slander. In the passage from Ecclesiastes, we see that war is presented as a real possibility that humans, even God's people, must be prepared for at times.

Despite this, the passage from Ecclesiastes that "there is a time for war" is seldom presented as evidence for the legitimacy of a just war. Similarly, proponents of modern credit-based capitalism write off or ignore the plethora of Old Testament condemnations of interest as irrelevant or restricted to the Levitical law alone.

In our first article, we established that the Old Testament is the word of God, different from the New Testament but on par with it as regards its divine inspiration and the inerrant nature of all its parts. If it is in fact the word of God, then these passages cannot be irrelevant; they may not be the whole argument, but they cannot be irrelevant to the argument. The passage from Ecclesiastes is very relevant in reminding us that, so long as we are in this world, the possibility of war is a real one. There are certainly times for peace, times for planting, times for gathering, but we must also realize there will be times for war, times for pulling up, and times for scattering. So not only is the passage from Ecclesiastes relevant, but it provides with the most fundamental point of the argument - namely, that we must understand that life on this earth may necessitate war. Once we accept this starting point, we move forward to explore under what conditions war may be waged.

In the questions about interest, since taking interest is lumped together with things like murder, adultery, and slander, it should be evident that the Old Testament presents it as a teaching of the moral law and not the ceremonial law and hence always binding. Again, these passages should be the starting point for any conversations on this matter, as they reveal the most fundamental truth about interest-taking: God is not pleased with it.

We could cite several other contemporary arguments that would benefit from appeals to Old Testament passages. As we have seen, rather than writing such passages off as irrelevant, Old Testament teachings often give us the truth at the most fundamental or basic level; they provide a starting point from which discussion should proceed from. When I discuss pacifism with other Christians, I always start and begin the argument with Ecclesiastes 3, and similarly arguments about usury begin with Psalm 15. They help provide the parameters or the argument and encapsulate the traditional teaching with a beautifully simple sine qua non that provide us with the seed of the doctrine. 

If we reject these passages as irrelevant, we risk eroding the foundation from the doctrine. If, for example, we toss out the relevance of all biblical injunctions against usury, then it becomes that much more difficult to maintain that usury is condemned in divine revelation. Unfortunately, passages found in such books as Ecclesiastes, Proverbs and Nehemiah are often tossed simply because people don't know how to handle these books or in what sense they ought to be interpreted. Which brings us to our next question.

How to understand questions of historicity relating to the authority of any Old Testament book or passage?

What I mean by this is how does a book's historicity - or lack thereof - effect the authority or force of the statements found in it?

The obvious answer should be, "It doesn't. The Bible is the Bible." A condemnation of slander or praise of charity found in the Psalms or Proverbs is just as legitimate as one found in the Gospel of Matthew or 1 Corinthians.

It was actually an argument with a friend on this question of historicity that prompted this series of posts. The friend was arguing that we should not say that material goods are a blessing from God because of the fact that there are many people in God's favor who are not blessed with material goods; he said it is insulting to them to suggest that people who have homes, children, cars, etc. are blessed because it insinuates that if you are poor you do not have God's favor.

While of course rejecting the absolute identification of prosperity with blessing as the Prosperity Gospel people do, I nevertheless argued that material goods are a form of blessing, as every temporal gift comes from God, and temporal prosperity is often said to be a form of blessing in the Old Testament. To this I invoked the Book of Job, which specifically calls Job's prosperity a blessing: 

"And the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning. And he had fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she asses" (Job 42:12).

We have it right there. Job's possessions were a blessing from God. But guess what? My interlocutor dismissed the argument because "Job is not considered a historical book."

Setting aside the particular question of the historicity of Job, it should be evident that the genre of the book is only of secondary importance. Yes, we have different styles in the Old Testament. History. Wisdom. Poetry. That's obvious. Genre is something we take into account when interpreting, but genre itself does not become the interpretive principle, as if the literary style of a passage has any relevance to its authority as Divine Revelation. Furthermore, just because some books of the Old Testament, like the Song of Solomon, are open to a wide variety of interpretation does not mean every book or passage is. Some, like the passage from Job, are strikingly clear. The Book of Job clearly states that his large flocks were a blessing of God. Why do we need to argue this point? The literary genre of a book does not call the truth-value of its statements into question. Unless we are looking at a question that is purely historical - such as whether Job really happened, the identity of the Shunammite in Song of Solomon, the chronology of the Book of Judith - the historicity of the book is irrelevant. Or to put it another way, historicity is only relevant when the question at hand is historical.

What do we derive from passages where the Old Testament morality seems to be at odds with current Church teaching?

Finally, what do we do when we come across passages in the Old Testament that seem to contradict the moral teachings of the Church and the New Testament? The ubiquitous practice of polygamy. God's command to Abraham to perform a human sacrifice. Jepthah sacrificing his daughter. The genocide of the Canaanites in the Book of Joshua. Nehemiah's command that the Jewish exiles divorce their wives and abandon their children by them. Psalm 137:9, which says of the heathen Babylonians, "Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!" The fact that Rahab lies and for her lie is recorded among the heroes of faith in Hebrews 7. All throughout the Old Testament, we are confronted with examples of moral behavior at odds with what the Catholic Church teaches is morally acceptable in God's sight - these are what the 2008 Synod on the Word of God persistently referred to as the "difficulties" with the Old Testament.

Of course, the 2008 Synod sought to solve these "difficulties" by questioning the literalism of the text rather than the more traditional method of reconciling the problematic texts. There is no uniform answer for how to reconcile these passages; they need to be approached on a case by case basis, as we have done on this blog regarding Joshua's genocide. But in general, when we encounter such passages, there are a few things we can do:

First, accept that there can be no real contradiction. The moral law is eternal, and nothing can be good in the New that was evil in the Old.

Second, that being said, understand that the Old Testament was only a partial revelation. The Israelites were at an imperfect stage of moral development and did not possess either the fullness of divine revelation nor the dispensation of grace merited by Christ. This is why certain behaviors -such as divorce and polygamy - are "permitted" though they are never encouraged or praised. So, while nothing can be good in the New that was evil in the Old, somethings that were tolerated in the Old are no longer tolerated in the New.

Third, we have to take into account the different nature of a moral imperative when it comes from God Himself. For example some things, like murder, are wrong because they usurp the unique prerogative of God to give life and take life (cf. Deut. 32:39, 1 Sam 2:6). However, when God Himself commands a human being's death, then no usurpation is taking place; in such cases, the human being becomes the instrumental cause of God's will in putting to death another whom God has condemned to death. This principle is essential to understanding passages where God commands the Israelites to put individuals or groups to death.

Finally, while genre is not the fundamental principle of interpretation, we do need to be attentive to stylistic forms. In the case of Psalm 137:9 ("Blessed is he who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!"), we are seeing a case of Semitic hyperbole - literary exaggeration - similar to when Jesus says, "If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out." When the Psalmist pronounces blessing upon he who smashes the heads of Babylonian infants, he is using exaggeration to say, "May God bring judgment upon Babylon." So literary techniques are important in understanding particular passages.

And, as St. Augustine teaches in De Doctrina Christiana, all things are to be interpreted in light of charity and the teaching of the Church.

There is much more that could be said on this topic; in fact we have received several inquiries as a result of these posts asking for more specific guidance on understanding particular passages. God willing we will get to these as well. But in the meantime, I hope this series has been beneficial.