This parable is quite short and, by itself, rather uninteresting. However, the background situation and Rabbi Ishmael’s response to the parable set the stage for a lesson in wisdom. The translation by McArthur and Johnston is given below along with the original in Hebrew. (My goal is to learn a little more of the Hebrew of these parables, when available, and become a little more familiar with the Talmud). I have broken up the text in such a way that will be easier to see some of its structure. After the parable, I will make a few comments.

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One of the areas of theological reflection that I have been thinking about lately is the interface between what we think the Bible is and what it says it is. Evangelicals have come up with very clear formulations of what they think the Bible should be, or rather, what an inspired, authoritative book should look like. Inerrancy debates are looming up all over the place, and part of the debate is exactly about one’s presupposition of the nature of Scripture. Although “inerrancy battles” are mostly fought within evangelicalism, I have come to realize more and more that the assumptions that often fuel the epistemological, pre-suppositional and theological fire of these discussions are not privy to fundamentalists and a certain cross-section of evangelicals. The same question-begging assumptions come from the academia, and the presently raging debates are bringing these to light in more nuanced ways.

James Kugel in his How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now concludes his chapter on the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) with what scholars see as the incompatibility of the human elements they find in a text that is taken to be divine. After showing why scholars think that the command not to make any images was inserted at later period (which does not imply that it did not exist early on), he writes the following:

[The Decalogue’s] very form now appears to most scholars to assimilate them to the covenant stipulations found in old Hittite and other ancient Near Eastern treaties. This fact itself raises disturbing questions about the divine origin of these laws. For why should God, in this crucial act of binding the people of Israel to Himself, have chosen to rely on an utterly human set of conventions instead of going about things in some very different, divine sort of way? (p. 259, my emphasis)

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I am currently reading N. T. Wright’s book Justificaion: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision which is basically a response to John Piper’s book The Future of Justification. Although he interacts with Piper at various points in the book, it is not a point by point response which, in my opinion, makes it a much better read. I have read the first part of the book and gotten through his exegesis of Galatians. For those familiar with Wright’s work on this subject, there is probably not going to be a lot that is new, but I am finding that Wright is (re)explaining things in this book in a way that is proving to be extremely helpful for my understanding of justification and Paul in general. I specially appreciated his spending some time explaining exactly what he means by “covenant” (as in God’s righteousness being God’s faithfulness to the covenant). I won’t attempt to summarize it here because it is exactly within the context of all that he is saying in this book that “covenant” makes sense. All I can say is that people should read this book and try to listen to what Wright is saying.

Of course, this doesn’t mean people will get on board and change their worldviews or shift their paradigms. One good example is the Boyce College’s panel Assessing the Piper-Wright Debate on Justification. This was done before the book was released in the US, and I am already surprised at the comments from the panel (after only reading half of the book). As a matter of fact, I recommend that you read the comments at Denny Burk’s blog which, in my opinion, proved to be a lot more helpful than the panel itself. Now that the book has been released here, we are starting to see some helpful reviews, and one that may bring a little balance to this discussion is Scot McKnight’s review.
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Although the title of the show is An ‘Unbelievable?’ Debate on the NT Documents - Bart Ehrman & Pete Williams, this is really a very well done interview by Justin Brierley. Bart Ehrman is a professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Misquoting Jesus (whose title in the UK is Whose Word Is It?, a much better title in my opinion). Peter J. Williams is the warden of Tyndale House and Honorary Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies at the University of Aberdeen, and you can read his review of Ehrman’s book here.

I think this interview was very helpful. I shared a few thoughts on Ehrman’s book and, at the time, I could not understand what the big deal was with some of the stuff in his book. It became obvious to me in this interview that Ehrman does not think that the issues he raises are theologically damaging, but he thinks it does make a difference in how we understand and interpret the text. Which reading is correct if we don’t know for sure what was originally written?

I titled this post “Is Bart Ehrman a Proponent of Intelligent Design?” because one of the things you will notice in Misquoting Jesus is that at several points Ehrman believes the scribes made certain changes on purpose. Williams remarks that although Ehrman’s reconstructions may be correct, he doesn’t give much room for copying mistakes. In this sense, Ehrmans is more like a proponent of Intelligent Design than one who believes that things just happen by chance. Although I was not quite persuaded by Williams’ explanation of some of Ehrman’s examples, I think his analogy was hilarious and revealed Ehrman’s tendency.

In the Evangelical Textual Critical World, Intelligent Design is a bad thing.

I try to control my intake of information. I sort of have an idea of the next book to read, the next lecture to listen to, the next article to puzzle over, the next blog post to write, and the next item to take off my reading list just because it doesn’t seem that important anymore. But once in a while, it just happens; I am faced with the reality that there are certain things—even what I read— that I just can’t plan or control.

When Westminster Seminary made its audio archive available, I wasn’t all that excited; but I decided to check it out, and a name immediately jumped out at me—Harvie Conn. I had heard of this guy before, but I had never listened to him or read any of his books. Of all the lectures there, I decided to start with the first in a series on “Contextual Theology.” That was it—I was hooked!

I am so glad and thankful I got a chance to be exposed to some of Harvie Conn’s thinking. This particular course was recorded in 1984, and it was great to hear him talk about the “current controversy” of women in ministry, liberation theology, Charles Kraft’s ideas, biblical theology, missions, etc. Halfway through the lectures, I picked up his book Eternal Word and Changing Worlds and read it before I finished listening to the course. It is now one of my favorite books; Peter Enns said that, in his opinion, it is “the single most penetrating and insightful theological work the WTS tradition has ever produced.” I can see why. Listening to the lectures really helped me “contextualize” what he was talking about in the book. It is not an easy read, specially the first part, but it is well worth the effort.

My unplanned exposure to Harvie Conn has forced me to start rethinking how I do theology, and especially how I relate to my own community and culture. The result is that now I “plan” to read and listen more to Harvie Conn, and I hope you will take the time to listen to what he had to say, for even after almost three decades, his words are as fresh as today’s news.

For this parable, we are going to have the benefit of not only seeing its Hebrew but also two translations. John Hobbins was kind enough to translate the text in two posts entitled “The Parable of the Banquet in the Talmud.” In the first part, he looks at the exchange between R. Eliezer and his students culminating in a quote from Qohelet. Hobbins reminds us of the importance of taking the context of the parables into consideration as they may have never been stand-alone units.

I have my doubts about the tendency to treat parables as self-contained units. They may have been (or may never have been), once upon a time, autonomous units. But, just as is the case with the parables of the New Testament, the parables of the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud do not stand on their own anymore. Relationship to context needs to be taken into full account.

In the second part, he looks at the parable of a king who invited his servants to a feast (hence the title of the parable). He also provides a list of non-biblical expressions in the Talmud text and a vocalized biblical Hebrew assimilation that makes it a lot easier to read.

In the book They Also Taught in Parables, the authors go all the way to the end of Berakhot 153a since the last unit has R. Meir’s son-in-law expanding on the last parable. To make things a little easier to follow, I will divide this whole section (as demarcated by the book) into three parts. The first two will follow Hobbins’ sense-units and the last will include the conclusion. I will first provide the translation in They Also Taught in Parables (PT) followed by the Hebrew text and Hobbins’ translation (HT) (expect, of course, for the last part).

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There are different approaches that one can use to understand the complexities of the Pentateuch. I have been thinking about two approaches in particular, source criticism and literary criticism, after reading James S. Diamond’s book Stringing the Pearls: How to Read the Weekly Torah Portion. Dr. Diamond teaches in the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University and this book grew out of his two-year intensive Tanakh course sponsored by the Hebrew College of Boston. Although the aim of the book is to introduce the Jewish reader to the Torah portions (there are 54 portions or parashyiot which are read throughout the year covering the entire Torah), it covers a whole range of topics making it a great introductory short book on the Torah from a Jewish perspective.

My intention in this post is to look at Diamond’s handling of Genesis 37, a text that he uses to illustrate how the narrative can be read using literary criticism. Part of my interest in literary criticism is my admiration for Robert Alter’s work in this area.

Diamond gives us a general overview of source and literary criticism and how each one approaches the text in the Torah. Although source criticism can be quite technical, he points out that it is easier nowadays for lay people to understand it due, in great measure, to the work of Richard Elliot Friedman. In short, he says that source criticism “seeks to identify the different hands and voices that are visible and audible in the text. Source criticism builds on linguistic analysis but looks at larger literary issues such as style and point of view” (71).

Literary criticism on the other hand is attuned to the esthetic dimension of the text. “It seeks to illuminate the internal coherence of an individual narrative, of a poem, of a book, of the Pentateuch as a whole, even of the TANAKH as a whole” (72). He cites Gabriel Josipovici who contrasts the literary approach with source criticism:

It is not that the documentary hypothesis is necessarily wrong in substance; Genesis is clearly made up of a number of traditions which have been combined at different stages. But is not the task of the critic to try and come to grips with the final form as we have it, and to give the final editor or redactor the benefit of the doubt, rather than to delve behind his work to what was there before?” (72)

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I recently read a fascinating book entitled They Also Taught in Parables: Rabbinic Parables from the First Centuries of the Christian Era by Harvey K. McArthur and Robert M. Johnston. The first part is a collection of selected parables of the תנאים (tannaim - the Rabbinic sages in the Mishnah from approximately 70-200 CE) and the second part comprised of essays on the nature of their parables and some comparisons with the parables of Jesus.

The rabbinic word for parable(s) is mashal/meshalim, and, to mark a literary item as a narrative mashal, the authors chose the following elements:

Explicit label. Often the introductory formulas to the items explicitly label them as meshalim. Some typical introductions are: “A parable”; “A parable: It is like unto . . .”; and “They parable a parable. Unto what is the matter like? It is like unto. . . .”

Abbreviated label. Frequently the introductory formulas are abbreviated in such a way that the word mashal itself is omitted: “It is like unto. . . .”

Structural characteristics. The immediate environment and internal structure of the typical narrative mashal in its fullest form include these five parts:

Here is an example:

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Daniel Kirk, author of Unlocking Romans, shared a few thoughts on his blog about J. Richard Middleton’s book The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1.
You can read his thoughts in Image as Function in Gen 1, Liberating Image: Imago Dei in ANE Context, and Liberating Image: Some concluding remarks. Although I have not read the book yet, it looks like the type of book I would enjoy reading.

Here is what Peter Enns has to say about it:

“The Liberating Image is a balanced yet challenging articulation of the Imago Dei in Genesis, its ancient Near Eastern context, and its present-day theological implications. By locating himself in his postmodern context, Middleton brings a refreshing hermeneutical self-consciousness to the scholarly task, which is aimed at providing a substantive and compelling argument without posing as the last word. His analysis of Imago Dei in Genesis in the context of ancient Near Eastern religions leads Middleton to the conclusion that the Israelite theological traditions of Genesis 1-11 are recontextualized in conscious opposition to ideological categories of Mesopotamia. That Israel’s story promotes the dignity of all humans, not just of the royal or priestly classes, should have vital ethical implications for today.”

I accidentally ran across a few lectures by Dr. Middleton, and, although at first I had not recognized his name, I immediately recognized the title of his book. There is one lecture entitled In the Beginning God Created the Heavens and the Earth: Responsible Interpretation of Genesis 1 in Ancient and Contemporary Contexts where Dr. Middleton talks about how one goes about interpreting Genesis 1 responsibly (i. e. you should read it “literally,” but you have to listen to the lecture to find out what he means by “literal”). Those familiar with John Walton and G. K. Beale’s works will find some similarities in his approach in terms of Genesis’ function and temple imagery. The Q and A was interesting with some provocative answers. There are also two Chapel talks at Greenville College that are somewhat short but well worth listening. In the first he talks about creation and in the second about redemption. The second lecture pretty much covers the content of his essay A New Heaven and a New Earth: The Case for a Holistic Reading of the Biblical Story of Redemption (Journal for Christian Theological Research 11 [2006] 73-97). This lecture and essay will resonate with those who liked N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope. I really enjoyed reading the essay and it is a great way for those who have not read Wright’s book to become familiar with the premise that what the bible envisages for the eschaton is not heaven as the final destination but new heavens and a new earth (i. e. new creation).
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John Goldingay talks about blessing as one of the aspects of “God speaking” in creation. God’s speech is life-giving. He mentions something Genesis Rabbah says concerning the fact that Torah does not start with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, ‘aleph. And what does that have to do with blessing? Here is what he says,

“Thus blessing “is not simply a friendly wish” but “a bestowal of life-force… an act whereby the power-for-life monopolized by Yahweh generously is transmitted to Abraham and his descendants” (Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997], p. 165) — and here to humanity as a whole and to other living creatures. God shares power-for-life with the animal world. The prominence of the blessing theme makes for a pointed contrast with the gloomy vision of other Middle Eastern stories of the origins or the world and humanity, as well as with the troubled experience of Israel in; for instance, the exile. Genesis Rabbah 1:10 (on Gen 1:1) sees here another significance in the fact that Scripture begins with a bet, not an ‘alep, the second letter of the alphabet rather than the first, since b is the first letter of the word for blessing (whereas ‘aleph is the first letter of the word for curse). “Bless” has the first word in Scripture” (Israel’s Gospel, 54).

Side Note:

I was curious to find out when blessing and cursing first occur in the Bible. Blessing first makes its appearance in Genesis 1:22:

God blessed them, saying, “Be fertile and increase, fill the waters in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.”

The noun blessing is used for the first time in Gen 12:2.

I could not find the noun for curse using the root ארר (which is what I think the midrash has in mind), since it is usually קללה which HALOT defines as a curse-formula by which someone or something is designated as cursed (ארור). So the first time the verbal form of ארר is used in the Bible is in 3:14:

Then the LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you did this, More cursed shall you be Than all cattle And all the wild beasts: On your belly shall you crawl And dirt shall you eat All the days of your life.

The first time God blesses something is on the fifth day and what He blesses is specifically living beings. The interesting comment in Genesis Rabbah is that the first letter already foreshadows that. I think it is a little ironic that the first curse is also attributed to a living creature.