One of the passages used to illustrate the NT use of the OT in Three Views on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament was Galatians 3 concerning Paul’s use of the word “seed.” I was especially interested in this passage because I remember being quite impressed with N. T. Wright’s treatment of it in The Climax of the Covenant a few years ago. In this post, I would like to do three things: 1) summarize each author’s understanding of this passage; 2) bring N. T. Wright into the conversation and explain, in broad strokes, his exegesis; and 3) ask which of the three views best reflects N. T. Wright’s approach.

Since Peter Enns chose the “seed” passage as one of his examples and elaborated on it in his essay, we get a fuller picture of Enns’ approach related to this particular issue. Kaiser and Bock merely responded to Enns so there will be some inevitable reading between the lines. But since I am only interested in the approach and not a full exegesis of the text, I believe each position can be fairly outlined (at least I will attempt to do that).

The Passage

Although passage is properly Galatians 3:15-29, let me show you the verse which is the focus of discussion, Galatians 3:16:

[Now the promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. He does not say, "And to seeds," as referring to many, but rather to one, "And to your seed," that is, Christ. (NAS)]

Although this is not a direct quotation, it is clear that Paul is alluding to God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis. Enns uses Genesis 13:14-16 as an example:

[The LORD said to Abram, after Lot had separated from him, "Lift up your eyes and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward, for all the land that you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever. I will make your offspring as the dust of the earth, so that if one can count the dust of the earth, your offspring also can be counted. (ESV)]

It is interesting to notice that the major translations don’t use the word “seed” in this passage with the exception of the KJV. They either use “offspring” maintaining the singular (since it is a collective term) or “descendants” highlighting its plurality. The LXX uses the word sperma (seed) in the singular throughout (see also Genesis 12:7; 15:5; 21:12; 24:6-7).

The Three Amigos

Peter Enns sees Paul’s interpretation of this passage as “atomistic” which he defines as when “particular words or phrases are looked at in isolation, without being informed by the immediate or broader contexts and thus more open to manipulation” (184). In Enns’ view, the form of “seed” is significant for Paul who understands the promise made to Abraham of an offspring too numerous to count and uses the singular form of “seed” to bring the Abrahamic promise into “conformity with the all-surpassing realization of all the OT promises in the person and work of Christ” (181). This is just a summary of Enns’ understanding of Paul’s use of the word “seed” in his argument. Paul is well aware of its collective use in Genesis but uses a technique typical of Second Temple hermeneutics to make an explicit connection between the promise of a “seed” and Christ (who is the “seed”) to make a larger point in verse 29 (using the word “seed” in its collective sense) that the new people of God are made up of Jews and Gentiles since those who are “of Christ” are “Abraham’s seed.”

Walter Kaiser seems to connect the promise of God concerning Abraham’s offspring with the fact that through Abraham all nations would be blessed. He infers from this that since all the nations would be blessed through Abraham, then the promises of God concerning his “seed” includes the Gentiles. So how does Kaiser explain Paul’s use of “seed”and “seeds”? Since Paul and the writer of Genesis knew that seed was a collective term, it had a “singular focus” on the one who would crush the head of the serpent (Gen. 3:15). Paul’s plural use of the word “seed” refers to all who would believe as Abraham did (Jews and Gentiles). So the promise was to the “seed” with a singular focus on Christ and not to the “seeds,” that is, Jews and Gentiles who would come to believe. The only way I can understand Kaiser’s take on the use of “seed” in Genesis is that it has a double-meaning, for it could collectively refer to both Jews and Gentiles (since they would be blessed through Abraham) and singularly refer to Christ (who would crush the head of the serpent). So when Paul uses “seeds” to refer to Jews and Gentiles, he must be thinking of the “seed” in Genesis as referring to Christ already and ignore the collective possibility of “Jews and Gentiles” according to Kaiser’s understanding of the role of Gen 12:13. This is a bit confusing to me, and it could be I just misunderstood the point Kaiser was trying to make.

Bock sees the promise in Genesis as a pattern of the many coming out of the one. In Romans 9, for example, the promise runs through one “seed” of Abraham (Isaac and Jacob) and not through another “seed” (Ishmael or Esau). So now the eschatological people of God come through the chosen seed of Abraham. When Paul talks about “seeds” and “seed” he is just talking about the pattern of how God created his people in the past. In other words, it was always through the one that the many were constituted. Here I think Romans 9 is playing a major role because it is the launching pad for saying that “seed”, corporately understood, can be applied to different genealogical lineages. So we have the Isaac-Jacob seed, Ishmael seed, Esau seed, etc. Paul’s point then would be that the promise in the OT was never just to “seeds” but to one particular “seed” (in this case Isaac-Jacob down the line). In the same way (pattern), the people of God (Jews and Gentiles) come out of one “seed”, Christ. Bock believes that this kind of “theologizing” belonged to the hermeneutical methods in Second Temple Judaism.

To summarize, Enns and Bock believe Paul was using Second Temple hermeneutical methods, but they disagree on what this method was. For Enns, Paul uses the form of the word seed for his exegetical point whereas Bock believes Paul is recognizing a pattern where the many come out of the one, and so in Christ. For Kaiser, Paul already sees the promise to the seed as referring to the one who would crush the head of the serpent.

So Bishop Wright, what do YOU think?

It is important to understand Wright’s take on Galatians 3:16 in light of his understanding of the book of Galatians. For this, I need refer you to his article The Letter to the Galatians: Exegesis and Theology. Here is an excerpt from this article that asks some poignant questions about our text in its larger context:

“The long argument of 3:1-5:1, which forms the solid center of the letter, offers almost endless puzzles for the exegete, down to the meaning of individual words and particles and the question of implicit punctuation (the early manuscripts, of course, have for the most part neither punctuation nor breaks between words). And it is here that the larger issues of understanding Galatians, the questions that form the bridge between exegesis, history, and theology, begin to come to light. Where does Paul suppose that he stands in relationship to the covenant that Israel’s God made with Abraham? And to that with Moses? And to the Torah, the Jewish law, which, though giving substance to the historical Mosaic covenant, seems to have taken on a life of its own? What, in short, does Paul wish to say about what he himself, surprisingly perhaps, calls “Judaism” (1:13)? Does he see it as a historical sequence of covenants and promises that have now reached their fulfillment in Jesus? Or does he see it as a system to the whole of which the true God is now saying “no” in order to break in, through the gospel, and do a new thing? A further important question, not usually considered sufficiently: Does Paul’s actual handling of the Jewish Scriptures, in terms of quotation, allusion, and echo, reflect the view he holds, or do the two stand in tension?” (emphasis mine)

In the conclusion of his chapter “The Seed and the Mediator: Galatians 3:15-20” in The Climax of the Covenant, Wrights asserts a conviction about the argument of Galatians 3 that will be important for us to remember as we look at the way he approaches his understanding of the “seed”. He says,

“Unless I am totally mistaken, the argument of Galatians 3 actually hinges on the divine purpose to create not two families, as in much recent theology, but one” (Climax, 173).

Wright’s Approach

Although Wright recognizes that there are Rabbinic parallels to Galatians 3, he thinks there are four serous problems with trying to understand Paul on that basis:

1) It is to ask too much for Paul to move from collective to singular to then collective (v. 29) sense of “seed.”

2) If this is his argument, then it seems to imply that the promises meant nothing at all until the coming of Christ.

3) The point seems to depend on verse 29 for its completion.

4) Sperma is not used this way in the apparent parallels in Romans 4 and 9.

From this we can already see that Wright is not going to take Enns’ approach. He thinks Enns’ view “seems to leave Paul on the very shaky ground of a purely semantic trick” (158).

From what I have read of Wright, I would doubt that his approach would be anywhere close to Kaiser’s. So, it remains for us to see if Wright will follow Bock in his handling of Paul’s use of ‘seed.’

Let me go ahead and give you the punchline of how Wright will deal with this passage:

“If, as would accord with good exegetical practice, we approach the difficult passage about the ‘seed’ in 3:16 in the light of the quite clear reference in 3:29 where (as in 3:15-18) it is found within a discussion of Abrahamic ‘inheritance,’ we might suggest that the singularity of the seed in v. 16 is not a singularity of an individual person contrasted with the plurality of many human beings, but the singularity of one family contrasted with the plurality of families which would result if the Torah were to be regarded the way Paul’s opponents apparently regard it” (163).

So, if we understand Paul to be using “seed” here as referring to a family, then it would make sense for him to be making a distinction between “seed” (a single family) and “seeds” (a Jewish family and a Gentile family). Wright can think of at least three objections.

First, is this use of sperma justified? Wright makes the case that the Hebrew word zera’ as a collective term came to be used later on in the sense of family or nation. One of his examples is Ezra 2:59:

The following were those who came up from Tel-melah, Tel-harsha, Cherub, Addan, and Immer, though they could not prove their fathers’ houses or their descent [zera’], whether they belonged to Israel. (ESV, emphasis mine)

Here zera’ is synonymous with “race.” Wright cites other passages, including the Babylonian Talmud to show that under certain circumstances zera’ (or its translation sperma) could have the sense of ‘family.’

Second, Paul talks about “many” when, in the context of Galatians 3, he is clearing referring to a duality (Jews and Gentiles). Here Paul could be speaking in general terms or making the point that if ethnic origin, racial or geographical loyalties determine who is to eat with whom, then there will be far more than two ‘families.’

And lastly, what to make of the “seed” being “Christ?” Wright says that “here, as elsewhere, we meet Paul’s use of Christos in a representative or corporal sense” (165). According to Wright, Paul is saying to his readers that “the ‘one family’ spoken of in the promises is in fact (as he will prove) the family created in Christ” (166). That’s why Christ is “the seed.”

There are implications for this way of thinking which I am not going to expound here because I think the general outline of how Wright understands this passage has been given.

The danger in summarizing Wright’s approach here is that I am only looking at half of his exegesis. It is important to bear in mind that Wright wants to show in Galatians 3:15-20 that the clue for its interpretation lies in the idea of unity. So to see how this reading of Gal. 3:16 really works, the whole argument should be considered. Having said that, I attempted to give you the gist of how Wright handles Paul’s use of “seed” and the rest of his chapter will only reinforce his interpretation and the whole essay should be consulted for further details.

Which view of the NT use of the OT fits Wright’s approach best?

First, let me clarify that I am NOT trying to determine Wright’s overall approach to the NT use of the OT. What I am doing is using Wright’s handling of the “seed” in Galatians 3:16 as a test case and inquiring which of the three views best fits Wright’s understanding of this particular passage. Anyone who has read N. T. Wright knows how much he values Second Temple Judaism for NT studies even when he thinks certain hermeneutical tools of that time are not the best to understand a particular passage in Paul.

I don’t think Wright’s approach is Single Meaning, Unified Referents (Kaiser) since zera’s collective sense was not referring to a “family” (as opposed to many) in the context of Genesis. According to Wright, Paul uses a later definition of zera’/sperma to make the point about God’s purpose in creating one single family.

Is it then Single Meaning, Multiple Referents (Bock)? To answer this question, we need to ask whether or not Paul, according to Wright, is applying the same sense to a different referent. One way I think you could to pull that off is to argue along with Bock that Paul is thinking of the pattern of the ‘many’ coming out of the ‘one.’ But this is not how Wright argues it. His argument is focused on the semantic possibility of zera’ which allows him to use “seed” as family. So Wright’s focus is on the “singularity” of the “seed” in Genesis (through its collective sense) which is preserved in Galatians to make the larger point that this singularity still applies, but this time with the sense of ‘family.’ So the singularity is the same but the referents are different. However, I don’t think that the singularity of the “seed” is the sense of the promise in Genesis. Singularity is arguably just a feature shared by both contexts but not intrinsic to their understanding. Since Wright does not use a pattern as Bock suggested, and since the sense is not preserved, I don’t think that Wright falls into the Single Meaning, Multiple Referents’ view either, at least not in this case.

We already know that Wright thinks there are serious problems in an atomistic reading of Galatians 3:14 a la Rabbinic exegesis. That notwithstanding, the irony is that I think Wright is better characterized as a proponent of the Fuller Meaning, Single Goal. I say this not because Wright believes Paul uses midrashic methods, as this would leave him on “shaky ground,” but because Wright does the midrashing for Paul. Whereas Peter Enns thinks that the form of the word ‘seed’ is significant for Paul, Wright thinks that the semantic flexibility of “seed” is the hermeneutical key.

Some may say that I am being unfair in saying that Wright engages in midrash since maybe it was Paul who understood “seed” the way he proposes. Perhaps so. But it is important to remember that Wright believes that the difficulty in Gal 3:16 can be approached “in the light of the quite clear reference in 3:29.” This is a hermeneutical decision on Wright’s part.

Don’t get me wrong. I really think that Wright’s “solution” to this passage is very satisfying if it can be shown that sperma could be understood as family and that it was likely for Paul to use that sense here.

Let me say a few words about Wright’s four serious problems as I did not find them compelling enough to discard Second Temple hermeneutics.

It is to ask too much for Paul to move from collective to singular to then collective (v. 29) sense. Enns thinks that this is not only NOT a problem but makes perfect sense. The new people of God (Jews and Gentiles together) are Abraham’s seed (plural), but “only because Christ is Abraham’s seed (singular) first” (Three Views, 183).

If this is his argument, then it seems to imply that the promises meant nothing at all until the coming of Christ. I am surprised that Wright is saying this (he almost sounds like Kaiser). Here I repeat the main thrust of Enns’view: Paul, who understands the promise made to Abraham of an offspring too numerous to count, uses the singular form of “seed” to bring the Abrahamic promise into “conformity with the all-surpassing realization of all the OT promises in the person and work of Christ”.

The point seems to depend on verse 29 for its completion. On the contrary, v. 29 is the result of Christ’s being ‘the seed.’

“Sperma” is not used this way in the apparent parallels in Romans 4 and 9. I don’t understand why this is a serious problem. I think Wright would be the first to say that Paul’s handling of Scriptures is not monolithic.

But one of the things that I think Wright contributed to this conversation is that he asked a question that I don’t think Bock, Kaiser or Enns had asked. What is the semantic range of the word sperma in Second Temple Judaism? Much focus was given to the fact that “seed” was either singular or plural, but its meaning was taken for granted.

I also need to point out that if Paul were indeed using the sense of ‘family,’ he would still be engaging in midrash, but of a different sort. Once again, Fuller Meaning, Single Goal. In principle, I agree with Wright that sperma may mean ‘family’ but NOT because it solves the difficulty of understanding Paul’s use of ‘seed.’

Conclusion

This has been a great exercise for me to think more deeply about these issues. I appreciate the contribution of each author and I hope I have not misrepresented them. I would encourage those who are interested in this subject to read the books and engage with the authors.

One thing that Kaiser, Bock, Enns and Wright do agree on is that Jesus of Nazareth is the focus of Paul’s reading of the OT. I would like to finish with something N. T. Wright said in the conclusion of his chapter in The Climax of the Covenant:

“His [Paul’s] preaching, and his writing, are aimed at one thing: the glorification of God through the effective announcement in all the world that the promises to Abraham have some true in Jesus Christ.”

May we all be motivated by the same conviction.

Related Posts:

1. The New Testament and the People of God

3 Comments

• By Darrell Bock, November 15, 2008 @ 10:50 am

  Maer:

  Nice summary. My one observation on Wright is that the place he ends up (family) is really the same place I am arguing for. But the singular of it cannot be merely made into this descriptive category. It is the singular Christ who creates the family in question.

  Romans 5 shows Paul thinks of two lines in humanity (Adam and Christ). What we are trying to do is see the theological linkage that let’s us get from point A to point B. Romans 9 shows that Paul thinks in this singular to corporate manner about seed. This is also not a matter of either-or. We can have second temple hermeneutic being used as well as looking at the theological grids being present in the method.

  What I resist about Enns is to say usage is just hermeneutics, christological and (rather) arbitrary at spots. There are grids of understanding at work, rooted in the progress of revelation as the case is being made.

  Thanks again for the thoughts.

• By Maer, November 17, 2008 @ 4:07 pm

  Dr. Bock – Thank you so much for taking the time to read my essay. Your comment makes me wish I had spent some time talking about why I believe Wright takes the approach he does. Because he is convinced that Paul’s theology is consistent not only in Galatians but also Romans on the subject of the new people of God, I do believe it is this theological conviction that drives him to see Paul’s use of “seed” the way he does. Whereas you try to see the theological linkage from A to B, could it be the case that Wright saw the theological linkage from B to A?

  You said “we can have second temple hermeneutic being used as well as looking at the theological grids being present in the method.” I agree that this should not be an either-or, and this is exactly my struggle as I look at the NT use of the OT. How do we maintain a right balance of second temple hermeneutics and the theological grids being employed without pitting one against the other?

  Thank you for your contribution to this field and I am looking forward to reading more.

• By Darrell Bock, November 18, 2008 @ 5:22 pm

  Maer:

  One way to balance second temple hermeneutics and theological grids is to see how authors handle themes within their own writing. That is precisely what my proposal did in going to Romans 9. In Romans 9 we see how Paul thinks directly without having to posit a point that may or may not be present. As I said, I am not sure these positions A to B or B to A are so different. but I do think we can see Paul thinks corporately and individually about the seed, while Wright’s empahsis is built on his larger thesis and is less explicitly present.

  dlb

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