Can We Please Stop Appealing to Rabbis for Biblical and Ancient Text Interpretation?

I have this topic stuck in my head today in the wake of some conversations with folks about the Dead Sea Scrolls. But it could just as well be about interpreting any passage in the Hebrew Bible. I’ve grown weary of people (especially in Christian Middle Earth) appealing to rabbis to “prove” some idea they have about Scripture.

You have to realize appealing to rabbis means nothing. Rabbinic thought and biblical thought (and academic work) are miles apart. Hey Christians enamored with rabbis: The rabbis can’t even get the messiah right (or, to be more charitable, the two powers in heaven doctrine right — that belief they used to have in Judaism until it became uncomfortable due to Christianity). If you’ve ever listened to Ben Shapiro (I’m a fan of the show) you know what I mean. He often does “Bible time” on his podcast. But what you get isn’t exegesis of the text in its ancient context. What you get is rabbinic opinion (with all the contrarian rabbinic opinions shelved to the side). Rabbinic interpretation (think Talmud and Mishnah) contradicts itself over and over again. That’s what those works do — they fling opinions at each other. That Hebrew food fight got codified into the Talmud and Mishnah. And Judaism is fine with that. We shouldn’t be. Most of what you’d find in rabbinic writings bears little to no resemblance of exegetical work in the text understood in light of its original ancient Near Eastern worldview. Not even close. They’re frequently making stuff up (they apply biblical material to situations in which the community found itself in; the work of the rabbis was responsive to community circumstances — it’s very applicational or situational).

In short, “the rabbis” are not authorities on biblical exegesis in context or on deciphering scrolls and inscriptions. A modern analogy might help. If you put 100 pastors in a room and asked them what a given passage meant and why, and then recorded their debates and codified them in writing you’ve have “evangelical Christian rabbinics.” In academic terms, they are mostly amateurs, unaware of the historical contexts (ANE, and even Second Temple — most of which period preceded the classic rabbinic era). It’s a pool of contradicting opinions. It’s really not very useful. Rabbinic commentary about the biblical text will tell you only about the opinions rabbis have had on a passage. It won’t tell you at all how the ancient biblical writer was producing content from the context of his own *pre-rabbinic* worldview. “Rabbinic period” and “biblical period” do not overlap chronologically. The classic rabbinic period (“Rabbinism”) dates from the 6th century AD forward. Some of what worked its way into the Mishnah and Talmus is earlier than that, but NONE of it (recall it’s commenting on the Hebrew Bible) is from the Old Testament period. The Dead Sea Scrolls also pre-date the rabbinic period (by centuries). NOTE: This is also why the church fathers aren’t authorities in biblical exegesis, either. They are centuries (even millennia) removed from the biblical period and had no access to things like ancient Near Eastern texts and the Dead Sea Scrolls for help in interpretation. They were brilliant, but far removed from the right contexts and under-sourced.

In fairness, though, I don’t want to overstate the situation. Just as we might find a pastor who is a trained scholar in our hypothetical analogy — and whose opinions would be more informed (i.e., he’d be aware of the scholarly give and take, the published literature on a passage, and the wider worldview contexts), we might find a rabbi who is a trained scholar as well. But it’s light years from a 1:1 equation there. “Rabbi” isn’t a synonym for “Hebrew Bible scholar” any more than “pastor” is a synonym for “Bible scholar.” You might find that overlap, but it’s far from a given. Occasionally, then, you might find something of interest in rabbinic material. It works this way: “Hey. rabbi so-and-so has an interesting take on that passage. Now I need to  see if his thinking is coherent / might work given the original context of that passage, and the wider parameters of biblical authorship.” In other words, rabbinic thought needs to be probed for strengths and weaknesses according to exegesis of a passage in its original context. This might shock some of you, but biblical Hebrew is not rabbinic Hebrew, either. The language went through many changes of orthography (spelling), morphology (word formation), grammar, and syntax. All of those can effect understanding (think modern English vs. Shakespearean English). And when it comes to ancient texts (including the Bible, especially in places where even older features are preserved), rabbis may not know what they’re looking at or for in a text unless they’ve been trained with respect to the language of these older periods. Rabbis depend on the Masoretic Text, but there are times when other textual material (the Septuagint, for example) must be factored in to get something right, or when meaning is only comprehensible in light of understanding what the more ancient for of the text looked like. But that’s getting into the weeds here.

The problem is (my perception) that people who don’t read Hebrew literally get mesmerized by “the rabbis” and their opinions. They feel like they can’t object because they don’t know Hebrew, or that they can’t know better, because they don’t know Hebrew, and so on. WRONG. Someone who doesn’t know Hebrew certainly can know better — if they know how to tap into serious academic resources produced by real scholars in relevant fields. This is what I try to expose people to in my books and the Naked Bible Podcast.

Perhaps another illustrative analogy helps make this particular point. A person who can’t read Hebrew appealing to rabbis to explain the biblical text is like a person who doesn’t read English appealing to an English reader to interpret Shakespeare. Might turn out well if that English reader has spent a couple decades studying Shakespeare’s writing. It won’t work at all if that English reader is a journalist or high school biology teacher or a teenager who likes comic books (“but they know English!” yeah, they do — I’ll bet they’ll really help you understand that Bible passage).

So let’s PLEASE stop appealing to rabbis for biblical understanding. Let’s instead learn how to tap into serious scholarship that reads Scripture in light of its own, original contexts.

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