Reading with the Jewish teachers

Interpreting the Bible is not a modern invention. The First Testament itself already shows readers explaining the text to others.

A reading that explains itself

In Nehemiah 8:1-8, after the return from exile, Ezra reads the book of the law of Moses before the people gathered near the Water Gate. Levites, named one by one, “helped the people to understand the law”. The people probably no longer spoke Hebrew well, but rather the Aramaic brought back from Babylon. The explanation therefore probably included a translation.

According to rabbinic tradition, this episode is the origin of the Targum, a translation and interpretation in Aramaic read in the synagogue. To translate is already to choose a meaning. The one who explains shares the authority of the text, because he can steer the whole understanding of it.

Reading was a serious act

In antiquity people almost always read aloud, even alone, like the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8:30. Texts were written continuously, without spaces or punctuation: to read was already to divide and to understand.

At Qumran, the way of reading was so important that a reading error could be regarded as blasphemy and lead to exclusion from the community. Philo and Josephus describe synagogues where, every sabbath, people gathered to hear the Law and gain an accurate knowledge of it.

Two schools, one text

Around the turn of our era, two great Pharisaic schools debate:

• The school of Shammai generally gives strict interpretations of the Torah.
• The school of Hillel gives more lenient interpretations.

Rabbinic Judaism kept a surprising solution: both readings can be true. As Stephen Wylen sums it up, “the divine word may be paradoxical, but the divine law must be directive. The minority opinion is true as Torah, but we do not live by it.” The memory of the disagreement is kept, while a decision is made for life in common.

Hillel is also known for his rules of interpretation (middot). One example is the “how much more” argument (qal wa-homer): if something holds in a light case, it holds all the more in a serious one. Paul would use these rules.

The text and the teacher

For the Pharisees, the written Torah went hand in hand with an oral tradition of interpretation. The Sadducees, for their part, rejected this tradition and kept to the letter. Rabbinic Judaism later put this tradition into writing in the Mishnah, then discussed it in the Talmuds and the collections of Midrash.

One lesson runs through all of this: in Judaism the text is never alone. It is read within a community, handed down by teachers and debated. The first Christians would inherit this way of doing things.