Excerpt of "Theological Hermeneutics and the Book of Numbers as Christian Scripture"

THEOLOGICAL HERMENEUTICS and the

BOOK of NUMBERS as

CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURE

RICHARD S. BRIGGS

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

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Copyright © 2018 by the University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data to come

∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and ­durability of the ­Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

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CONTENTS

Preface Abbreviations

Introduction: A Map of the Wilderness

ONE

The Figure in the Wilderness: Readings in the Book of Numbers

15

Trust and Suspicion: Approaches to a Holy Text That Invites Little Approach

35

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

1

T WO

SIX

ix xv

“Fraught with Background”: Towards Ascriptive Realism and Figural Reading (Numbers 10–12)

53

“What Did You Go Out into the Wilderness to See?”: Theological Interpretation, the Eyes of the Heart, and Karl Barth’s Reading of Sloth (Numbers 13–14)

85

“It Is the Text That Swallows Up the World”: The Eclipse of Numbers’s Narrative and the Literal Sense of Korah’s Rebellion (Numbers 15–16)

117

“The Rock Was Christ”: Typology between a Rock and a Hard Place (Numbers 20)

157

vii

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viii Contents SEVEN

“ ‘Peace, Peace,’ When There Is No Peace”: The Zeal of Readers in Defense and in Dissent (Numbers 25)

EIGHT

Blessing for an Unfinished Journey: On Reading Numbers 223 as Christian Scripture (Numbers 6; 22–24; 33)

Notes Bibliography

Index of Scriptural Passages

General Index

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191

253 301 321 000

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Introduction A Map of the Wilderness

This book sets out to do two things, neither of which comes first or second. On the one hand, it offers a theological interpretation of certain key narratives and other texts in the book of Numbers. On the other hand, and at the same time, it seeks to enrich and deepen our present practices of scriptural interpretation by way of understanding the nature of full-­bodied theological and hermeneutical investigation of the scriptural text. The resulting shape of the book testifies to my conviction that the latter goal—enriched interpretive understanding and practice—cannot be attained without some form of the former goal: sustained attention to an actual scriptural text. The book is also shaped by the sober recognition that those works pursuing the former goal—the sustained attention— frequently fail to arrive at the latter goal at all. The book is therefore part commentary and part theological-­hermeneutical treatise, with the nature of each of those characterizations in turn transformed by the presence of the other one. This introduction seeks to assist the reader of what follows by offering a map of the path that the book will take, with respect both to the approach to reading Numbers (the theological-­hermeneutical project) and the resultant reading(s) of Numbers that emerge (the substantive 1

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2 THEOLOGIC AL HERMENEUTICS AND THE BOOK OF NUMBERS

interpretation). Neither goal is subservient to the other; each is mutually illuminating.

The choice of the book of Numbers as focal text for this project requires only brief comment, since in one sense any substantive scriptural text would serve well, and part of the point is that one has to make a particular choice out of all the possible choices, and then get on with the task of reading the chosen text. The fact that Numbers is an Old Testament text will turn out to offer depth and nuance to the challenges of articulating adequate theological perspectives on its interpretation, bringing in sensitivity to variant Jewish and Christian emphases, and avoiding the pitfall of much generic reflection on theological interpretation where in practice the proposals offered only really make much sense for New Testament texts.1 The fact that Numbers is also a difficult text, in the sense of being obscure to many readers, forces upon us a willingness to dig deep if one is to make any real progress. Whatever the shortcomings of what follows, I trust that it will not be open to the charge of skipping past abundant straightforward alternatives in search of mysteriously hidden depths. Finally, the fact that Numbers is difficult in the sense of being morally and/or theologically problematic allows us to focus on many of the most pressing concerns with biblical interpretation today. There will be plenty of opportunity for reflection on the question of whether theologically engaged interpretation is a matter of evading a moral challenge.

Clearly it can be. I shall be seeking to show that it need not be. There are other various contingent reasons why I myself have selected the book of Numbers for such a focus, but in fact they all come down to some combination of the above reasons.2 It is not the whole book of Numbers that will be in view. The narratives that most easily interest readers of Numbers occur in distributed form through chapters 11–25. Chapters 1–10, in many ways, complete the work of Leviticus, and arguably the end of Exodus, in describing the setup of the Israelite camp. Chapter 26 reorients the reader to what is to come by moving on to a second census (after the one at the beginning of the book) and to a collection of texts taking up a disparate range of further matters. My own readings in the book will focus mainly on Numbers 11–25, but not on every chapter, and not equally on every narrative. Even so, these texts will afford substantial opportunity to ground matters of

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Introduction 3

hermeneutical and theological reflection in the actual practice of reading scripture. This focus is interwoven throughout—the refining and deepening of the hermeneutical and theological practices in play when scripture is read. The pull toward abstract reflection on such matters is great, and not without its merits. But in this book I attempt to tether such reflection to the rigors of working with the scriptural text. All in all, in the balance of current academic discourse, this is probably where most work still needs to be done.

T H E PAT H I N P R O S P E C T

How will the reader be led through this forbidding wilderness? Here I offer some orientation to the shape of the project, and some working definitions of the key terms that will be in focus as we proceed.3 With regard to the shape, it is not self-­evident how to introduce properly a project that has two different focal aims. The book thus begins with an introduction in two parts to the project of a theological reading of the scriptural book of Numbers, with the first two chapters emphasizing, respectively, the text and its readers (or readings). However, as will be clear throughout, it is not possible to deal serially first with one and then the other. Rather, each imposes upon the other. Each therefore leaves its mark upon the other and invites constant renegotiation of what is at stake in discussing the book of Numbers, or in the different ways in which one might approach reading it.

But one must start somewhere, and so it is only for the purposes of exposition that the focus passes from text to reader in the initial orientation.

The first of these chapters attempts to understand the nature of theological commentary of the book of Numbers by way of Henry James. It constitutes something of an essay in theological hermeneutics, clearing or at least reconnoitering the ground. The second chapter then dips into selected texts from the book to refine certain key ideas in how the book is approached. For example: trust and suspicion turn out to be a key pair of modes of hermeneutical inquiry for our task. By the end of chapter 2, the project of theological interpretation of Numbers is already under way, with self-­reflexive theological and hermeneutical awareness of what is involved.

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4 THEOLOGIC AL HERMENEUTICS AND THE BOOK OF NUMBERS

The chapters that follow then explore further facets of the task in sustained dialogue with key narrative texts, beginning with two chapters that set out what I take as the key hermeneutical and theological resources for such a reading. Chapter 3 begins by locating hermeneutical significance in the bare and brief narrative of Numbers 11:1–3, which in its underdefined and programmatic nature invites the articulation of a major theological-­hermeneutical issue for this project. The issue is that of reading scriptural narrative as realistic in the sense expounded by Hans Frei. In dialogue with Frei and Erich Auerbach in particular, I attempt to set forth an approach to reading that offers a contemporary take on traditional figural interpretation.4 Although I am about to introduce an alternative label to describe my project, it may be useful to clarify that I take “figural reading” of the Bible, in broad terms, to be interpretation that reads key people, places, events, indeed tropes of any kind, as figures of archetypal ways of being, doing, knowing, . . . conjoined under the unifying divine providence of God. In the manner described by Christopher Seitz: What is at stake in figural reading is the theological conviction that God the Holy Trinity is the eternal reality with whom we have to do, both Israel and God’s adopted sons and daughters in Christ, and this has ontological as well as economic implications for our reading of the two testament canon of Prophet and Apostle.5

The delicate balance this affords between concerns with historical-­critical specificity, on the one hand, and theologically ascriptive attention to truth, on the other, will be key to the whole book, and is explored in this first instance by trying it out in a careful reading of Numbers 11–12. Tempting as it is to reduce the resultant approach to being characterized in a simple sound-­bite (“ascriptive realism” is the nearest I come in this chapter), part of the burden of my account is that one must evaluate the hermeneutical labels with respect to how the reading plays out. Any hermeneutical position worth holding will be subtle and nuanced, and the proving of “ascriptive realism,” let alone clarity with regard to what its actual commitments may be, must be in the reading offered, though I shall offer pointers in a moment.

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Introduction 5

Chapter 4 proceeds to the next major narrative in Numbers, the account of the failed entry into the promised land, and engages with Karl Barth’s reading of this passage in the Church Dogmatics. Having set out a hermeneutical approach in the previous chapter, I here turn to what is, in my judgment, the most pressing theologically shaped issue for serious scriptural reading: how to preserve the freedom of the text to speak in dialogue with how to honor the theological convictions and traditions within which Christian (and, differently, Jewish) readers operate. There is no shortage of examples of readings that settle this matter entirely one way or the other: all text without regard to theological tradition; or all the rehearsal of theological prejudgment without due attention to the text.

In advance of the detailed exploration of this issue in chapter 4, this is a good moment to sketch out the fundamental convictions and conclusions of this project concerning these core issues. Barth’s reading of Numbers 13–14 in terms of sloth offers a striking example of attending to the text in terms that are not simply read off the surface of the text. Most simply: there is no Hebrew word for “sloth” in the text. So what does it mean to say that this is what the text is about? My conclusion, after the hermeneutical travails of chapter 3, and the theological investigations of chapter 4, may be stated as follows.

Among our chief interests as Bible readers is the reality to which the scriptural text attests, a reality that may be described in multiple ways (philosophically, sociologically, psychologically, . . . and historically too), but one of which should be attuned to theological conceptuality. Theological language takes seriously the nature and action of God; indeed it is what allows readers access to ways of talking about the nature and reality of God. However, such language as we encounter it in scripture is not straightforwardly descriptive, since God is not alternatively present to Bible readers in ways that allow one to measure how descriptively accurate the theological language is. Or to be more precise, God is not present in any other less mediated way, even if one may still affirm that God acts in and through the interpretive processes that readers bring to their reading. The mediations of spiritual experience will take different forms in different traditions: perhaps ecstatic phenomena for some; the Eucharist for others; small-­group discussion offering sudden insights . . .

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6 THEOLOGIC AL HERMENEUTICS AND THE BOOK OF NUMBERS

The value accorded to the accumulated track record of those mediations, the “tradition” as one might call it, will also be evaluated differently, and it will become clear in one or two places that my own location as a reader in the Anglican tradition involves me in a range of judgments both affirming of and at times (in more Protestant fashion) critical of the mediations offered over the centuries. Theological interpretation will benefit from far greater clarity around the question of the nature of God’s ongoing involvement in guiding readers to hear the text well, assuming that there is no real mileage in having any theological account where God abandons the text to subsequent readers with little more than “make of it what you will” and an invitation to fashion various critical methodologies that come and go according to the passing perspectives of the centuries. At various points in what follows these concerns will lead us to articulate and evaluate claims concerning the role of the church, of individual Christian interpreters, of differing Jewish and Christian perspectives, and of the legitimacy and limits of our best critical insights. For now, the point is that there is no unmediated access to God that takes place in language; or equally, that scriptural language is one such mediation of the nature and action of God. But it is important to say that theological language (in the text and today) is still really referring to God’s nature and action. For reasons that will be explored fully in chapter 3, the most felicitous language for holding on to this referential function without collapsing it into description is “ascription”: we are engaged in a mode of reading that one might term “ascriptive realism.” That Numbers is an Old Testament text allows the benefit here that Christian attention to the Old Testament quite clearly involves more than an interest in the text’s historically descriptive function. My theological claim is that the subject matter of such a text (vari­ ously referred to as its Sache or res) has irreducibly theological elements, alongside all its other characterizations (philosophical, historical, and so forth). My hermeneutical claim is then that the text itself is the prime candidate for offering the most trustworthy articulation of its subject matter. One should therefore approach the inevitable attempts to translate the text’s conceptualities into other categories as provisional, and open to the insights of fresh testing. Such translations may work well, I will argue, if they provide suitable access to the reality to which the text witnesses in

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Introduction 7

its ascriptive way. They are unlikely to work well if they are in effect the abstraction of thin categories from the narrative portrayal that the text offers, or the reduction of the text to a description of otherwise accessible characteristics. As I hope to demonstrate through chapters 3 and 4, the theological and the hermeneutical claims are related. In other words: attention to the text in its ascriptively realistic sense leads the reader to engagement with its witness to theological reality, or to reality understood in theological categories. My approach therefore operates downstream of the classic understanding of “the literal sense of the text” such as animated Aquinas at the beginning of the Summa Theologiae, such as exercised Hans Frei, and such as is much debated today.6 The definition of “the literal sense” has always circled around some such core claim as “what informed readers think the text most straightforwardly and significantly points to,” or in the deliberately loose definition of Lewis Ayres: “The literal sense is that which results from ascribing to the words, phrases and other textual units the meaning that is commonly given them by reasonably well-­educated readers in a reading community.”7 The many works and thinkers to which these reflections are indebted will be made plain in the substantive chapters that follow.

One should sense immediately how much of such an account depends on what these claims mean in practice. It would clearly be of very limited use, if indeed it is true at all, to say, “Numbers 13–14 is about sloth.” The interesting question will emerge only when Barth’s reading of sloth in this text is explored at sufficient length to understand what he is saying about the nature of human interaction before God and the extent to which this is what Numbers 13–14 narrates. (Because of the way that Barth’s reading is balanced by other readings of other passages, I shall adjudge it basically successful on this point in chapter 4.) The advantage, therefore, of pursuing my hermeneutical-­theological project with reference to a specific text is that the language of “ascriptive realism” and “theological interpretation” is put to work. Such language is predicated on the commitment that the reality of God is one relevant factor to assessing the full scope of the reality to which the text witnesses. Sad to say, among readers who would agree with that statement are many who seem to think that such a commitment allows one to bypass all the other careful and critical elements required of us in the reading of Scripture.

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8 THEOLOGIC AL HERMENEUTICS AND THE BOOK OF NUMBERS

One other point touched on here emerges in full force through the explorations of chapters 3 and 4. This is that the hypothetical reconstruction of a world behind the text, a world of “description” or “historical reference” as it might be termed, can play at best only a limited role in allowing access to the reality to which the text witnesses, if such reconstruction is carried out without attention to how the text is seeking to witness to the reality of God. Here my hermeneutical wager is that what the text does not mention is unlikely to be the key to understanding its realistic witness.8 The reader will encounter variations of this claim time and again in what follows.

Armed with this overview of the core claims of chapters 3 and 4, readers may then recognize that chapter 5 offers something of a synthesizing presentation of all these hermeneutical and theological commitments, first negatively and then positively. The negative presentation pertains to an extended analysis of Numbers 15, the main nonnarrative text that I consider herein, since it is the first to interrupt the narrative flow begun by the breaking of the camp at the end of Numbers 10. This affords an opportunity to explore in greater detail the vexed questions of how readers either discover or construct cohesion in narratives. Although I am strongly predisposed toward readings that discover cohesion, usually in the footsteps of an editor or redactor as much as any author, my conclusion is that the book of Numbers stands as a (perhaps rare) example of a biblical text that defeats such readings to some extent. It simply is a mixed collection of textual elements, and readerly ingenuity may in the end serve only to construct a cohesion where none previously existed, in the minds of any author or redactor. This opening half of chapter 5 represents the longest sustained engagement with the minutiae of Old Testament scholarship, and will concomitantly be the hardest reading for those whose interests are on the broader theological and hermeneutical level. I signpost certain key moments where such readers may feel free to disengage and then rejoin the book when it returns to attending to narrative, and to broader theological matters, with the arrival at Numbers 16. Here, in the more positive half of the presentation, the themes of the earlier understanding of the nature of interpretation are deployed in an attempt to read the deeply counterintuitive narrative (to modern readers) of Korah’s rebellion. This may be the clearest case study I am able

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Introduction 9

to offer of how far the conceptualities of the text do or do not transfer to today, by way of a discussion of the text’s concerns with holiness and priesthood, among other issues. Will the text absorb the world or will the (modern) world absorb the text? Readings in both directions are possible, and I discuss many of them. What is at stake in such readings is, I hope, as clearly stated as possible by the end of this chapter. In short: there is the uninteresting possibility that the reader who encounters such an “alien” text simply consigns it to the category of ancient history and refuses to consider its existential challenge; there is the unsettling possibility that such a reader allows the text’s alien agenda to challenge the presumptions of the modern world from which they read, and thereby to call them into new theological reflection; and there is the awkward possibility that if the challenge of the text is understood then the reader who notes it and rejects it may have come to the end of any meaningful engagement with the reality to which the text witnesses. They may talk on about the text, even at length, but they will have ceased to engage its literal sense, and will therefore have ceased, in a certain sense, to engage in conversation with the text.

From this point on, I select only certain key narratives in order to allow discussion of three further substantive points, which I take in roughly the order in which they are provoked by a sequential reading of Numbers in the context of the whole of scripture. First comes Christology. In chapter 6 I turn to the story of Moses striking the rock in the wilderness (Num. 20), in dialogue with the well-­known christological twist on this tale given by Paul in 1 Corinthians 10:4. This offers an opportunity to address directly the much-­debated sense in which Christian reading of the Old Testament is (or is necessarily) christological. By way of engaging with the contrast between typological/figural readings and the approach of general hermeneutical theory, I use this story of the rock to suggest that the Old Testament does itself serve as a rock, a stumbling stone, for general hermeneutical theory in its relevance to questions of how to read Old Testament texts. The specific contribution of the two-­testament structure of Christian scripture is thrown into clear relief here, where readings adhering only to the generating horizon of the text will not arrive at the text’s relevance to readings attuned to scripture’s realistic witness to Christ. Multiple readings are possible, but they do include Christian ones.

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10 THEOLOGIC AL HERMENEUTICS AND THE BOOK OF NUMBERS

Second comes violence, or the troubling nature of texts that seem to validate unethical practices. As a test case here I turn to Numbers 25 and the account of the zeal of Phinehas. In dialogue with interpreters ancient and modern, and in particular indebted to the work of Miroslav Volf, I argue that a “literal” approach to this text clarifies a range of potential readings that include options for taking the text seriously but not in support of violence. It is not possible, I argue, to go further and rule out such “violent readings,” despite the hopes of occasional theologically motivated apologists, but the fact that the text’s ascriptive and realistic witness to God can make good sense in ways that do not condone religious violence is to be taken seriously. I also argue that it is of no benefit to read our present world naively with regard to peace and violence, and that for better or worse—in fact assuredly for worse—we do not live in a world where peaceful ends are attainable always through peaceful means. Likewise, scriptural texts do not in practice always do us good, but again, the point is that this should not foreclose on the search for constructive readings.

Third comes blessing. Although it is not unfair to see the book of Numbers as largely a downbeat affair, theologically and spiritually, there is a recurrent interest in blessing. Here I conclude the journey through the book by taking up some of its more significant texts that have not otherwise received attention: the justly celebrated Aaronic blessing of chapter 6; the delightful narratives of Balaam and Balak in chapters 22–24, which really deserve a full treatment of their own for all their literary and theological complexity; and the wilderness itinerary of Numbers 33. This last text is much celebrated in the history of interpretation because it serves as the base text for Origen’s tour de force of theological reading concerning the ascent of the soul towards God. Although I have no interest in suggesting that Origen serves as a model for how present-­day readers should read the text, for reasons clarified in the discussion, I do think that the kinds of issues he raised stand close to the concerns that might properly exercise attentive readers today.

The overall shape of the journey to come therefore begins with rehearsing the framing questions of text and reading in two generally theoretical chapters; rises to the core hermeneutical and theological accounts of chapters 3 and 4; explores them in most concentrated form with the paradigmatically difficult narrative of Korah’s rebellion in chapter

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Introduction 11

5 (along with extended clarification of how different such approaches are from typical present-­day commentary); and then unwinds through three more thematically oriented chapters pertaining to texts that provoke consideration of Christology, violence, and blessing. Like the book of Numbers itself, this is a journey without a definitive end. The best readings provoke further rereadings. My hope is that readers who have tested the hermeneutical and theological proposals expounded here through the wilderness wanderings of the book of Numbers will in turn then seek to refine them further through the careful reading of other scriptural texts.

T H E PAT H I N S U B S TA N C E

It remains rather more briefly to offer some sense of the theological terrain to be traversed, by which I mean: what I will end up saying with regard to the book of Numbers’ own theological contribution(s). Chapter 1 below will discuss at length various alternative proposals concerning Numbers’ “theme” or “message,” as well as the various limitations on our ability to capture such a notion in less time than it takes to spell out everything the book says. But again, readers with an interest in Numbers as Christian scripture may be served by some advance indication of what the core theological impress of the book turns out to be.

I have concluded that the most helpful way to express this is in terms of the formational theological questions to which Numbers provides the most illuminating answers for its readers. I highlight four: What is the significance and nature of trust in God? How does holiness (mediated in Numbers through the priesthood) challenge and redefine our sense of what is right, or “fair”? To what extent is it helpful to conceptualize life with God as a journey through a wilderness, of whatever sort? Finally, short of whatever promised land we may be, what is the context and role of blessing? All these matters will be taken up in the book that follows, but I offer here a very short summa on these four topics in Numbers: trust—holiness—wilderness—blessing.

As I will argue more fully in chapter 2, trust is one key theme in the book. The reader of Numbers has questions of trust and its absence (suspicion) foregrounded at key moments in the book’s narrative: in the people’s

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