THE FOUR KINDS OF SCRIPTURE INTERPRETATION:
Yet there is a wisdom that we are speaking to those who are mature enough for it. But it is
not the wisdom of this world or of this world’s leaders, who are in the process of passing
away. On the contrary, we are communicating a secret wisdom from God, which has been
hidden until now but which, before history began, God had decreed would bring us glory. Not
one of this world’s leaders has understood it, because if they had, they would not have
executed the Lord from whom this glory flows. But, as the Tanakh says.
“No eye has seen, no ear has heard,
And no one’s heart has imagined
all the things that God has prepared
for those who love him” (Isaiah 64:4; 52:15)
It is to us, however, that God has revealed these things. How? Through the Spirit. For
the Spirit probes all things, even the profoundest depths of God. For who knows the inner
workings of a person except the person’s own spirit inside him? So too no one knows the inner
workings of God except God’s Spirit. Now we have not received the spirit of the world but the
Spirit of God, so that we might understand the things God has so freely given us. These are
the things we are talking about when we avoid the manner of speaking that human wisdom
would dictate and instead use a manner of speaking taught by the Spirit, by which we explain
things of the Spirit to people who have the Spirit. Now the natural man does not receive the
things from the Spirit of God – to him they are nonsense! Moreover, he is unable to grasp
them, because they are evaluated through the Spirit. But the person who has the Spirit can
evaluate everything, while no one is in a position to evaluate him.
For who has known the mind of ADONAI?
Who will counsel him?
But we have the mind of the Messiah!
1 Corinthians 2:6 – 16 (CJB)
During Yeshua’s life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions, crying aloud and
shedding tears, to the One who had the power to deliver him from death; and he was heard
because of his godliness. Even though he was the Son, he learned obedience through his
sufferings. And after he had been brought to the goal, he became the source of eternal
deliverance to all who obey him, since he had been proclaimed by God as a cohen gadol to be
compared with Malki-Tzedek.
We have much to say about this subject, but it is hard to explain, because you have
become sluggish in understanding. For although by this time you ought to be teachers, you
need someone to teach you the very first principles of God’s Word all over again! You need
milk, not solid food! Anyone who has to drink milk is still a baby, without experience in
applying the Word about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, for those whose
faculties have been trained by continuous exercise to distinguish good from evil.
Therefore, leaving behind the initial lessons about the Messiah, let us go on to
maturity, not laying again the foundation of turning from works that lead to death, trusting
God, and instruction about washings, s’mikah, the resurrection of the dead and eternal
punishment. And, God willing, this is what we will do.
For when people have once been enlightened, tasted the heavenly gift, become
sharers in the Ruach HaKodesh, and tasted the goodness of God’s Word and the powers of the
olam haba – and then have fallen away – it is impossible to renew them so that they turn from
their sin, as long as for themselves they keep on executing the Son of God on the stake all
over again and keep on holding him up to public contempt. For the land that soaks up
frequent rains and then brings forth a crop useful to its owners receives a blessing from God;
but if it keeps producing thorns and thistles, it fails the test and is close to being cursed; in the
end, it will be burned.
Now even though we speak this way, dear friends, we are confident that you have the
better thing that come from being delivered. For God is not so unfair as to forget your work
and the love you showed for him in your past service to his people – and in your present
service too. However, we want each one of you to keep on showing the same diligence right
up to the end, when your hope will be realized; so that you will not become sluggish, but will
be imitators of those who by their trust and patience are receiving what has been promised.
Messianic Jews (Hebrews) 5:7 – 6:12 (CJB)
When Isra’el was a child, I loved him;
And out of Egypt I called my son.
Hosea 11:1 (CJB)
After they had gone, an angel of ADONAI appeared to Yosef in a dream and
said, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and escape to Egypt, and stay there
until I tell you to leave. For Herod is going to look for the child in order to kill him.”
So he got up, took the child and his mother, and left during the night for Egypt,
where he stayed until Herod died. This happened in order to fulfill what ADONAI had
said through the prophet,
“Out of Egypt I called my son”
Mattiyahu 2:13 – 15 (CJB)
Hosea 11:1 clearly refers not to the Messiah but to the people of Israel, who were
called God’s son even before leaving Egypt (Exodus 4:22). The previous two Tanakh
quotations (1:23; 2:6) involved literal fulfillment, but this does not. In what sense, then, does
Yeshua’s flight to Egypt fulfill what ADONAI had said through the prophet?
To answer, we must understand the four basic modes of Scripture interpretation used
by the rabbis. These are:
1. P’shat (“simple”) – The plain, literal sense of the text, more or less what modern scholars
mean by “grammatical-historical exegesis,” which looks to the grammar of the language and
the historical setting as background for deciding what a passage means. Modern scholars often
consider grammatical-historical exegesis the only valid way to deal with a text; pastors who
use other approaches in their sermons usually feel defensive about it before academics. But
the rabbis had three other modes of interpreting Scripture, and their validity should not be
excluded in advance but related to the validity of their implied presuppositions.
2. Remez (“hint”) – Wherein a word, phrase or other element of the text hints at a truth not
conveyed by the p’shat. The implied presupposition is that God can hint at things of which the
Bible writers themselves were unaware.
3. Drash or midrash (“search”) – An allegorical or homiletical application of the text. This is a
species of eisegesis – reading one’s own thoughts into a text – as opposed to exegesis, which
is extracting from a text what it actually says. The implied presupposition is that the words of
Scripture can legitimately become grist for the mill of human intellect, which God can guide to
truths not directly related to the text at all.
4. Sod (“secret”) – A mystical or hidden meaning arrived at by operating on the numerical
values of the Hebrew letters, noting unusual spellings, transposing letters, and the like. For
example, two words, the numerical equivalents of whose letters add up to the same amount,
would be good candidates for revealing a secret through what Arthur Koestler in his book on
the inventive mind called “bisociation of ideas”. The implied presupposition is that God invests
meaning in the minutest details of Scripture, even the individual letters.
The presuppositions underlying remez, drash and sod obviously express God’s
omnipotence, but they also express his love for humanity, in the sense that he chooses out of
love to use extraordinary means for reaching people’s hearts and minds. At the same time, it
is easy to see how remez, drash and sod can be abused, since they all allow, indeed require,
subjective interpretation; and this explains why scholars, who deal with the objective world,
hesitate to use them.
These four methods of working a text are remembered by the Hebrew word PaRDeS,
an acronym formed from the initials; it means “orchard” or “garden”.
What, then is Mattiyahu doing here? Some allege that he is misusing Scripture,
twisting the meaning of what Hosea wrote from its context in order to apply it to Yeshua. Such
an accusation stands only if Mattiyahu is dealing with the p’shat. For there is no question that
the p’shat of Hosea 11:1 applies to the nation of Israel and not Yeshua.
Some think Mattiyahu is using the drash approach, making a midrash in which he
reads the Messiah into a verse dealing with Israel. Many rabbis used the same procedure;
Mattiyahu’s readers would not have found it objectionable.
Nevertheless, David Stern in his Jewish New Testament Commentary suggests that
Mattiyahu is not doing eisegesis but giving us a remez, a hint of a very deep truth. Israel is
called God’s son as far back as Exodus 4:22. The Messiah is presented as God’s son a few
verses earlier in Mattiyahu (1:18 – 25), reflecting Tanakh passages such as Isaiah 9:6 –7,
Psalm 2:7 and Proverbs 30:4. Thus the Son equals the son; the Messiah is equated with, is
one with, the nation of Israel. This is the deep truth Mattiyahu is hinting at by calling Yeshua’s
flight to Egypt a “fulfillment” of Hosea 11:1.
The fact that the Messiah stands for and is intimately identified with his people Israel,
is an extremely important corporate aspect of the Gospel generally neglected in the
individualistically-oriented Western world. The individual who trusts Yeshua becomes united
with him and is “immersed” (baptizo) into all that Yeshua is (Acts 2:38), including his death
and resurrection – so that his sinful propensities are regarded as dead, and his new nature,
empowered by the Holy Spirit, is regarded as alive (Ro 6:3 – 6). Likewise, just as this intimate
identification with the Messiah holds for the individual, so the Messiah similarly identifies with
and embodies national, corporate Israel. Indeed, it is only because Yeshua identifies himself
with the Jewish people, national Israel, the “olive tree” into which Gentile Christians have been
“grafted” (Ro 11:17 – 24), that he can plausibly identify with the Messianic Community, the
Church, as “head of the Body” (1Cor 11:3; Eph 1:10, 22; 4:15, 5:23; Col 1:18, 2:19) and
“cornerstone” of the building (Mt 21:42; Mk 12:10; Acts 4:11; Eph 2:20; 1Pet 2:6 – 7).
Modern readers of the Bible, by using “grammatical-historical exegesis,” ignore all
modes of interpretation except the p’shat, discounting them as eisegesis. This is in reaction to
the tendency of the Church Fathers in the second through eighth centuries to over-allegorize,
an error which probably resulted from their misunderstanding the limitations of, and thereby
misusing, the other three rabbinic approaches to texts. But the New Testament is a Jewish
book, written by Jews in a Jewish context; and the first-century Jewish context included all
four ways of handling texts. Mattiyahu knew perfectly well that Hosea was not referring to
Yeshua, to a Messiah, or even to any individual. Yet he also sensed that because Yeshua in a
profound yet recondite way embodies Israel, his coming from Egypt re-enacted in a spiritually
significant way the Exodus of the Jewish people. Since remez and p’shat have different
presuppositions one should expect fulfillment of a prophecy by remez to be different from
literal fulfillment. At 1:23 and 2:6 the plain, literal sense of the text, the p’shat, suffices to
show how the prophecies are fulfilled, but here it does not.
The phrase, “what ADONAI had said through the prophet,” takes our attention off
the prophet himself and puts it on God who spoke through him. It lets the reader understand
that ADONAI might have been saying more than what the prophet himself understood when he
wrote. It prepares him for the possibility that behind Hosea’s p’shat lies God’s remez to be
revealed in its time and lends credibility to the “PaRDes” mode of interpretation.
Recognition that there are four modes of Jewish exegesis also resolves much of the
controversy concerning how certain passages of the Tanakh ought to be interpreted. For
example, most Christians say that Isaiah 53 refers to the Messiah, and some (though not all)
traditional Jews say it refers to Israel. But if there is a mystical identification between the
Messiah and the people whose King he is, (an idea expounded at length by the best-known
Christian theologian of the twentieth century, Karl Barth, in his Church Dogmatics), then the
interpretational conflict vanishes; both claimants hold part of the total truth.
Moreover, the idea that the Messiah personifies or is identified intimately with Israel is
a Jewish one. First of all, we see it in the Tanakh itself. Compare Isaiah 49:3 (“You are my
servant Israel, in whom I will be glorified.”) with Isaiah 49:6 (“Is it too slight a thing that you
should be my servant… to restore the preserved of Israel?”). The servant is at once Israel and
he who restores Israel, that is, the Messiah. In Chapter 12 of Raphael Patai’s The Messiah
Texts he quotes Pesikta Rabbati 161 – 162, where the Messiah is called Efrayim (a name
symbolizing Israel) and is at the same time bearing Israel’s sufferings. Likewise the thirteenth-
century work which is at the core of the Jewish mystical approach called kabbalah, the Zohar,
(2:212a), links the Messiah’s suffering with that of Israel. Patai also retells the eighteenth-
century Rabbi Nachman of Bratislav’s story of the viceroy and the king’s daughter, adding that
most interpreters understand the viceroy to represent both Israel and the suffering Messiah.
