Exegetical motifs - how James Kugel says ancient readers interpreted scripture.
Following Fishbane, James Kugel shows how first century Jewish and Christian texts participate in the same tradition of interpretation.
By the first century, argues Kugel, changes to the Hebrew language, historical distance from the events narrated in scripture, and the postexilic centrality of Torah all led to the sudden rise in prominence of the interpreter of scripture. Jews now expected the ‘word of the Lord’ to come not from the prophet but from the sage.
To Kugel, it is clear that these sage-interpreters were ruled by a common set of assumptions regarding the biblical text that govern all their work of interpretation.
Scripture is fundamentally cryptic. Ancient interpreters all agree that “the apparent meaning of the text is some hidden, esoteric message.” The task of interpretation requires attending skillfully to the smallest of hints and clues and suggesting solutions.
Scripture is fundamentally relevant to present life. For these readers, the meaning of the Bible is not primarily in the history it reports. Paul’s attitude toward the story about the rock, that this was “written down for our instruction,” is representative of all ancient interpreters’ attitudes toward scripture.
The texts of scripture are perfectly harmonious. Apparent contradictions are just that: apparent; and “must therefore be an illusion to be clarified by proper interpretation.” The motivation to demonstrate this inherent harmony inspired what Kugel calls the ‘doctrine of omnisignificance.’ No word or syllable is wasted. Each one contains hidden vistas of meaning.
The texts of scripture are divine in origin. Kugel is careful to clarify that the former three assumptions didn’t emerge as logical extensions of this fourth one; rather, by his lights, this assumption did not become explicit in ‘homogeneous fashion’ until relatively late in Jewish history, well after the former assumptions had been so homogeneously attested.
With this approach, ancient interpreters focused on these ‘apparent contradictions’ and ‘hints and clues’ in pursuit of deeper, harmonized meaning. What Kugel found over the course of his own study was that ancient biblical interpreters focused not on general topics like ‘Melchizedek’ or whole texts like ‘Gen 14:18-20,’ but the “individual bits of interpretation out of which the larger retellings were made.” He focuses, as did ancient interpreters, on exegetical motifs:
Simply put, an exegetical motif is an explanation of a biblical verse (or phrase or word therein) that becomes the basis for some ancient writer’s expansion or other alteration of what Scripture actually says: in paraphrasing or summarizing Scripture, the ancient writer incorporates the exegetical motif in his retelling and in so doing adds some minor detail or otherwise deviates from mere repetition or restatement of the Bible.
Exegetical motifs have specific points of origin in scripture, usually arising due to a particularly “troubling or suggestive word or phrase within a single verse.” Identifying a motif involves locating the troubling text and tracing the traditions to which it gives rise.
For example, one of the Melchizedek traditions Kugel traces is the motif of ‘Melchizedek as righteous king and priest.’ The text (Gen 14:18-20) doesn’t make this explicit. So where did the idea come from?
One of the curiosities regarding Melchizedek is that, in the traditional Hebrew text, his name is written with a space between its two halves—malki ṣedeq—as if it were two words, ‘my king’ and ‘righteousness.’ Interpreters took this oddity as a clue and ran with it.
Josephus says Melchizedek was a ‘righteous king’ in Jewish Wars 6:438. This interpretation, or motif, also appears Targums Onqelos, Neophyti Gen 14:18; Ephraem’s Commentary on Genesis 11:2; and Midrash ha-Gadol Gen. 11:10. When the author of Hebrews says, “First, his name means ‘king of righteousness,’” at 7:2, he is either assuming or affirming an existing tradition rather than advancing his own novel interpretation.
Evans had pointed out that the New Testament authors ‘heard more than Scripture itself,’ that is, ‘Scripture as it had been interpreted in late antiquity.’ Following Kugel, we might specify this in two ways.
For one, the authors of the New Testament had banks of motifs from which to forge their own texts.
For another, the interpretations of scripture we encounter in New Testament texts were made in the ideological context of these traditioned interpretations of scriptures. The authors variously assume them, combine them, transform and subvert them.
The lesson to be learned from Kugel is that interpreters of New Testament texts must attend not only what the Old Testament says, but to what everyone else was saying it says.