The Scriptures includes their own interpretations.
Lessons from Michael Fishbane’s Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel
Here’s a brief reading of read Michael Fishbane’s Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel focused on my own immediate interests:
The New Testament aside, Michael Fishbane points out the Hebrew Bible itself is a case of intertextuality and interpreted Scripture.
Fishbane finds it a remarkable feature of the history of religions in general that, alongside each religion’s original authoritative texts, a set of independently ‘dignified’ traditions and commentaries has also emerged. These traditions derive their dignity from their association with those original scriptures; and it hardly matters whether that association is a product of focused ‘exegesis’ or simply of ‘textual justification.’ What fascinates Fishbane about the Hebrew Bible in particular—he limits his concern to ‘inner-biblical exegesis’ within the Hebrew Bible—is the way in which it bears within its confines interpretations of its own texts; that is, it contains both ‘scriptures’ and interpretations of those scriptures which have, themselves, become ‘scriptures.’ The Bible itself is a dialogical relationship between traditum and traditio.
Understanding this should shape the way we approach biblical interpretation. Tradition-historical readers, he points out, have tended to work backwards, reconstructing the oral traditions that (must?) lie behind the written texts we receive. Fishbane commends working forwards: beginning with the given, authoritative traditum, itself a “stablized literary formation,” and moving forward to the interpretations based upon it. Whereas tradition-historical readers view finalized texts as pastiches of various traditions, Fishbane views finalized texts as interpretive snapshots from a moment in history.
One form of this inner-biblical interpretation particularly relevant for a study of Hebrews is aggadic exegesis. Aggadic exegesis is best understood in terms of its distinction from halakhic exegesis. Generally speaking, halakhic exegesis is concerned with the reinterpretation of fixed laws; while aggadic exegesis is concerned with “utilizing the full range of inherited traditum for the sake of new theological insights, attitudes, and speculations.” Halakhic exegesis arises in response to a lack of clarity in legal material; whereas aggadic exegesis springs from an abundance of clarity in a given text. It is because the text is clear, and so has more easily maintained an active presence in the minds of the tradents, that it is ripe for reinterpretation and reformulation. Aggadic exegesis does not “supplement gaps,” but “draws forth latent and unsuspected meanings” in the traditum so that it can “transcend its original focus, and become the basis of a new configuration of meaning.”
This unapologetically creative mode of exegesis was occasioned, says Fishbane, by ‘historical crises’ that had required the contemporary traditio to be significantly reconfigured. These historical exigencies can be sorted, generally speaking, into three kinds. There are situations that call for the restoration of the tradition in its totality. There are situations that call for the reinterpretation or transformation of a particular element of the tradition. Then there are “massive crises,” situations that call for a radical reinterpretation of the tradition as a whole. Both the construction and the destruction of the temple called for radical reinterpretations of priestly law. Fishbane may not address the Book of Hebrews, but we would do well to observe that the text of Hebrews is a practice in radically reconfiguring the Levitical cult in the light of Jesus’s ascension into heaven and the notion that his offering of his own blood had accomplished atonement once, for all.
These new interpretations, or new traditio, tend to have the same rhetorical features. First, the author asserts the radical newness of his traditio against the radical obsolescence of the traditum. Rhetorically, this often includes contrasts between the former days and the present ones (e.g., ἐπ ἐσχάτου τῶν ἡμερῶν τούτων; Heb. 1:1–2). Second, the author emphasizes the continuity between the older traditum and the future he envisions, drawing from cultural memory to configure future hope. The primary tool for this is typology, which attends hermeneutically to a set of select correspondences between earlier and later phenomena. Typology is meant to allow tradents to interpret their present situation in light of clear tradita from their past. As such, it is a re-actualization of the traditum rather than an outright replacement. Third, the author presents his new traditio as an authoritative response to the present situation exposing matters of pressing concern. His traditio cannot guide tradents into a faithful future unless it can first guide them through the immediate moment.
This is a fine moment to point out one of the natural problems with understanding Hebrews’s vision for worship. The scholarly debate of whether the θυσίαν αἰνέσεως at Heb. 13:15 refers to the Christian eucharist is flatly anachronistic. It does not, because the historical conditions under which Christians could have understood their eucharist as a new covenant sacrifice did not obtain until the late second century. Later interpretations of Heb 13:15 are themselves reinterpretations of particular elements of the traditum introduced in Hebrews.