From one perspective, meaning is largely a matter of finding connections. This book has dealt primarily with the connections created by craft, language, and genre. It has also emphasized the tradition’s common expectations, which poets transform to forge their particular poems.

Here, I would like to explore the text’s connections and meaning by asking three questions:

1. What did it mean?
2. What did it come to mean for those before us?
3. What does it mean?

The answers to these three questions are related, but they are not the same. Moreover, each answer also has its own complication.

16.1. What did the biblical text mean?

The question of what the biblical text meant depends on our understanding of history.

First, history suggests people and events, and archaeology has given us a larger understanding of Israel’s place within the ancient Near East. Along with many ancient cities, archaeologists have uncovered numberless tablets and inscriptions that have unlocked ancient literature, laws, and culture. Within that history, Israel appears as a late culture. The great pyramids predate David by more than fifteen hundred years, and the Sumerians invented writing more than two thousand years before David. The kingdoms of Judah and Israel are insignificant compared to the empires of Assyria, Babylon, and Persia. History plays a central role for the prophets who speak to world events. Today we understand this history much better although much remains hidden. 

Second, the great biblical scholar, Herman Gunkel (1862-1932), emphasized the importance of understanding a text within its historical context. However, fixing a text in a specific context can be challenging. Moreover, text from one period found new meaning in later periods. Psalms addressing God as king reflect the culture of Solomon’s temple, but they find a place in Israel’s prayer during the Persian and Hellenistic periods before taking their place in the Bible. These texts can transcend their original context. 

Third, language communicates a historical understanding of life and culture. The Hebrew word for “house,” as noted earlier in this book, does not have the same sense as what we understand as a house. Likewise, we must know something of ancient kingship to understand the acclamation, “The Lord is king!” If we only know what words mean today, we will miss what the Bible wants to tell us.

Fourth, the Bible does not offer us just one theology; rather it presents several theologies—sometimes at the same time. The royal theology of Jerusalem, which celebrates YHWH as king, gives way to the deuteronomistic theology, which insists that YHWH alone is the one God. After the destruction of Jerusalem, the priestly theology focuses on the temple and Torah to forge a new theology that shapes the religion during the New Testament. Apocalyptic theology, grounded in royal theology, provides the other theological context for that time. The Bible holds together these different theologies, and their differences help to preserve the mystery of God.

Fifth, over the last three hundred years, scholars have given much attention to the development of biblical texts. Our notion of a single author writing and publishing a book does not fit these biblical books. Some texts begin as an oral story or poem, which another person writes down at a later period. A final editor may then weave several traditions into the final text which bears the marks of its hybrid history. Most prophetic books contain not only the words of that prophet but also poems and stories added by their disciples who continued to build on and adjust what they received.

Sixth, this book has dealt with the biblical texts as they appear in the New Revised Standard Version with minimal consideration of the Hebrew text. The best Hebrew manuscript was copied more than thirteen hundred years after the scribes began to create the book that we have.  Though the text appears in English as coherent and legible, the Hebrew text is sometimes ambiguous and even opaque. Good translations provide indications of the problems in the footnotes.

Seventh, the Hebrew Bible itself comes together during the Persian and Hellenistic periods, and it reflects the concerns and issues of that time. The post-exilic community was in search of an identity that would allow them to live in the midst of a foreign culture and maintain their own religious and cultural identity. Their concerns shape the book and provide an important lens for viewing the book. On the other hand, their specific concerns are not exactly ours. The psalms were originally someone else’s prayer. Likewise, the prophets were not speaking first of all to us. We must recognize their concerns as we attend to our own.

Historical studies have come under some critique during the last fifty years. Some of its claims have proved to be wrong. The post-exilic period, which was regarded earlier as a period of decline, stands now as a time of great creativity. Also, historical studies necessarily focus on what is behind the text and can lose sight of the words on the page, and this book has focused on the words on the page.

What the text meant, therefore, can be a complicated matter. Still, these texts carry the information we need to make sense of them—if we pay attention.

16.2. What did the biblical text come to mean?

In both the Jewish and Christian traditions, an important period follows the book which has become a foundation for later interpretation. The Rabbis lay this foundation for Judaism, and the early Church does it for Christianity.

The Jewish Study Bible provides a fine overview of “Classical Rabbinic Interpretation” by Yaakov Elman and “Midrash and Jewish Interpretation” by David Stern. As Elman says, Rabbinic interpretations seek first to explain the text itself and then develop its “application” or “practical intent” for the present. The rabbis carry this out in a conversation that stretches over generations and preserves both the major and minor opinions of Rabbis as it seeks to clarify and make the Torah real in the life of the people.

The early Church affirmed the unity of the two testaments, grounded in Luke 24 and elsewhere. Platonic thought provided the philosophical framework. These early writers understood Christ as Plato’s ideal and everything else as a reflection of that ideal. Therefore, the Old Testament became a manifestation of the Gospel. The prayer psalms, with the psalmist praying for salvation from sickness, oppression, and death, mirror Christ’s crucifixion, and the psalmist’s release reflects the resurrection. While some have criticized this interpretation as arbitrary (and some of it is), they miss the larger metaphorical connections that the early Church grasped.

Two large schools of interpretation developed in the early period. One at Antioch focused on the literal or plain meaning of the biblical text. The other at Alexandria, with Origen as its leader, saw the literal meaning as a shadow of a Christological interpretation. Origen could always find a Christological interpretation for every word, but eventually, there was a reaction to the excesses of his followers.

St. Augustine talks about these two meanings as the text’s plain sense and its transferred sense. The plain sense would be what it meant in its context. The transferred sense is a Christological sense that builds on the plain sense. Any interpretation, Augustine insists, should be consistent with the whole text, though he realizes that this does not solve every problem. People often prefer simple, unambiguous answers, but the Bible is better suited to engage us in a serious conversation that deepens our understanding.

Augustine recognizes the psalms as ancient prayers, but he sees them primarily as the prayers of Christ. Because some do not fit easily into the mouth of the ideal Christ, Augustine distinguishes between the prayers of Christ the Head and those of the Body of Christ, that is, the Church.

Augustine also sets out an important criterion for interpreting all Scripture: the commandment of love.

If you seem to understand the divine Scriptures or some part of them but by that understanding do not build upon the twofold love of God and neighbor, then you have not yet understood them. (De doctrina christiana, I.40 = XXII 20)

With this, Augustine emphasizes the moral context for interpretation.

Christians have not used the Hebrew text liturgically since the earliest times. Instead, they have used it in translation, beginning with the Greek text, then the Latin, and vernacular languages. In the West, the same is also true for the New Testament. Even so, Christians have accepted these translations as the Word of God, and they ground this approach in the incarnation. From the beginning, God’s Word has come to us in human words.

If you belong to a community of faith, its tradition of understanding the Bible provides both guidance and limits for interpretation. Still, a careful examination of tradition reveals a multiplicity of understandings that both affirm and challenge our understanding of God and the world.

16.3. What does a biblical text mean?

A text becomes meaningful to us when we can find a relationship between the text and our understanding of God and the world. Though this statement sounds rather simple, it conceals many complexities. This relationship is fundamentally metaphorical. We find meaning when we discover how the text is like us. As in all things metaphorical, the overlap is not whole and entire. The relationship is sometimes narrow but often wider than we first suspect.

In The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, H. Porter Abbott observes that we can take three different approaches to interpretation which I characterize as standing inside the text, outside the text, and between texts (ch. 7).

In the first, standing inside the text, we try to key our understanding to the worldview of the text itself. We accept its world and the way it works. We interpret its meaning accordingly. People sometimes talk about “what the author meant.” However, we do not have journals from these authors or interviews with them. We have only the text. Our insight can only be our reconstruction of what fits with the text’s worldview. Moreover, and this is particularly true for poets, what they want to say is the poem itself. If they had wanted to say something different, they would have written a different poem. The poem is what they want us to confront.

When standing outside the text, we can ask whether we agree with that worldview, and we easily find ourselves standing outside because of our differences and distance. Their world was not round (Genesis 1). They took slavery as a given (Exodus 21; Deuteronomy 15). Women in some texts are considered part of a man’s property (Exod 20:17), or at least wives should be subservient to their husbands (Eph 5:24). Sometimes we bracket these differences and read on, but sometimes they are central to our relationship to the text, or they should be. In Genesis 38, Tamar gets justice for herself only by playing the prostitute. Though the narrator seems comfortable with this resolution, it raises questions about whether we would want to live in that world and whether we do, in fact, live in that world.

Finally, we stand between texts when we find relationships of likeness between the biblical text and other texts in or outside the Bible or with the texts of our lives. The connections here are metaphorical and so partial. While the worldview of the text is central to our understanding when standing inside or outside the text, here, it is not the controlling factor. Here readers play a central role because they discover relationships that the text and its author did not foresee. Readers with a larger world of connections see more possibilities than those with a restricted imagination.

Standing inside, outside, or between texts are all legitimate places to stand. It is essential to know where you are standing and what you can accomplish from that place.

Though the psalms were once other people’s prayers, we try to discover how they might be “our” prayers. Here we might regard them as mirrors or windows. They are mirrors when we find that the psalm reflects something of ourselves. We catch sight of our suffering or joy in the psalm, which gives us words to express our experience. If windows, then the psalm gives us insight into the lives of others. Just as the ancient psalmists experienced sickness and injustice, so also do people in our world today. We do not always know their names, but they are out there, and the psalms give us connections to them.

Today, “post-modern” approaches to literature emphasize the instability of texts. These scholars argue that every text has inconsistencies and contradictions that undermine every understanding, for they admit no universals. While I do not accept their premise, their observations have a point. Texts can be more challenging and ambiguous than we want them to be. Our world is not the world of the text. Its worldview does not always make sense, and it may even be objectionable to us. Sometimes, as in the case of slavery, it takes a long time to discover this. St. Augustine’s insistence that our interpretation must build upon “the twofold love of God and neighbor” remains an enduring principle.

The philosopher, Hans Georg Gadamer, has argued that all interpretation comes by engaging the text in a thoroughgoing conversation with questions we have not already answered. If we look for answers that we already know, we will make the text confirm that. However, if we come to the text with an openness that allows us to engage the text in a real dialogue. This may challenge us to think differently, or it may invite us to see life more deeply and more fully than before.

16.4. Exercise for Chapter 16

Pick your favorite psalm and answer the three questions:

• What did the psalm mean?
• What did it come to mean?
  For this question, Google St. Augustine’s commentary on the psalms called “Exposition on the Psalms,” and see what he thought the psalm meant.
• What does the psalm mean for you?