Through Immigrant's Eyes? Reading the Bible from Various Perspectives

Institute of Biblical Research is a premier biblical studies fellowship guided by evangelical principles. IBR sponsors morning devotions at the annual meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature, and an annual lecture.

This year's annual lecture was entitled "Reading the Bible through Other Lenses: New Perspectives and Challenging Vistas," and given by Denver Seminary professor M. Daniel Carroll. The premise was that we can discover valid new interpretations of the Bible if we look through the eyes of the diaspora community. By diaspora community, Prof. Carroll refers to those who migrate to other countries, such as Latinos crossing the border into the U.S. It was very stimulating, but ultimately I have some serious disagreements.

In recent decades, we've been challenged to look at the Bible from various perspectives. How would our interpretation of various passages change if we read the text from the perspective of a woman, of an African, or of a slave? No doubt our own experiences often prevent us from hearing the word of God from these other perspectives.

Prof. Carroll gave some examples. He suggested that Abraham's lie about his wife being his sister might be understood differently if we looked at it from the eyes of an "undocumented worker" (no doubt he meant to say "illegal immigrant”). Accordingly, Abraham was an immigrant who was responsible for feeding his clan, and so desperate to do so during the famine that he was willing to risk Sara. Such risks, Prof. Carroll said, must be taken during desperate times, as reflected in the plight of many immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexican border.

Prof. Carroll also pointed out to Joseph, Prince of Egypt, who adopted Egyptian customs, but still named his children with "Hebrew" names, retained his native language, and insisted on being buried in his home country. Prof. Carroll then asked if this might have implications for the requirement of learning English in the U.S.

A third example (although there were several more) was Ruth. He suggested that we might be able to understand the book of Ruth if we read it from the viewpoint of an immigrant.

Now for my disagreements.

Let me first pass on an urgency of Gordon Fee's, that we must do exegesis in the context of the Church. By exegesis, I refer to the process of interpretation whereby we ascertain the interpretation that the author meant to convey. Prof. Fee was saying that he, as a Pentecostal, desperately needs to hear what Presbyterians and Baptists and Methodists and Anglicans, etc. have to say about the text. As a Baptist, I spot things in the Bible that a Presbyterian might overlook. Since I'm not a Pentecostal, I might overlook a valid concern in the biblical text that a Pentecostal might see. So, Dr. Fee is right to say that we need each other to help hear the biblical text.

All this is true of the other perspectives as well. In a sermon series through 1 Timothy, I remember giving a short shrift treatment to the text of 1 Tim 5 dealing with widows. And then on the following Monday when re-thinking the Sunday service, I realized that a good portion of the church consisted of widows—I missed an important text simply because I made no attempt to understand it through someone else’s experience. Consequently, when we look at the biblical text, we should attempt to read it from multiple perspectives.

But ultimately, since exegesis is all about determining the author's original intention, the one set of glasses that is all important is that of the author. For the Pauline letters, we must put on the glasses of a first century Hellenistic Jew. For Micah, we must put on the glasses of an 8th century Israelite.

I think it is improbable that the book of Ruth was written from the viewpoint of an immigrant. Historically, reading Ruth with the eyes of an immigrant might help us understand how Ruth felt, but this does not help us understand how the author wanted us to understand the book. I suspect that the author’s perspective was that of a Hebrew living in Israel looking at the immigrant, which is quite different from the converse situation.

Likewise, the story of Abraham and his lie was not written to be read from the eyes of an immigrant. Consequently, it is all-together irrelevant for the interpretation of the story what the motive for Abraham’s lie was. The reality, according to the biblical author’s perspective, was that Abraham risked the Covenant Promise by giving the mother of his future progeny to the Egyptian king, and so failed in his faith. Reading the text from an immigrant’s perspective might make one more sympathetic with Abraham, but this was extraneous to the author’s intention.

If I may be capricious—for the sake of looking on the other side of the equation…, one of Dr. Carroll’s examples lends itself to be read from the perspective of an American capitalist. Joseph the immigrant came into Egypt, learned the Egyptian language, and adopted Egyptian customs, and achieved the highest possible success as an Egyptian. As the leader of his country, his first obligation was to protect his own citizenry. This is why he sold wheat to non-citizens for a profit, and did not indiscriminately allow foreigners to deplete Egypt’s resources.

Ultimately, Kenneth E. Bailey's works on understanding the Bible through Middle Eastern eyes is so much more valuable for interpreting the Bible.

Presuppositions for Biblical Interpretation and the Meaning of the Term Exegesis

Exegesis
Definition: A Bible study process to determine the author's intended meaning to his original audience.

1. The process includes doing word studies, context studies (phrase, sentence, paragraph, chapter, section, book, corpus, testament), historical and sociological studies, etc.
   
   "What the text meant to them back then."
2. Exegesis must precede application to our modern situation:

"Making what the text meant to them back then relevant to us today."

Paul Might Have Said that, but He Meant Something Different

Because of our view of inspiration—since we value the Book so highly, we sometimes over-exegete a passage and ascribe to it too much meaning. Sometimes, an inspired word gets phrased by the author in such a way not because the author meant to convey a point of theology, but merely to be poetic.

Here is one such example, using Young's Literal Translation, barbaric though it be….

For His blessed ones do possess the land,
And His reviled ones are cut off (Ps 37:22)

The oddity is that the ones who are reviled are written in the divine possessive: God's reviled ones. We're certainly familiar with the first line's phrase "his blessed ones," but the second line makes us scratch our heads and ask, Why would the psalmist refer to cursed people as being of God's own? (The standard English translations smooth out the oddity of the Hebrew, but there is nonetheless identical parallelism between the two possessive forms, and Young's accurately reflects this.)

If we over-exegete this passage, if we try to cull from the text a point of theology—as we normally do since we value the Bible so highly, then we end up creating some theological point about reprobates and non-Covenant participants (=unsaved people) being a class of "God's people." I can see it now—some Fundamentalist book titled The Cursed People of God, or some such; it smacks of a new chapter in Calvinistic supralapsarian electionism.

However, if we back off a bit, we will see that what determined the odd phrasing was not a point of theology, but literary considerations. The psalmist determined the form of the second line when he used the standard phrase, "his blessed ones." In Hebrew parallelism, the second half of the couplet (to use an English term) is supposed to correspond in some way to the first half of the couplet. So, in good literary fashion, the psalmist created the oddity found in the second half out of literary considerations, and not theological considerations. We don't need to write a new chapter in our systematic theology books to cope with this odd phrase.

This sort of thing happens from time to time elsewhere in the Bible, including the Pauline epistles. For example, it has been argued that Jesus is the same as the Spirit (non-Trinitarianism). This claim is made on the basis of 2 Cor 3:17 which reads,

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.

The passage does indeed literally say that Jesus is the Spirit. But the question is not so much a matter of what Paul said, but what he meant by it. In this case, I think literary considerations were the motive for this odd phrase, and not theological considerations.

This issue may seem threatening to us who have such a high view of Scripture. Indeed, it ought to make us raise our defense mechanisms. I understand this a little bit better now as opposed to 10 years ago when I argued this issue with a significant Free Will Baptist scholar, with the two of us retorting back and forth, "But what did Paul mean?" and "But what did Paul say." Nonetheless, "grammatico-historical" interpretation requires us to take into consideration literary features to help us determine the meaning of words and phrases so that in some cases, the sensitive exegete may not be bound by the mere lexical meaning of words in order to get to the author's intended meaning.