When I came to Baylor, I was disconcerted by how the Bible was taught from time to time. I distinctly recall this coming up when a professor was talking about the book of Ruth, that in the Hebrew the implication of laying at Boaz's feet meant that Ruth had offered herself sexually to him. I was shocked by this and even a bit offended. It wasn't at all because I had been raised to think that everything in the Bible was literal or that I was raised to think that the Scripture was somehow Rated G. In fact, I grew up exposed early on to the harsh and difficult places in the Word. The story of Judah and Tamar was not watered down; the harsh reality of David's vile violation of Bathsheba and murder of Uriah was not glossed over; and, on and on, the devastating and sometimes disconcerting elements of the Text were viewed through a lens that did not try to pretty them up for anyone's benefit. No one was made to look better than they actually were, because the protagonist of Scripture, I had known since I was very young, and had been taught so very carefully, was God. Scripture was about what He did in spite of just as much as He did through people. So when I heard that particular take on Ruth, it surprised me not on the basis of thinking that Scripture was too polished to dabble in that, but that the extent to which I had a visual memory of the Bible, with all its problem places and difficult things, I had never seen fit to translate the story of Ruth into that kind of picture. The rape of Bathsheba, certainly; but, it wasn't so with Ruth.
I open this way to try and illustrate that my approach to the Text is not glossed with a kind of rose-colored view of the people it concerns. At the same time, I was also not brought up to read a kind of staunch-nosed legalism into the text either. My very good Southern Baptist parents study the Word closely and love it deeply, so that I was raised to engage Scripture on all its levels and to carry with me the mental furniture of its stories. The narrative was for me a kind of literary reservoir, rich and overflowing with meaning. In fact, from an early age, I can recall my Father emphasizing how you can't understand the Bible for what it is unless you engage the literary element at work with in it. The story lay beneath the story, because God had seen fit to author historical truth via literary articulation so as to be eternally reflective of those who would come to learn from it. Subsequently, the Bible as a literary text was none the less a historically accurate one.
I was not at liberty to explain away on the basis of literature a passage that was not easy to read. In turn, I was not given the freedom to objectively read a single verse in Scripture and not discern the context and rhythm behind it that begot it into being.
This means that there are places in Scripture for me that are particularly difficult. I come upon them and feel a sense of nervousness. On the one hand, I know that God is good. On the other, I deliberate how I am seeing that goodness in the Text. Am I pushing the Scripture to try and make it easier for me, or am I trying to chew on it so as to understand the not-so-simple passages? Am I obsessing over a problem that is only there because I have read a problem into it, or am I seeing a place that God wants me to puzzle out to grow deeper in my understanding of Him?
One such passage is 2 Samuel 21. God sent a famine upon Israel that has lasted three years and He explains to David that the reason is because of the blood on the house of Saul for putting to death the Gibeonites. Back when Saul was king, several years before this passage, he had defied a covenant he had made with that people to spare them, instead slaughtering them against the will of God. David calls the descendants of the Gibeonites to him asks what they would like for restitution. At first they say nothing, as they have no quarrel with King David. He presses them nonetheless and they relent, asking that seven of the sons of the house of Saul be given to them to be "hung before the Lord." (v. 6) David concedes to do so and chooses for himself the seven, sparing some specific ones. Then Scripture says:
Then [David] gave them into the hands of the Gibeonites, and they hanged them in the mountain before the Lord, so that the seven of them fell together; and they were put to death in the first days of harvest at the beginning of barley harvest. And Rizpah the daughter of Aiah took sackcloth and spread it for herself on the rock, from the beginning of harvest until it rained on them from the sky; and she allowed neither the birds of the sky to rest on them by day nor the beasts of the field by night. - 2 Samuel 21:9-10
Beside this passage in my Bible, I have written, "This is not easy..." That is to say, this passage does not easily explain itself away. Why those seven? Why does God wait so long after the reign of Saul to visit this judgement upon his house? Why does God leave it to David to judge the hearts of men to choose those who shall die? What of this poor sister who tries so hard to keep the bodies from being disgraced?
I don't have a comfortable answer to this passage. I have the knowledge that God is good. I have the faith that I shall understand this one day when I am in His presence. But for now, this passage is not one that easily sorts itself out, no matter how well you try and justify it. The fact is, it's a hard thing to read and it's hard to understand the goodness of God when it sits on its own and not in the context of the Scripture as a whole.
Another place of difficulty for me is in the New Testament, when Jesus is teaching on prayer.
And when you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition as the Gentiles do, for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words. - Gospel of St. Matthew 6:7
I use the liturgy every Sunday. I pray compline. I pray the prayers that certain saints have written. While I know that the verse here is not condemning that per se, I admit that when I read that recently I spent a lot of time reflecting on how I have used the liturgy and asking myself if I turn it into many words of meaninglessness in place of a relationship with the Father in which I am actually speaking to Him in prayer. Once more, on the surface this seems an easy problem to deal with, but for some of us these passages can be like the fingernail of God scratching the surface of our soul. It's not comfortable, but it's somehow important. It doesn't let me simply settle; it makes me meditate on Him more.
At this point in my life, I'm not one of those people who happen to be disposed to doubting God very much. But I'm also not someone who is content to blindly accept an interpretation as being the final say in the matter. I think that's a special kind of lazy arrogance, to think we have it perfectly figured out. (Now, I'm not knocking the commentary tradition or the Tradition itself here, mind, but rather I'm thinking of the tendency in recent years to throw everything out in favor of some new, allegedly recovered understanding of the Text.) But I think it's also a lazy arrogance to say that we can't known anything about it and we just have to be content in our doubt and leave it alone.
There has to be a middle way. There has to be a way for me to not be comfortable with every single line of Scripture but to also be comfortable with God enough that I can be honest about that and in turn ask that He in His good time and according to His good purposes illumine me accordingly.
In the Middle Ages, manuscripts were copied and recopied by scribes in scriptoriums. One of the "fun" things you get to do when you study the manuscripts is to see where they change and deviate from one scribe to the other. Someone skips a line here, changes a verb tense there. These scribal errors are some of the most interesting facets of the manuscript tradition, for wars could be justified over the miswriting of one scribe versus that of another. At times, this creates a crisis, because the original text is somehow lost in a sea of translations, even if the translation is from the same language, but the translator somehow, in some small but pronounced way, changes it and therefore changes everything.
Reading Scripture faithfully can be like that. The original intent of the message is sometimes lost. What I have written on my heart as I read it is sometimes not at all what the intent of the Author was, because I skipped a line as it were or hastily copied it down instead of focusing on the wording carefully. Or I don't understand the metaphor. I don't get the joke. This is not to say that truth is relative or that my experience is somehow particularly unique. Rather, I see in this a kind of necessity for rejecting complacency. The only way I will know if I'm copying things down incorrectly is if I will spend time with the source text and time with the Author Himself. Only then, only after a long time, will I start to mirror His writing correctly. But even then, I'm trying to translate into speech the intent of an Author beyond words. So in this life, in this space, I can expect a decent percent error from time to time. Until I know as I have been known, I'm still working with weak eyes.
This to me is the central message behind Psalm 119:11, "I have hidden Your word in my heart, so that I might not sin against You."
In the scriptorium of my heart, passages like 2 Samuel 21 are being copied and recopied. Some days they are read in one light that seems to almost make them understandable. Some days they are read in a light that saddens and is a struggle to get through. Nonetheless, the faithful act is to keep writing and keep transcribing, to take the hard words and try to see them as the language of God would have them be seen. There's a lot of error in the process, but there is a hope even in that. It strikes me how many scribal errors do in fact occur in the manuscript tradition. Nonetheless, God moved despite that and used people in profound and beautiful ways. Such is true of the persons in Scripture as well. How much more so may I be content that God is able to see some of His good put into the world via myself, in so far as I with fumbling speech and poor translation skills try to make some kind of replication of His intentions in the passages that are not so easy to explain? What a special kind of grace.
I think of it like this: at the end of my life, I come to God with this painting. It's beautiful, very well made, and I have even fashioned the frame for it myself. God thanks me for it and places it on His refrigerator (ah, delightful heresy!) beside an ugly, awful little finger-painting. I ask God about this other painting, inwardly assessing it to be of the poorest quality. God smiles and tells me that it's the first painting I ever made Him. He still likes it very much. My new painting, my perceived better painting, is very nice too. They both look good on the refrigerator.
So I get a lot interpretively wrong now. Faithfully seeking Him somehow evens that out.
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Are there some passages in Scripture that are hard for you to read or understand? Share them in the comments below!
