OT scholar Peter Enns is currently running a series of articles from "biblical scholars from evangelical backgrounds telling their stories about their “aha” moments that convinced them they needed to find different ways of handling the Bible than how they had been taught.". When people from a fundamentalist background really study the Bible, rather than just use it to reinforce their dogma, they tend to pick up the problems (contradictory creation narratives when read literally, creative exegesis by Paul of the OT which runs against the original meaning of the OT passages in question) to which their fundamentalism has blinded them. While some lose their faith, having been primed by their fundamentalist background to see things in an all-or-nothing mindset, others have the wisdom and intelligence to recognise that the problem lies not in the Bible, but in their fundamentalist way of reading it.
Peter Enns, an OT scholar and Affiliate Professor of Biblical Studies at Eastern University opens the series with an event that occurred during his PhD work - the realisation that Paul in 1 Cor 10:4 appears to really believe that there was a moving rock that accompanied Israel through the desert, despite the OT being silent on this:
One day in class, my professor James Kugel was lecturing on the creative ways that Second Temple Jewish interpreters handled these episodes. He explained that water coming from the rock twice–once at thebeginning of the wilderness period (Exodus 17) and again toward the end of the 40-year period (Numbers 20)–led some Jewish interpreters to conclude that the “two” rocks were actually one and the same, hence, one rock accompanied the Israelites on their 40-year journey.
There is a certain “ancient logic” at work here. After all, if the Israelites had manna given to them miraculously every morning, are we to think that the corresponding miraculous supply of water was only given twice, 40 years apart!? Of course not.
So, to solve this problem, the water supply became mobile. For some interpreters it was a stream through the desert, but for others the rock of Exodus 17 followed the Israelites for 40 years and was mentioned again in Numbers 20.
Evangelicals could write off this bit of biblical “interpretation” as entertaining or just plain silly, but 1 Corinthians 10:4 complicates things. When Paul refers to Jesus not just as the rock but the accompanying rock, he, as a Jewish interpreter, is showing his familiarity with and acceptance of this creative Jewish reading of the Old Testament.
Let me put a finer point on that: no rock moved in the Old Testament, but Paul said one did. Paul says something about the Old Testament that Old Testament doesn’t say. He wasn’t following the evangelical rule of ”grammatical-historical” contextual interpretation. He was doing something else–something weird, ancient, and Jewish.
My Bible was no longer protected under glass. It was out there, part of its very odd, ancient world that I really didn’t understand.
For Paul–an inspired apostle–to accept such a strange legend and treat it as fact is not something that can be easily brought into an evangelical framework. “But Paul is inspired by God! He would never say something like this!!”
But he did.
The question of whether such a rabbinic tradition existed, and whether it predated or post-dated Paul has been an active one in Christian and Jewish scholarship. Anthony Thistelton notes both the fact that such a rabbinic tradition exists, as well as cautions against assuming how Paul used these traditions.
In the use of rabbinic traditions reflected in Targum, Midrash, and most certainly Talmud, issues of dating remain obscure and complex. Ellis reconstructs a coherent rabbinic tradition concerning a movable well, “rock-shaped and resembling a sieve … given to the Israelites in the desert … one of the ten things created on the evening of the Sixth Day.… It rolled along after the wanderers through hills and valleys, and when they camped it settled at the tent of meeting.…” Some degree of speculation cannot be avoided about whether Paul uses material even in pretextual form to address Corinth. On the other hand, the role of the figure of Wisdom in guiding, protecting, and nurturing Israel through the wilderness is very widely attested in literature in hellenistic Judaism over the century before Paul’s writing, in contemporary synagogue homilies, and in Paul’s near-contemporary Philo. Both Wisdom 2, the Book of Wisdom, and Philo speak of Wisdom’s provision of water to wandering Israel “from a flinty rock ἐδόθη αὐτοῖς ἐκ πέτρος ἀκροτόμου ὕδωρ (Wis 2:4) on which Philo observes: “the flinty rock is the wisdom of God” (Philo, Legum Allegoriae 2.86). The point here is that it is clearly and widely recognized that Paul informs his own Christology by drawing explicitly on traditions of preexistent Wisdom from the OT Wisdom literature (e.g., Proverbs 8) and hellenistic Judaism of the first century. Certain differences between the rabbinic and Philonic traditions in relation to 1 Cor 10:4 have recently been explored by Kreitzer; his approach underlines the need for caution in drawing too readily or uncritically on widespread assumptions about Paul’s sources and his use of them.44 Paul certainly drew on Wisdom traditions in the LXX; what part is from speculative material in rabbinic traditions or in Philo remains open to serious question. [1]
However, as even Carson and Beale, hardly theological liberals accept, Paul does appear to accept that there was a moving rock that followed Israel:
Paul draws on a rich Jewish exegetical tradition (e.g., L.A.B. 10:7; 11:15; t. Sukkah 3:11, b. Šabb. 35a; b. Pesaḥ. 54a; Gen. Rab. 62:4; Num. Rab. 1:2; 9:14; 19:25–26; Tg. Onq. Num. 21:16–20) when he speaks in 10:4 of the rock that followed Israel (see Ellis 1978a; Enns 1996). In inquiring how the interpretive tradition of a moveable well developed, Enns (1996: 30) notes that “the miraculous provision of water in the desert is mentioned only at the beginning of the wilderness wandering period (Exod. 17, Rephidim; also the waters of Elim in Exod. 15:22–27; see Bib. Ant. 11:15 …) and at the end (Num. 20, Kadesh; Num. 21, Beer).” According to the exegetical tradition, the answer to the natural question of what the Israelites had done for water between those times was that “the rock of Exodus 17 and the rock of Numbers 20 are one and the same. Hence, this rock must have accompanied the Israelites through their journey.” [2]
In fact, Paul's use of the OT (not to mention other Jewish writers such as Matthew) is entirely consistent with Second Temple exegetical methods which run counter to the standard historical-grammatical method which we regard as normative.
As Enns, whose doctoral work heavily involved Second Temple exegesis notes:
I was seeing a bigger picture, not just about this one verse but about the Bible as a whole. I was seeing right before my eyes that Paul and the other New Testament writers were part of this ancient world and they too handled their Bible in highly creative ways that were not anchored in the “original meaning” of the text but were transposed and altered in keeping with Jewish interpretive conventions of the day.
Evangelical attempts to make Paul sound more evangelical and less Jewish–to make him into a “sound” interpreter rather than a creative one–immediately rang hollow, and continue to. And I knew back then, as I do now, that the older model of biblical interpretation I had been taught was not going to cut it. I couldn’t deny what I was seeing. I knew I had some thinking to do.
We need to understand the Bible, rather than try to defend what we think it says, as invariably what we will end up doing is conflate our interpretation of what we think it says with the text itself.
References
1.Thiselton, Anthony C. The First Epistle to the Corinthians: a Commentary on the Greek Text. New International Greek Testament Commentary. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2000.
2. Beale, G. K., and D. A. Carson. Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids, MI; Nottingham, UK: Baker Academic; Apollos, 2007.
