ROMANS 19:5-8

Peter warns us that Paul in his letters sometimes says things which are hard to understand (II Peter 3:15-16). Personally, I don't have nearly as much trouble comprehending Paul's statements as I do when he then proceeds to prove those statements by quoting from the Old Testament. One of the prime examples is found in Romans 10 where he quotes from or alludes to several OT texts, mainly from Deuteronomy. There are instances when the most confusing aspect of Paul's argument stems from the fact that he is in fact quoting from the Greek Septuagint rather than the Hebrew text. But that is not the case here.

Paul begins this chapter by contrasting the righteousness which the Jews mistakenly pursued – self-righteousness – with the righteousness that only comes from faith in God and His righteousness. His thesis statement is found in v. 4: “Christ is the end of the law in order that there may be righteousness for all who believe.” Then he bolsters up his argument by referring to Scripture. But, as Fitzmyer says, “the argument from the OT is complicated, because Paul contrasts two OT passages.” And Paul cites Leviticus in v. 5 but only utilizes part of Deuteronomy 30:11-14 in the rest of his argument.

Romans 10:5

He starts out with a straight quotation from Leviticus 18:5: “The person who does these things will live by them.” In its original setting, these words by Moses referred to the long life in Canaan for the Jewish people as a whole as long as they obeyed the commandments. But Paul applies it to the eternal life available to each individual believer who submits to God's righteousness rather than his own. Seifrid explains that these two changes are not entirely unjustified since rabbinic interpretations of Leviticus 18:5 included both the present life and the life to come. As to the second change of personalizing Moses' teaching, Seifrid says, “Individual responsibility and corporate solidarity are not mutually exclusive, nor can they be played off against each other.”

Morris' approach is to see two possible understandings of Paul's reasoning here which are hard to chose between:

    1. “Adherence to the law meant keeping all the commandments, which is impossible and thus requires a Savior.”

    2. The law really pointed to Christ since, properly understood, it teaches that everything comes from dependence of God and His grace.

Another pertinent OT passage which Paul may have had in mind here is Deuteronomy 6:24: “Yahweh commanded us to obey all these laws, to fear Yahweh our Gd, for our lasting good so that we will live, as is now the case.”

Romans 10:6-7

Then he states:

    A. The righteousness that comes by faith says,

    B. “Do not say in your heart

    C. 'Who will go up to heaven to bring Christ down' or 'Who will go down to the abyss to bring Christ up from the dead?'”

There is a definite departure from the OT words in Deuteronomy 30:11-13 although some of the phraseology is certainly similar:

    “This commandment I give you today is not too difficult for you to obey. Neither is it too far off so that you would have to go to heaven to bring it down and hear it. It is also not beyond the sea so that you would say, 'Who will go over the sea to bring it back?'” (Deuteronomy 30:11-13)

A. Let us consider Paul's alterations one at a time, beginning with the unusual way in which Paul introduces the quotation. The more common way of beginning a citation would have been something like “Moses said” or its equivalent. The fact that this sort of introduction was not used may signal the fact that Paul is going to make no attempt to stick to the OT text and interpret it directly. So Murray states, “We should not perplex the difficulties of this passage by supposing that the apostle takes a passage concerned with law-righteousness and applies it to the opposite, namely, faith-righteousness.”

B. This phrase comes from Deuteronomy 9:4 in which context, Moses warns the people not to get self-confident when the inhabitants of Canaan are dispossessed by God and think that this was due to the Jews' righteousness. Thus, it is an apt citation to fit Paul's message contrasting God's righteousness with self-righteousness.

Murray explains that what follows the phrase do not say refers to “a statement of unbelief” that first states that Jesus never came down from heaven to earth and then denies that he resurrected from the dead.

C. There are at least three interpretive issues to deal with here. The first major departure between Romans and Deuteronomy is Paul's application of an original teaching on the knowledge of the law with teachings on Christ. But this is not as great a leap of logic as it first appears. For one thing, Evans points out that the apocryphal book Baruch (3:29-30) had earlier applied the same Deuteronomy text to Wisdom instead of to the Law. And in other early writings, Wisdom was sometimes associated with the Messiah. As Schnabel says, “What Moses had said of the divine law and what the Jewish tradition had interpreted in terms of Wisdom, Paul says of Christ.”

And then there is a fragmentary Targum (Jewish interpretation of Scripture) which paraphrased Deuteronomy 30:12-13 as saying that the Law is not in heaven so that one like the prophet Moses needs to bring it down or in the depths of the sea so that a prophet like Jonah needs to bring it up. Of course in NT writings, Christ is compared to both of these men.

This last source also deals with a second interpretive issue, the major departure in wording Paul makes in the final clause. Paul takes an original quotation which mentions crossing the sea to bring something back, a difficult but not impossible task, and replaces it (as did the Targum) with an impossible trip down to the depths of Sheol. “This underscores the inherent impotence of any quest for righteousness.” (Seifrid) By the way, Paul's wording here is also a possible allusion to Psalm 107:25-26: “The waves of the sea mounted up to the heaven; they sank to the depths.”

Another way of explaining the vertical direction in this final phrase in place of the horizontal voyage in Deuteronomy comes from The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery, which compares it to the “idea that the afterlife is reached by crossing waters (cf. River Styx).”

With this portion of Paul's argument, he is not merely explaining his OT source but actually contrasting it. Calvin noted this potential difficulty and responded by saying, “If anyone thinks that this interpretation is to strained or too refined, let him understand that is was not the object of the Apostle strictly to explain this passage, but to apply it to the explanation of his present subject.” And Fitzmyer agrees that “he is not interpreting the Old Testament in the strict sense.”

So how would we characterize Paul's treatment of the Old Testament passages? Evans states, “As unusual as Paul's exegesis appears, it is not entirely novel.” “The problem is to understand his logic, if there is any.” (Fitzmyer)

    Barclay says that it is an allegorization.

    Elliott calls it a christological reading.

    Fitzmyer labels it as a midrashic commentary on certain phrases of the passage.

    Kasemann says some scholars call it “a rhetorically construed paraphrase of the OT text.”

    Morris says that Paul is “giving the essential thought of the passage but not in the exact words of the original.”

    F.F. Bruce, Schnabel, and Kasemann believe that, in Kasemann's words, it “follows the pesher form...for which the often violent interpretation of Scripture in actualization of its hidden eschatological content is characteristic.”

Commenting on these possibilities, Seifrid sees differences between Paul's style of argumentation and both midrash and pesher forms. For example, in the latter, a scripture is applied to current events whereas Paul applies it to past events (Christ's incarnation and resurrection). Also, he notes that these Jewish techniques would have been quite foreign to his mainly Gentile audience.

Romans 10:8

Paul concludes by quoting Deuteronomy 30:14: “The word is near you on your lips and in your heart,” referring to the word of faith we are proclaiming.” This word order of “lips” followed by “heart” is responsible for the unusual order in Romans 10:8 in which confessing with your lips precedes believing in your heart, according to Reumann, who also notes that the reversed order appears in Romans 10:10. Alternatively, Elias says that “God's near word, spoken by mouth [by Paul and others] and internalized in the heart energizes the community of the faithful to observe that word.”

Conclusion

The simple thrust of Paul's thought here can be summarized as follows:

    “The promise of life to the person who does these things (Lev 18:5) requires not human effort to produce the messiah, but faith in the messiah whom God has sent.” (Elliott)

    “It is not our effort which brought Christ into the world or raised Him from the dead. It is not our effort which wins us goodness. The thing is done for us, and we have only to accept and to take.” (Barclay)