Secret Meanings in the Text of the Bible

In 2004, Don Curtis wrote an interesting paper titled “Hints, Allegories, and Mysteries: The New Testament Quotes the Old.” It started out looking at some NT quotations and applications of OT texts which did not really follow the currently accepted rules of Bible interpretation, usually known as the grammatical-historical method. So that fact seemed to call into question either that standard method of approaching the text or the validity of the NT authors in utilizing other methods.

But Curtis explains that during NT times, there were really four different accepted ways of interpreting Scripture according to the rabbis. Curtis describes these as below:

    P’shat (“simple”)—the plain, literal sense of the text, more or less what modern scholars mean by “grammatical-historical exegesis,” which looks to the grammar of the language and the historical setting as background for deciding what a passage means. Modern scholars often consider grammatical-historical exegesis the only valid way to deal with a text; pastors who use other approaches in their sermons usually feel defensive about it before academics. But the rabbis had three other modes of interpreting Scripture, and their validity should not be excluded in advance but related to the validity of their implied presuppositions.
    Drash or Midrash (“search”)—an allegorical or homiletical application of a text. This is a species of eisegesis—reading one’s own thoughts into the text—as opposed to exegesis, which is extracting from the text what it actually says. The implied presupposition is that the words of Scripture can legitimately become grist for the mill of human intellect, which God can guide to truths not directly related to the text at all.
    Sod (“secret”)—a mystical or hidden meaning arrived at by operating on the numerical values of the Hebrew letters, noting unusual spellings, transposing letters, and the like...The implied presupposition is that God invests meaning in the minutest details of Scripture, even the individual letters.
    Remez (“hint”)—wherein a word, phrase or other element in the text hints at a truth not conveyed by the p’shat. The implied presupposition is that God can hint at things of which the Bible writers themselves were unaware.
Curtis then asks the logical question: “Must one be an inspired writer of sacred scripture to employ hints, allegories, and hidden meanings from the scriptures? There is no suggestion in the scriptures that this is so, and many who employ a grammatical-historical hermeneutic also acknowledge the existence of types (drashim). All that’s left is to add the use of hints (remezim) and possible discovery of hidden meanings (sodim) to our interpretive toolkit. The scriptures model all four and, therefore, they seem to be legitimate.”

“The fundamental issue with this notion is quality control and purity of doctrine. One can dialog over the simple meaning of the text and arise at consensus meaning (most of the time). How might one dialog over subjective interpretations? How do we avoid the pitfalls of error and protect people from falling prey to cults?” A good example of this happening is seen in the teachings of Christian Science in which Mary Baker Eddy systematically redefined a number of key words in the Bible according to a sense not at all intended originally in order to come up with totally unfounded contentions she felt were “hidden” in the text.

As to my own feelings on the subject, they are mixed. On the one hand, the plain text interpreted as the original audiences would have received it seems to be the safest way to interpret Scripture. However, throughout my many posts of the Bible, I have occasionally pointed out some possible examples of what Curtis might call sodim or remezim.  These might include literary devices such as puns, chiastic (mirror-image) arrangements of phrases or longer passages, inclusions utilizing the same phrase or unusual word to identify the start and end of a discrete passage, acrostics, repetition of words or phrases a symbolically significant number of times, etc. 

But to me the test of whether such seeming departures from a strictly grammatical-historical exegesis is justified or not is simply whether such departures serve to bolster up the plain text as most people would read it or whether these “added insights” actually send the reader off in a completely different direction.

Let me quote one example used by Curtis in his paper as an example. He notes that Zephaniah 3:8 contains all 22 letters in the Hebrew Bible. His only conclusion from such a phenomenon is that it demonstrates that the Jews considered the Hebrew letters to be important from a literary point of view. I would happen to agree with him on this point but question what the significance of this fact was in light of the meaning of Zeph. 3:8. 

Assuming that the fact itself was not a mere fluke in light of the extended length of that particular verse, one could very well state that by including all the Hebrew letters in this verse, it symbolically represented the totality of worldwide judgment expressed in the words of that verse. Thus, we have confirmation and symbolic representation of the plain text, as also occurs in the acrostics of Psalm 119 and other OT passages (see my post “Acrostics in the Bible”). I would thus conclude that the sod method of interpretation is justified in this case, again going with the problematic assumption that the presence of all 22 letters is not a mere coincidence.

By contrast, such mystical approaches to Scripture as the Kabbalah, the Bible Code, or Theomatics which totally divorce the plain text from the “hidden text” are to be avoided at all costs (see my post on “Creative Ways to Twist Scripture”).