Explicit Quotations of Scripture in Matthew 1-2 (Part 2): Hosea 11:1 in Matthew 2:15

We are continuing our look at the way that Matthew uses scripture in his first two chapters. We started at the end of chapter 2 and are working our way backwards toward the quotation of Isa. 7:14 in Matt. 1:23. Last time, we looked at Matt. 2:23 and 2:17-18.

The next previous ("next previous"? Is that oxymoronic? Well, you know what I mean) explicit quotation is in Matt. 2:15. I'll quote the whole paragraph.

Now when they [i.e., the Magi] had gone, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, "Get up! Take the child and his mother and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is going to search for the child to destroy him." So Joseph got up and took the child and his mother while it was still night, and left for Egypt. He remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: "Out of Egypt I called my son." (2:13-15; NASB; I have not always retained capitalization)

The quotation is from Hosea 11:1. Let me cite that passage, with the subsequent verses.

(1)When Israel was a youth I loved him,
And out of Egypt I called my son.
(2) The more they called them,
The more they went from them;
They kept sacrificing to the Baals
And burning incense to idols.
(3) Yet it is I who taught Ephraim to walk,
I took them in my arms;
But they did not know that I healed them.
(4) I led them with cords of a man, with bonds of love,
And I became to them as one who lifts the yoke from their jaws;
And I bent down and fed them.
(5) They will not return to the land of Egypt;
But Assyria--he will be their king
Because they refused to return to me.
(6) The sword will whirl against their cities,
And will demolish their gate bars
And consume them because of their counsels.
(7) So my people are bent on turning from me.
Though they call them to the one on high,
None at all exalts him.
(8) How can I give you up, O Ephraim?
How can I surrender you, O Israel?

The passage continues with assurances that, in fact, God will not do what he had just said that he would do, that is, send Israel into exile to Assyria (cf. v. 5). It's a beautiful passage, and written only a couple decades before Assyria actually did come in and destroy Israel (722 BCE) and take many of its inhabitants into exile.

Now, one time I read Hos. 11:1 in a congregation and asked what it was talking about? The answer came quickly--it's a messianic prediction! This Christian had been trained to read Hos. 11:1 through (a poor understanding of) Matt. 2:15. Well, I submit to you that Matthew's audience had not been trained to so read Hos. 11:1, and Matthew then could not have relied on the assumption that his audience would read Hos. 11:1 in that way. So, imagine that you've never read Matthew (as Matthew's first audience had never read Matthew); now, what is Hos. 11:1 about? Is it a messianic prophecy? Does it have any connection to the Messiah at all? What is it predicting?

A casual reading of the passage (without reference to Matthew) should reveal that it has nothing to do with the Messiah and that it isn't even a prediction. It is a statement about the past, about how God rescued Israel from Egypt. It is a historical statement about the exodus--"Out of Egypt I called my son [= Israel]." It is a beautiful passage in its own right, and I have little doubt that Matthew's audience would have been familiar with it (assuming they were educated Jews).

So, what in the world is Matthew doing with it? We saw last time that his use of Jer. 31:15 was in no way a straightforward prediction-fulfillment type of thing. Matthew is using scripture in a manner much more subtle and sophisticated. Just like with Jer. 31:15, so now with Hos. 11:1, Matthew cites scripture as fulfilled in the life of Jesus in the sense that the things Israel experienced are now being recapitulated in this child, so that the history of Israel is being summed up in his own experience. He does not mean that Hos. 11:1 directly prophesied this particular event in the life of Jesus; he means that what has happened to Jesus is typologically similar to what happened to Israel.

How do we know that Matthew used scripture in this complex fashion, rather than the much simpler explanation that he merely misinterpreted Hos. 11:1 and thought that it actually was a prediction of the Messiah (the son of God)? I think there is a way to be very certain about this point.

Notice that the event that Matthew says was a fulfillment of Hos. 11:1 is the descent of the holy family into Egypt. If Matthew had been looking for a literal fulfillment of Hos. 11:1 as if it were a prediction of something, the logical place to insert his quotation of it would be after Matt. 2:21, when "Joseph got up, took the child and his mother [out of Egypt], and came into the land of Israel." Instead, Matthew says that when Joseph took his new wife and child out of Israel, that fulfills what Hosea said about God's son coming out of Egypt. In other words, Matthew typologically equates Israel with Egypt (Israel = Egypt). Why does he do this?

Let's look for the parallels between Israel and Egypt that Matthew wants us to see. A child is born who would become the savior of his people (Moses, Jesus). The life of this child is under threat from a wicked king (Pharaoh, Herod). The wicked king ensures that Jewish male children are killed. There may be other parallels, but these are the ones that pop out to me. So, in response to this situation, God rescues his 'son' (whether Israel or Jesus) from the hand of the wicked king, brings him out of that evil land, and into a place of safety. Only this time, the evil land is Israel itself, and the place of safety is actually Egypt. [A similar comparison between Israel and Egypt seems to happen in Rev. 11:8--"And their dead bodies will lie in the street of the great city which mystically is called Sodom and Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified."]

So, does Matthew misinterpret Hos. 11:1? I wouldn't call it that. Certainly, he has not offered an exegetical analysis of the passage that would be acceptable in most seminary classrooms, but he wasn't trying to do that, either. He has creatively re-used Hos. 11:1 in order to add significance to his narrative about Jesus. When the incongruity between the quotation and its supposed fulfillment are realized, Matthew's readers gain more insight into who Jesus is and what he has come to do.

We're not done yet, but you'll have to wait till next time for Matt. 2:5-6 and then Matt. 1:22-23.

Sailhamer on Dan. 9 and the Shape of the Tanakh

After presenting my Chronicles paper at the first graduate seminar yesterday, my colleague Nathan Daily asked me how John Sailhamer related Dan. 9 to the shape of the Tanakh. This was a point I had brought up in my paper but had not elaborated on. I cited it as a bizarre curiosity, and Nathan received it as such. But he was so shocked by its curiousness, that he wanted more. So, here I present the paragraph from The Meaning of the Pentateuch (Downers Grove: IVP, 2009).

As you read this, recall that in the canon list of Baba Bathra 14b, the Book of Daniel appears near the end of the canon, right before Esther, Ezra[-Nehemiah], and Chronicles. Recall further that a rabbinic arrangement alternative to the one in Baba Bathra sets Chronicles at the beginning of the third section of the canon and Ezra-Nehemiah at the end. It is this latter arrangement, found in some important Masoretic manuscripts (Aleppo, Leningrad), that Sailhamer is arguing against in order to establish the canon list of Baba Bathra as primary.

According to the version of the Tanak that ends with Ezra-Nehemiah, there are no significant events expected in Israel's subsequent history. The future, so far as it can be made out of the biblical texts, will be either a continuation of the present or an extension of the past. In the version of the Tanak that ends with Chronicles, the next biblical events are to be the coming of the Messiah (Dan 9:25), the death of the Messiah (Dan 9:26) and the destruction of the temple (Dan 9:26b). These events, all taken from Daniel, 9, are projected on to the screen of the future by 2 Chronicles 36 at the close of the Tanak. Those events take us directly into the first century. (p. 214)

Of course, see Sailhamer's book for more, but there it is before you in a nutshell. I cannot possibly add anything to what Sailhamer has said, so I submit this passage to you without comment.

First Graduate Seminar Today

Just a note to remind anyone reading this that the first graduate seminar will be held today at 11:30 in the conference room at HCU. Today I'll be presenting my paper on the placement of Chronicles in the canon, which I will also be presenting at SECSOR on Friday. I've got two hours, so naturally I'm still working on the paper. But I am nearly done with it. All are invited, and there's free lunch!

In a couple of weeks we'll have another graduate seminar and Brad McKinnon will present a paper on the Churches of Christ in Vietnam, part of his M.A. thesis in History at the University of North Alabama.

Explicit Quotations of Scripture in Matthew 1-2 (Part 1)

This post is a continuation of yeterday's comments on how Matthew uses Isaiah 7:14. Here, I want to look at the way Matthew relies on other scriptural passages at the beginning of his Gospel as a window into what he might be doing with the 'virgin' and child of Isa. 7. (Of course, for Isaiah, the woman is not a virgin--see previous post.)

Let me note that hardly any thought presented here is original with me. I think I first encountered these ideas in a well-articulated way in Christopher J. H. Wright's book Knowing Jesus through the Old Testament (IVP, 1992; Amazon). I highly recommend this book as a good, reasonable, simple, and theologically thoughtful explanation of all kinds of issues related to the relationship between the Testaments and, indeed, what Jesus thought he was doing. (While you're at Amazon, you might as well pick up another book, as well. Rest assured, I will not make any money off of either of these books.)

I'll begin at the end of Matt. 2 and work my way backwards. The very last verse of Matt. 2 contains the last of four explicit scriptural quotations in the chapter.

and [Joseph, Mary, and baby Jesus] came and lived in a city called Nazareth. This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophets: "He shall be called a Nazarene." (Matt. 2:23; NASB)

The odd thing about this quotation is that it does not correspond to any statement made in the Hebrew Bible (or LXX, for that matter). I don't have time to delve into the reception history of this verse--no matter how much I'd like to; after all, that's what I do: I'm a history-of-interpretations guy--but I will say it has given interpreters fits for millenia. One ancient (and modern) interpretation relates it to Isa. 11:1 where we read a future descendant of Jesse (David's daddy, and thus we are reading a messianic passage) who will be a 'branch' (Hebrew: netzer). Well, maybe.

Jerome pointed out (he may not have been the first to do so) that the wording of the citation in Matthew references prophets, plural, in distinction to the other references in these chapters (cf. 1:22; 2:5, 15, 17, all speaking of 'prophet,' singular). Jerome thought that this might indicate that Matthew is not referring to any particular passage from a particular prophet, but that he is consolidating the message of the prophets as a whole, and part of that message is that the coming savior would be called a Nazarene. Apparently, Nazareth was not thought to be that great of a town; not the hometown you want if you're planning on being anything significant in life (cf. John 1:46). And so, the message here would be that the prophets in general indicated that the coming savior would be "from the wrong side of the tracks."

The truth is, we don't know exactly what Matthew is doing in 2:23, but we do know that he's not using scripture in a straightforward, prediction-fulfillment kind of way.

Going backwards in Matt. 2, we next come to vv. 17-18. This is in response to King Herod's slaughtering of the innocents, killing all the male babies in Bethlehem two-years-old and under.

Then what had been spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled: "A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children; and she refused to be comforted, because they were no more." (Matt. 2:17-18)

This is a quotation from Jer. 31:15. Now, look at the context within Jeremiah. This verse comes in the middle of a block of chapters called "The Book of Consolation" (Jer. 30-33) promising restoration for Israel and Judah (cf. 30:3). Israel and Judah needed to be restored because they had both experienced exile (Israel by the Assyrians; Judah by the Babylonians), and so in these chapters Jeremiah speaks of their experience of exile and the future hope that they both have. This means that the weeping that Rachel is doing in Jer. 31:15 relates to these experiences, specifically, exile. When the Babylonians came into Judah and killed people and took others away from their homeland to live in Babylon, at that time Rachel was weeping for her children. Not only is there no messianic prediction here, but there is no prediction whatsoever in this particular verse. In the context there is a prediction of restoration, but the specific verse quoted by Matthew has nothing to do with the future, only with the past. Rachel is weeping because of the exile already experienced even in Jeremiah's day.

So, what is Matthew doing with this verse? Does he think there's a prediction in it? Does he think it's about the Messiah? Has he completely ignored the context? Interpreters often say as much, but Richard Hays has taught me (through his books, especially this one) to hesitate to attribute to the biblical authors the insensitivity to context that modern untrained readers often exhibit. That is, Hays has taught me to look for a more-nuanced interpretation of scripture in the New Testament, especially when the interpretation looks weird.

I think that Matthew surely must have understood that Jer. 31:15 was not a prediction of a future time, had nothing to do with the Messiah. Furthermore, I think he understood that his use of this verse in reference to events surrounding Jesus would in no way serve as proof for any Jew that Jesus was the Messiah. A Jew could simply respond, "No, that's not what Jeremiah's talking about, not even close." Jer. 31:15 was not intended to be a messianic prediction, and was not received as such. Jews at the time of Matthew did not look for the fulfillment of Jer. 31:15 as one of the signs that the Messiah was coming. I think Matthew knew all of this.

But, I also think that Matthew understood the context of Jer. 31:15 as about restoration, and he saw that restoration could come only after weeping. He understood that this was true in the history of his own people, who had experienced exile first, and then restoration under Zerubbabel and others (see the book of Ezra). But, the restoration had not been all they had hoped for, had not resulted in the reunification of Israel and Judah (as predicted in Jer. 30:3, etc.), had not returned them to an independent kingdom as in David's days. But, Matthew also knows that one has now been born who would accomplish these things, in a manner of speaking. And just as before with the exile first and then restoration, so also here, weeping precedes joy.

That is, similar to what we saw earlier in Matt. 2:23, Matthew uses Jer. 31:15 not as a straightforward prediction-fulfillment. He knows that Jer. 31:15 has its own context unrelated to the Messiah. But he wants to show his readers that events surrounding the birth of this Christ-child re-enact in some ways Israel's own story, that what has happened in the past is now being repeated, that the history of Israel is somehow being summed up in this child. (You are probably hearing echoes of N.T. Wright.)

Again, the length of this post is getting unwieldy, so I'll have to continue next time. But you can already see where I'm going. Rules of thumb: consider the context of the OT passage, and consider how the NT author uses that context to his advantage. Also, in Matt. 1-2, specifically, look at that word "fulfill". The places that it appears is rather odd. And, finally, is Matthew using a text of scripture closer to the Hebrew or to the Greek? These are some of the issues we will explore next time, when we look at Matt. 2:15, and then 2:5-6, and finally get to 1:22-23.

The 'Virgin' of Isa. 7:14 and of Matt. 1:23

In the latest Biblical Archaeology Review (March/April 2012), Amy-Jill Levine (Jewish NT prof. at Vanderbilt) has an article on "What Jews (and Christians too) Should Know about the New Testament" (available free online at the moment). It's a good article, as one would expect from Levine. She places in historical context certain NT ideas that have caused antagonism (to say the least) between Jews and Christians: (a) the not infrequent accusation in the NT that the Jews have killed the Christ and/or the prophets (cf. 1 Thess 2:15; Matt. 27:25; John 8:44; etc.); (b) the idea that the man Jesus was connected to God in such a way that he himself could be considered divine and thus be worshiped; and (c) the often strange (to modern ears/eyes) interpretations of scripture to be found in the NT.

About the first two of her points, I have only praise for Levine. Whereas some scholars involved in Jewish-Christian dialogue seem to approach their task as if meaningful dialogue can happen only if "the other guy" first recognizes that his own religious traditions are stupid, bigoted, and condemnable (I'll refrain from citing anyone), Levine reads with sympathy and openness the scriptures of those with whom she fundamentally disagrees. When this is more common, true dialogue and understanding will be more common, as well.

But about her third point, I have some concerns--not from the standpoint that she's obfuscating Jewish-Christian dialogue, but just plain ole' exegetical concerns. Let me quote her. At the beginning of her third section, entitled "To fulfill what was said by the prophet...," she writes:

Some Jewish readers will reject Christian claims that the Scriptures of Israel (the Church’s “Old Testament”) predict the life of Jesus. Matthew 1:23 quotes Isaiah 7:14 as stating that “the virgin will conceive and bear a son,” but Jewish readers may respond: “Isaiah doesn’t mention a ‘virgin’ but a ‘young woman,’ and he’s not talking about something to take place centuries later, but about a current political issue.” The problem here is one of translation. Isaiah, writing in Hebrew around 700 B.C.E., uses a pregnant young woman as a visual illustration for King Ahaz. To paraphrase Isaiah’s comment: “Look at that pregnant young woman. By the time her baby is old enough for solid food, your international problems will dissipate.”

When Isaiah’s prophecies were translated into Greek (the Septuagint), probably in the second century B.C.E., the Hebrew for “young woman,” almah, was rendered as parthenos, which we know today from the Parthenon in Athens (or the replica in Nashville!), the temple of the goddess Athena. At the time, parthenos meant “young woman,” but it could mean virgin also. In the Greek translation of Genesis 34:3, the prince Shechem, after having sexual relations with Jacob’s daughter Dinah, uses the term parthenos to describe her. 

When, 200 years later, the author of Matthew’s gospel read Isaiah 7:14 in Greek, he saw a prediction of a virginal conception. That is a legitimate reading. Jews, however, reading their Scriptures in Hebrew, see no virginal conception. 

By applying Isaiah’s prophecy to his own time, Matthew is reading his Scripture in good first-century Jewish fashion. 

Levine goes on to note ancient Jewish interpretations outside the NT that we would also consider far-fetched, and so again a proper understanding of the contemporary Jewish world would help us to understand what the NT writers are doing. Yes, but...

I don't think her explanation of what Matthew is doing captures precisely his reading of Isaiah. Specifically, this sentence gives me pause: "When, 200 years later, the author of Matthew's gospel read Isaiah 7:14 in Greek, he saw a prediction of a virginal conception." Levine seems to be saying that Matthew--like any good first-century Jew--took this verse out of context, thus misinterpreting it (though Levine herself calls this reading "legitimate"), because he thought it was predicting a virginal conception when actually, unbeknownst to Matthew, it had a meaning for Isaiah's own day.

Several things about this understanding of Matthew 1:23 seem dubious to me. But let me first say, for the benefit of any Christian readers out there who haven't run across this idea before, that Levine's reading of Isa. 7:14 finds little disagreement from me. That is, she is surely correct that Isaiah was talking not about a "virgin" but about a "young woman" (thus agreeing with the Hebrew, and even the Greek, as Levine points out), and not one who would become pregnant in the future, but who was pregnant right at the time Isaiah was speaking. (Unfortunately, English translations, usually arising from conservative Christian groups, have translated Isa. 7:14 in keeping with their faulty understanding of Matt. 1:23 and thus have butchered the text, turning the woman into a virgin and inserting a future tense ["will conceive"] when none exists in the Hebrew text, which says that she "is pregnant".)

Indeed, I like very much Levine's paraphrase: "Look at that pregnant young woman. By the time her baby is old enough for solid food, your international problems will dissipate." I think that is exactly the point Isaiah was trying to get across to Ahaz, as will be clear by reading the entirety of Isaiah 7. There is just one problem with the wording here--it leaves out the crucial bit of information that the child would be called "Immanuel." I call this information "crucial" because this name for the child certainly stimulated Matthew's thinking and prompted him to connect this child of Isa. 7 to the the only child--in Matthew's mind--who could truly wear the name. It is the name "Immanuel" as much as the presence of the word "parthenos" that explains the appearance of Isa. 7:14 in Matt. 1.

Now, to Matt. 1:23, and unfortunately this post is already somewhat lengthy, so I'm going to need to return to this subject later for a fuller explanation. But let me just say briefly: if we didn't have any other passages in which Matthew quotes something in Jesus' life as a fulfillment of previous scripture, then we would probably have to read Matt. 1:23 in the way Levine does here. But we do have other quotations of scripture in Matthew, and they must be explained as well. In a later post I will look at the quotations of scripture in Matthew ch. 2 and explain why I think these help us to understand what Matthew is doing in ch. 1.

But let me go ahead and give you the conclusion. Instead of Levine's explanation, quoted above, for Matthew's use of Isaiah, I would rather put it this way: "When, 200 years later, the author of Matthew's gospel read Isaiah 7:14 in Greek, he saw an opportunity to clarify an aspect of Jesus' life as a fulfillment [or a 'filling-up' or a 'working-out' or a typological example] of something that happened previously in Israel's history."

The Magical Supper

In the latest issue of Books & Culture (March/April 2012), Alan Jacobs has a fascinating article on the Book of Common Prayer, "So Blessed a Liturgy" (I can't find it on the B&C website yet, or I would link to it). It's a long-ish article for B&C and well worth the read. Jacobs reviews the history of the Prayer Book, from Thomas Cranmer's motivations for producing it in 1549, to its reception over the subsequent centuries.

Jacobs spends some time reflecting on the eucharistic rites of the Prayer Book, and it was here that I found one intriguing tidbit. On reaction to Cranmer's Prayer Book, and especially that it was in English rather than Latin, Jacobs writes:

The Cornish rebels [who spoke Cornish rather than English] said that the new rite was "but a Christmas game," and frankly thought that a Mass celebrated in English simply wouldn't work--would not achieve any reconciliation between a wrathful God and sinful men. Many native English speakers felt the same: they perceived the rite as something like a magical incantation, depending for its efficacy on the precise recitation of strange words. (Throughout much of the Middle Ages, when people were allowed to receive Communion only once a year, the[y] focused their attention in the Mass on the moment when the consecrated Host was elevated, accompanied by the words Hoc est corpus meum--"This is my body"--a phrase easily and naturally corrupted to Hocus Pocus.) (p. 11).

Ah, so that's where hocus pocus came from. Well, maybe. In such matters, one should always consult Wikipedia, and here it does not dissapoint. In the article "Hocus Pocus (magic)," the derivation of the words is explored. There is some suggestive additional evidence in favor of the etymological connection to the celebration of the Eucharist, but other suggestions are also discussed, with no apparent consensus opinion emerging. But, in fact, the Wikipedia article cites the OED as favoring an interpretation other than the one connected to the Lord's Supper.

Mary, Martha, and the Good Samaritan

In Sunday school this morning, as we were looking at the story of Mary and Martha in Luke 10:38-42, a connection between this story and the immediately preceding one--the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37)--occurred to me. I don't claim that this was intentional on Luke's part, but it could provide an interesting homiletic point.

The point of the story of Mary and Martha is that Martha is so consumed with the minor details of life that she neglects the very important things that can more easily be put off. Specifically, she works hard to serve their guest Jesus while her sister Mary simply sits and listens to Jesus. Martha is understandably frustrated, but Jesus offers her this gentle rebuke:

Martha, Martha, you are worried and bothered about so many things; but only one thing is necessary, for Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her. (Luke 10:41-42; NASB)

Now, Luke has positioned immediately before this brief report perhaps the most famous parable in the Gospels--that of the Good Samaritan. (Interestingly, this parable and the story about Mary and Martha appear only in the Third Gospel.) When the 'lawyer' asks Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?", Jesus responds with a parable highlighting that anyone, even a hated Samaritan, can prove to be a neighbor, and thus worthy of our love (Luke 10:27; cf. Lev. 19:18). Indeed, in the parable the Samaritan acted much more like a neighbor than the priest of Levite.

But, for a moment, I'd like to think about the priest and the Levite rather than the Samaritan; thus, the point I am making is not the main point that Jesus wanted to make. The text does not explore the motives behind the actions of the priest and Levite; it does not tell us why they passed by the half-dead man without helping him. However, if I may rely on personal experience/observation combined with the exegetical acumen of VeggieTales, I might say that a good guess as to why someone would ignore a man in need is because the would-be helper feels too busy with his own life.

In fact, in the VeggieTales version of the Good Samaritan, the 'priest' and the 'Levite' (actually, in this version, a mayor and a doctor, I think) pass by the man (or, cucumber) in need while singing, "I'm busy, busy, dreadfully busy, you've no idea what I've got to do; busy, busy, frightfully busy, much, much too busy for you."

Why do we often fail to help those who obviously have needs, even though we know that this is the type of thing we should do--I guess because we feel we haven't the time for such things, given the constant demands of life. We must get our child to piano practice right now, and thus we cannot stop to help the person whose car has stalled. We must do the minor details that feel so urgent, and thereby neglect the truly important things. Is this starting to sound like the story of Mary and Martha?

Reflecting in this way on the juxtaposition of the Parable of the Good Samaritan and the story of Mary and Martha might show that both stories are mutually illuminating, if not for Luke, then at least for his modern audience.