LIBERTY UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF DIVINITY
The critical study of biblical literature: exegesis and hermeneutics
Submitted to Dr. James Sulfridge
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the completion of
DSMN 500
Discipleship Ministries
By
Anthony Bean
The critical study of biblical literature: exegesis and hermeneutics
Exegesis, or critical interpretation, and hermeneutics, or the science of interpretive
principles, of the Bible have been used by both Jews and Christians throughout their histories
for various purposes. The most common purpose has been discovering the truths and values of
the Old and New Testaments by means of various techniques and principles, though very often,
owing to the exigencies of certain historical conditions, polemical or apologetical situations
anticipate the truth or value to be discovered and thus dictate the type of exegesis or
hermeneutic to be used. The primary goal, however, is to arrive at biblical truths and values by
an unbiassed use of exegesis and hermeneutics.
Nature and significance
Biblical exegesis is the actual interpretation of the sacred book, the bringing out of its
meaning; hermeneutics is the study and establishment of the principles by which it is to be
interpreted. Where the biblical writings are interpreted on a historical perspective, just as with
philological and other ancient documents, there is little call for a special discipline of biblical
hermeneutics. But it has been widely held that the factors of divine revelation and inspiration in
the Bible—which, according to Jewish and Christian belief, set it apart from other literature—
impose their appropriate hermeneutical principles, although there has been divergence of
opinion on what these principles are. Again, because of the place that the biblical writings have
occupied in synagogue and church, their exploitation for apologetical or polemical ends, their
employment as a source for dogma or as a means of grace, fostering individual and community
devotion, and the use of certain parts (especially the psalms) in the congregational liturgy, the
science of hermeneutics has been studiously cultivated as a theological discipline. To treat the
Bible like any other book (even in order to discover that it is not like any other book) has been
condemned by believers as an unworthy, not to say impious, attitude.
At times the languages in which the biblical texts were originally composed have for that
reason been treated as sacred languages. Hebrew may be to the philologist a Canaanite dialect,
not substantially different from Phoenician, or Moabite, or other Semitic languages, but for
some people even today this language is invested with an aura of sacredness. As for the
language of the New Testament, in the days before its place within the general development of
Hellenistic Greek was properly appreciated, it could be called a “language of the Holy Ghost,” as
it was by the German Lutheran theologian Richard Rothe (1799–1867). And even scholars who
know very well the true character of the biblical languages are tempted at times to make the
Old and New Testament vocabularies, down to the very prepositions, bear a greater weight of
theological significance than sound linguistic practice permits. Where in other Greek literature
the context would be allowed to determine the precise force of this or that synonym, there is a
tendency to approach the New Testament with definitions ready made and to impose them on
the text: to give one example, of two common Greek words meaning “new,” it is sometimes
laid down in advance that kainos denotes new in character and neos new in time (“young”).
Often such distinctions are valid, but their validity must be established by the context; where
the context discourages such precise differentiations, they must not be forced upon it.
Again, it is a truism in linguistic study that the meaning of a word depends on its usage, not
on its derivation. It may be of interest to know that the Hebrew word for “burnt offering” (ʿola)
etymologically means “ascending” (cf. the verb ʿala, “ascend”), and to trace the stages by which
it attained its biblical meaning, but this knowledge is almost wholly irrelevant to the
understanding of the word in the Old Testament ritual vocabulary, and any attempt to link it,
say, with the ascension of Jesus in the New Testament, as has been done, can lead only to
confusion.
Similarly there has been a tendency to place the history contained in the biblical writings
on a different level from “ordinary” history. Here the increasing knowledge of the historical
setting of the biblical narrative, especially in the Old Testament, has helped to remove the
impression that the persons and peoples portrayed in this narrative are not quite “real”; it has
integrated them with contemporary life and promoted a better understanding of what they had
in common with their neighbours and what their distinctive qualities were.
Critical methods
A prerequisite for the exegetical study of the biblical writings, and even for the
establishment of hermeneutical principles, is their critical examination. Most forms of biblical
criticism are relevant to many other bodies of literature.
Textual criticism
Textual criticism is concerned with the basic task of establishing, as far as possible, the
original text of the documents on the basis of the available materials. For the Old Testament,
until 1947, these materials consisted principally of: (1) Hebrew manuscripts dated from the 9th
century ce onward, the Masoretic text, the traditional Jewish text with its vocalization and
punctuation marks as recorded by the editors called Masoretes (Hebrew masora, “tradition”)
from the 6th century to the end of the 10th; (2) Hebrew manuscripts of medieval date
preserving the Samaritan edition of the Pentateuch (first five books of the Bible); (3) Greek
manuscripts, mainly from the 3rd and 4th centuries ceonward, preserving the text of the pre-
Christian Greek version of the Hebrew Bible together with most of the apocryphal books (the
Septuagint); and (4) manuscripts of the Syriac (Peshitta) and Latin (Vulgate) versions, both of
which were based directly on the Hebrew. Since 1947 the discovery of Hebrew biblical texts at
Qumrān (then Jordan) and other places west of the Dead Sea has made it possible to trace the
history of the Hebrew Bible back to the 2nd century bce and to recognize, among the
manuscripts circulating in the closing generations of the Second Jewish Commonwealth (c. 450
bce–c. 135 ce), at least three types of Hebrew text: (1) the ancestor of the Masoretic text, (2)
the Hebrew basis of the Septuagint version, and (3) a popular text of the Pentateuch akin to the
Samaritan edition. A comparative examination of these three indicates that the ancestor of the
Masoretic text is in the main the most reliable; the translators of the Revised Standard Version
(1952) and the New English Bible (1970) have continued to use the Masoretic text as their Old
Testament basis.
For the New Testament the chief text-critical materials are (1) manuscripts of the Greek
text, from the 2nd to the 15th century, of which some 5,000 are known, exhibiting the New
Testament text in whole or in part; (2) ancient versions in Syriac, Coptic, Latin, Armenian,
Georgian, Ethiopic, and other languages; and (3) citations in early Christian writers. A
comparative study of this material enables scholars to get behind the Byzantine type of text
(the type that first diffused from Constantinople from the 4th century onward, gained currency
throughout Greek-speaking Christendom, and formed the basis of the earliest printed editions
of the Greek Testament) to a variety of types current in various localities in the generations
immediately preceding; but the more recent discovery of manuscripts (mainly on papyrus) of
the 3rd and even 2nd centuries, which cannot be neatly assigned to one or another of these
types, makes the earlier history of the text more problematic, and the Revised Standard Version
and the New English Bible are both based on an eclectic text (in which, where the witnesses
show variant readings, the reading preferred is that which best suits the context and the
author’s known style).
Philological criticism
Philological criticism consists mainly in the study of the biblical languages in their widest
scope so that the vocabulary, grammar, and style of the biblical writings can be understood as
accurately as possible with the aid not only of other biblical writings but of other writings in the
same or cognate languages. New Testament Greek, for example, is a representative of
Hellenistic Greek written in the 1st century ce, ranging from the literary Hellenistic of Hebrews,
1 Peter, and portions of Luke–Acts to the colloquial or vernacular idiom of some other books
(e.g., the conversations in the Gospels). Some Aramaic influences have been discerned in parts
of the New Testament that have a Palestinian setting, but not to a point where scholars are
obliged to conclude that some books, or parts of books, were originally composed in Aramaic.
Moreover, the Septuagint version exercised on some New Testament writers the kind of
influence that the King James Version has exercised on many English writers, especially in the
provision of a theological vocabulary in areas such as law, ethics, atonement, and sacrifice. The
study of Old Testament Hebrew has been enriched by the study of other Semitic languages—
Akkadian and Ugaritic among the ancient languages, and Arabic, which preserves many archaic
features. Such comparative study has led to the suggestion of new meanings for a considerable
number of biblical Hebrew words—a tendency that is amply illustrated by the New English Bible
—but this department of philological criticism requires much more carefully defined guiding
lines than have hitherto been laid down.
Literary criticism
Literary criticism endeavours to establish the literary genres (types or categories) of the
various biblical documents and to reach conclusions about their structure, date, and
authorship. These conclusions are based as far as possible on internal evidence, but external
evidence is also very helpful, especially where date is concerned. If the document under
consideration is unmistakably quoted in another composition, for example, that quotation
forms a terminus ante quem (later limiting point in time) for dating purposes. If, on the other
hand, the document is clearly dependent on another document that can be dated on
independent grounds, the date of the earlier document provides a terminus post quem (earlier
limiting point in time).
Proven dependence on such an earlier document may also throw light on the structure of
the work being studied. But much of the evidence for the history of its structure is internal. The
evaluation of such evidence is the province of what used to be called the higher criticism, a
term first employed with a biblical reference by the German biblical scholar and orientalist
Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–1827):
I have been obliged to bestow the greatest amount of labour on a hitherto entirely
unworked field, the investigation of the inner constitution of the separate books of the Old
Testament by the aid of the higher criticism (a new name to no humanist).
Eichhorn paid special attention to the Pentateuch; his work marks an important step
forward in Pentateuchal criticism. The chronological arrangement of the successive law codes
contained in the Pentateuch, or of the successive editions of one fundamental law code, has
been related to the history of Israelite culture and religion recorded in the other Old Testament
books—histories, prophecies, and psalms—with the mounting aid supplied by contemporary
non-Israelite documents. The development of some Old Testament books is indicated expressly
in their contents: one can note the composition of the first and second editions of the Book of
Jeremiah in Jeremiah 36:4, 32; and scholars can reach some conclusions about later editions by
a comparison of the longer edition in the Masoretic text with the shorter edition in the
Septuagint (now also attested in a fragmentary Hebrew text from Qumrān). In the absence of
such explicit evidence, conclusions about the structure of other prophetic books, such as Isaiah
and Ezekiel, must be more tentative.
In the New Testament, literary criticism has centred principally on the Gospels. In the
Synoptic Gospels (that is, those having a common source—i.e., Matthew, Mark, and Luke)
indicators as to source and composition are provided by the presence of so much material
common to two or to all three of them. The majority opinion since the mid-19th century has
been that Mark served as a source for Matthew and Luke and that the two latter had a further
common source, generally labelled Q (for Quelle, the German term for “source”), comprising
mainly sayings of Jesus. Aspects of the Gospel problem that literary criticism leaves unsolved
are more likely to be illuminated by other critical approaches. The Fourth Gospel (John), having
much less in common with the Synoptic Gospels than the latter three have among themselves,
presents an independent line of transmission, and a comparative study of those areas where
the Johannine and Synoptic traditions touch each other yields valuable conclusions for the
beginnings of the gospel story.
