The Death of Deutero- and Trito-Isaiah

The heart of typology is representation, and representation is the heart of sacrifice.

A great deal of so-called theology seems to me to be a waste of time, breath and ink. Theologians and commentators insist on applying a “lens” to Scripture, or building a case from cherry-picked particulars or accumulations of fragmented data, when the answer to the debated question is staring right back at them. Literary structure should be the first recourse, not the last. When it comes to the Bible, literary structure is the label on the tin.

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“Israel’s ministry was to purchase every single day with blameless blood. Every morning and evening enjoyed by the nations was paid for in Yahweh’s name.”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

After the spectacular stories of Balaam and Phinehas, it is no wonder the modern mind has problems when the Torah suddenly crunches its gears to speak once again in detail about offerings. To the higher critic, this is simply evidence of a hodgepodge of scrolls gathered together by an ignorant and hurried scribe. For the believer, it adds to the niggling sense that the Bible has an internal logic which neither your pastor nor any Christian book you have read so far seems to be able to solve, despite many valiant attempts.

In his The Literary Structure of the Old Testament, David Dorsey sees some interesting chiastic structures in the Torah. For instance, he begins one structure at the defeat of Sihon and Og in Numbers 21 and ends it at Moses’ speech concerning the victory over Sihon and Og in Deuteronomy 2. To me, these seem to be historical structures more than literary ones, events rather than the careful arrangement of the text. Also, this sort of wooden symmetry can sometimes be imposed by skipping the bits of text that don’t fit. It doesn’t seem to hear the Bible’s textual “music.” We’ve all seen chiastic charts that aren’t quite symmetrical. Perhaps the Bible Matrix would knock the kinks out of them.

Certainly, we need to be aware of both historical and textual symmetry, but the arrangement of the text itself is a crucial part of the communication of the author. At least in his Numbers examples, Dorsey seems to overlook this aspect. Unlike most chiasmus fanboys, I don’t believe that mere identification of symmetry  is what we really need to be spending our time on. The Bible’s “progressive” chiasmus is more architectural, more musical, more beautiful, more rich… and much more fun.

We come to the fifth cycle of the Wilderness Book, Numbers 28-29, which consists of a rundown of Israel’s annual festal offerings. The first thing we need to ask is this: If we have passed the centre of the book, and are now on our way out, what did we see on the way in that might explain this strange and sudden deviation into lawgiving?

Overview of Numbers

So, there we have the structural logic revealed. This festal passage is the “Deuteronomy” of the book of Numbers, if you will. Firstfruits concerns the Covenant Head. The offerings are Levitical ones, the ones “lifted up” above the Land. Maturity concerns the Covenant Body. The offerings are those of all the other tribes, the ones farming, subduing the Land. As such, this cycle is different to the one in Leviticus 23, which concerns the priestly offerings. These offerings are kingly. If you remember, the first cycle was a microcosm of the entire book. Whereas Israel offered basins in the initial cycle (as symbolic bulls) to prove their fealty, now they are offering actual animals. The Tabernacle of stone, wood and metal has taken on flesh.

The first key to Maturity is plunder versus plagues, depending upon obedience to the promises. The second key is the assembly, or rather, re-assembly of Israel after her being dismantled in the sacrificial process.

The question is why the Lord chose the festal calendar to express all of this. It must be because Israel’s harvest year pictured the fruit of the Spirit. The cycle begins with the Lord’s reference to these offerings as a pleasing aroma. Ascension, Testing and Maturity are the triune process of Altar, Fire and Smoke.

So in cycle three, the Head of the sacrifice was offered. Here in cycle five, the Body is offered.

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[1] See also The Three Shepherds – 1.
[2] It is a “bullock countown”!
First day: 13 Bullocks 2 Rams 14 Lambs 1 Goat
Second day: 12 Bullocks 2 Rams 14 Lambs 1 Goat
Third day: 11 Bullocks 2 Rams 14 Lambs 1 Goat
Fourth day: 10 Bullocks 2 Rams 14 Lambs 1 Goat
Fifth day: 9 Bullocks 2 Rams 14 Lambs 1 Goat
Sixth day: 8 Bullocks 2 Rams 14 Lambs 1 Goat
Seventh day: 7 Bullocks 2 Rams 14 Lambs 1 Goat

In all there are 70 bullocks, 14 rams, 98 lambs, and 7 goats.

Ignorant (willfully?) of ancient literary conventions, higher critics explained the carelessness of arrangement they thought was apparent in Old Testament books with fallacies like the JEDP theory. It turns out they were very wrong. James Jordan writes:

“Chiastic literary analysis has completely destroyed liberal literary criticism. Liberalism is in tatters, bleeding and dying. Liberalism cannot survive Dorsey’s chiastic proof of the total unity of Isaiah, for instance. Dorsey finds loads of 7-fold chiasms in the Bible. I’ve found scores more, quite independently. What Dorsey does not see is that these are recaps of the chiasm of the 7 days in Genesis 1. And that’s good, because it means he did not go through the Bible forcing passages into heptamerous chiasms. He just found them there, and others can see that these track Genesis 1 as “new creation” passages.” [1]

All of the books of the New Testament display the same phenomenal craftsmanship inherent in the Old. Post-exilic Jews were people of the book, as Christians are, and this flows into culture as literacy. The gospels, the synoptic ones at least, were written very early. They aren’t a later record of oral traditions and they weren’t written by trailer trash. They are high art, written by people of means.

“It is often assumed by people, though not by all scholars by any means, that the disciples of jesus were poor and uneducated people. This is not so, and it can be shown rather quickly that it is not.

First, we find that Matthew, Peter and John were capable of composing very sophisticated literary works that are right in line with the style and form of the canonical works of what we call the “Old Testament.” This means that they were aware of the stylised hieratic scribal Hebrew used in the Hebrew Bible and capable of joining in that flow of writing. So also were Mark, Luke, Paul, James and Jude.” [2]

The Jews examined their Scriptures very closely. They turned them inside out and upside down and still do. The crowd at Biblical Horizons have done this with the New Testament and discovered the same literary structures.

Perhaps the Old Testament and New Testament departments in Bible colleges and seminaries ought to talk to each other more often, and drop the false critical paradigm that maintains the authors of Scripture, and their writings, are “encultured” and therefore must be analysed with blinkers on. [3]

Jordan despises the Old/New Testament division and rightly so. The 400 year gap between Malachi and Matthew is in reality no more significant (or just as significant, typologically) than the gap between Joseph and Moses, and the later ones.

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[1] James B. Jordan, A Reply on the Nature of the Psalter, Biblical Horizons blog, biblicalhorizons.wordpress.com, referring to David A. Dorsey, The Literary Structure of the Old Testament. Dorsey’s book is a must-have for reference.
[2] James B. Jordan, Getting Real in the Gospels, Biblical Horizons Newsletter No. 205, October 2009. Subscribe at www.biblicalhorizons.com
Jordan goes on to discuss the great evidence for the disciples, apostles, and indeed Joseph and Mary, being upper middle (working) class. 
[3] See Threshing the Text.

Yet more on literary analysis of the Bible as a ‘terrible marvel‘; a review of two books. As Warren Gage has commented, we are on the verge of a tremendously creative time in Biblical theology. But this to me seems also to be an element of scholarship returning home, older and wiser, from a wilderness of unbelief.

Genesis: The Story We Haven’t Heard
by Paul Borgman. Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2001. 252 pages.

The Literary Structure of the Old Testament: A Commentary on Genesis-Malachi
by David A. Dorsey. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1999. 330 pages.

Reviewed by Timothy Paul Erdel, Ph.D., Archivist and Assistant Professor of Religion and Philosophy, Bethel College, Mishawaka, IN.

“I have been fascinated by the primal power of Old Testament stories for as long as I can remember. From my perspective, there is no clearer window on human character, no greater storehouse of hard and holy truths. Yet some tales are deeply disturbing. Phyllis Trible calls them ‘texts of terror.’ Even the most familiar passages may seem strangely distant. So I relish each time a preacher or teacher sheds new light on these ancient Hebrew narratives.

The greatest of all great books, the Bible has been the focus of far more sustained and intensive scholarly scrutiny than any other work. Since the modern era, this critical dissection sometimes threatens to destroy everything precious to traditional readers: the religious message, the historical reliability, the underlying drama, and the unity of the writings. Nevertheless, despite two centuries of critical assaults, Bible stories continue to illumine for many of us believers both the will of God and the meta-narratives of our own lives.

Is it too much to hope that serious Old Testament monographs might acknowledge what seems so obvious to the ordinary religious reader, the spellbinding attraction of biblical stories? Could such studies simultaneously help us to see in those same stories all sorts of literary devices we might otherwise gloss over-even though once pointed out the devices seem so patently clear as to be undeniable? Could these newly manifest literary structures in turn underscore moral and religious truths we might also all too readily overlook? And could it possibly be the case, mirabile dictu, that these ever so subtle and tightly woven literary structures would in turn, once recognized, expose some favorite modern critical (i.e., skeptical) theories about the sequence of and motivations for biblical compositions as hopelessly implausible? Could it be that the sorts of generic doubts raised by C. S. Lewis (no mean literary critic himself) about standard biblical criticisms have now found their mundane confirmation in the work of two very patient and observant scholars working out of the limelight at relatively small evangelical schools?

The great good news is that the two books under review provide us with all the foregoing and much more. It is hard for me to describe how refreshing I find their approaches; but since this is to be a relatively brief review, I will restrict myself to a basic example or two from each work.

The story of Abraham offering Isaac on the altar is a powerful one on almost any reading. It has a long history of Rabbinic interpretation, and in the modern era has served as a favorite text for philosophers of religion as well, especially since Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, though Kant took up the story before him.

Critical studies in Genesis have often added to the notion that the story is both bizarre and extreme, and that the God revealed therein is both primitive and arbitrary, unworthy of enlightened religious sensibilities. What Paul Borgman (at Gordon College) does magnificently, though not without a hint or two from Martin Buber, is not only call attention to various details we might otherwise overlook, but stress the literary and moral and religious interconnectedness between this story and nearly everything else that has occurred in Genesis up to this point. Throughout his life Abraham has been tried and tested by some of the same temptations that already seduced Eve, Cain, Lamech, and the builders of the Tower of Babel. He has, repeatedly and to an astonishing degree, failed, as Borgman’s close reading of the text makes clear. But God has not given up on Abraham, and there has been at least some definite progress in each of the previous six visits God has made with Abraham. Now in this seventh visit, the chiasm (symmetry) is complete and virtually every detail of the story ties together dangling threads, not just from Abraham’s own life and experience, but from the whole of Genesis up to this point. You will simply have to read the book to find out why all this is so.

David Dorsey (Evangelical School of Theology) offers an unparalleled tour de force, the systematic laying out of the literary structure of every book in the Old Testament. Scholars have long recognized that repetition, parallelism, chiasm, sevenfold patterns, and similar devices permeate the ancient Hebrew Scriptures. Dorsey merely sets about identifying their occurrences and then seeing what the patterns in each book might tell us about it. What he often finds is, in retrospect, almost embarrassingly simple, but as elegant and powerful as a cleanly constructed mathematical proof. For example, even Old Testament scholars on the theological far right, such as R. K. Harrison and Gleason Archer, have admitted that Jeremiah apparently defies attempts to find an overarching orderly structure. Nevertheless, Dorsey sets out what he has discovered, and once presented, the book’s sevenfold structure seems quite sensible. Or again, given the all but universal tendency among modern scholars to divide Isaiah into separate writings, how would such scholars now explain the literary unity of Isaiah as a giant yet intricately crafted chiasm?

I trust I have not over stressed the polemical aspects in this review, which are more implicit than explicit in these two studies. For Borgman and Dorsey are both deeply indebted to other scholars of very different stripes. Furthermore, both Borgman and Dorsey, though committed evangelical biblicists, offer some striking reinterpretations and emphases that could offend evangelicals, such as Borgman’s stress on the depth and frequency of Abraham’s failures. But the genius of their approaches is that they are so directly tied to the text itself, not to highly speculative critical theories, therefore inviting correction from that same text. Nor does one need to agree uniformly with them to stand in awe of what they have achieved.”

PDF found here.

As an aside, Jordan’s book Primeval Saints takes the opposite position on the faithfulness of Abraham and the other patriarchs.

or Typology: Deadly Weapon or game of Scattergories?

“Chiastic literary analysis has completely destroyed liberal literary criticism. Liberalism is in tatters, bleeding and dying. Liberalism cannot survive Dorsey’s chiastic proof of the total unity of Isaiah, for instance. Dorsey finds loads of 7-fold chiasms in the Bible. I’ve found scores more, quite independently. What Dorsey does not see is that these are recaps of the chiasm of the 7 days in Genesis 1. And that’s good, because it means he did not go through the Bible forcing passages into heptamerous chiasms. He just found them there, and others can see that these track Genesis 1 as ‘new creation’ passages.”

—James B. Jordan, A Reply on the Nature of the Psalter, Biblical Horizons blog, biblicalhorizons.wordpress.com, referring to David A. Dorsey, The Literary Structure of the Old Testament.

If chiastic literary analysis (along with typology as I posted recently) is such a powerful weapon against a modernist interpretation of the Bible, why are these methods of study shunned by those who oppose liberal theology? Why are theologians hauled over the coals for using it if it leaves the enemy in shreds?

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“I began writing this book some ten years ago, although my interest in Hebrew literary structure goes back a decade before that. My fascination with the subject was kindled when I began teaching Old Testament courses in seminary. At that time I was struck by the apparent lack of order within many of the biblical books. Jeremiah seemed hopelessly confused in its organisation; so did Isaiah and Hosea and most of the prophets. Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes appeared to be in almost complete disarray, and even the more orderly historical books, such as Joshua and Kings, showed signs of strangely careless organisation. Why did the biblical authors write like this? I would never write a book, an article, or even a private letter with such carelessness of arrangement.

I was intrigued by the possibility that the Hebrew authors might have organised their compositions according to literary conventions that were different from ours. I began to discover, over a period of years, that several structuring patterns rarely used by us were remarkably common in the books of the Hebrew Bible, particularly chiasmus (symmetry), parallelism, and sevenfold patterns. I was increasingly struck by how often these patterns had been utilised to arrange biblical books…

It was my mother who gave me a love for literature. She read to my brother Stephen and me regularly, from as early as I can remember. I still have many fond memories of those wondrous bedtime stories, whose structures — like the Bible — were designed for the ear, not the eye.”

David A. Dorsey, The Literary Structure of the Old Testament, p.9-10 (Preface).