Deep Exegesis

The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Peter J. Leithart

BAYLOR UNIVERSITY PRESS

© 2009 by Baylor University Press

Waco, Texas 76798

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of Baylor University Press.

Cover Design by Cynthia Dunne, Blue Farm Graphic Design

Cover image © 2009 iStockphoto.com

Oedipus the King by Sophocles, from Three Theban Plays by Sophocles, translated by Robert Fagles, © 1982 by Robert Fagles. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Leithart, Peter J.

Deep exegesis: the mystery of reading Scripture / Peter J. Leithart.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-60258-069-5 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Bible--Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2. Bible--Hermeneutics. I. Title.

BS511.3.L45 2009

220.6--dc22

2009010380

Contents

Preface

Learning to Read from Jesus and Paul

1 The Text Is a Husk

Modern Hermeneutics

2 Texts Are Events

Typology

3 Words Are Players

Semantics

4 The Text Is a Joke

Intertextuality

5 Texts Are Music

Structure

6 Texts Are about Christ

Application

Epilogue

Appendices

Bibliography

Indices

Preface

Learning to Read from Jesus and Paul

I have two main aims in this book. First, this book advocates a hermeneutics of the letter. That is to say, reading Scripture has to do with attending to the specific contours of the text—the author’s word choices, structural organization, tropes and allusions, and intertextual quotations.

That might seem a prescription for minimalism, if not boredom or even murder. The letter kills, after all, while the Spirit gives life. Don’t we want our hermeneutics to raise us rather than kill us?

I disagree with the premise of this critique. We get at the meaning of baptism not by ignoring the properties of water but by musing on those properties. Eucharistic theology properly emerges from considering the meanings of meals, of bread and of wine, of broken loaves and full cups. So, too, we get to the rich and richly varied sensus plenior of the sacramental word not by moving past the letter to a spiritual sense, not by treating the letter as a husk for removal. We get at the riches of Scripture precisely by luxuriating in the letter, by squeezing everything we can from the text as written.

My first aim is to show that a hermeneutics of the letter ought not to be a rigidly literalist hermeneutics.

My second aim is to learn to read from Jesus and Paul. Almost without exception, most of the questions I attempt to answer in this book arose from my efforts to make sense of how the Bible works, and particularly how Jesus, Paul, and the other New Testament writers read the Old Testament.1 In some chapters, my argument does not overtly take this shape. Even when I am beginning from a theory of ...