Chapter 3 What is the "Historical Meaning" of Biblical Texts

In chapter 3 Sailhamer turns his attention to the question of the proper role of history in biblical hermeneutics arguing that its proper place is philological. With reference to the term “historical-grammatical” he says, “I contend that from its inception in the eighteenth century to the present it has undergone considerable development and change in some of its key tenets” (100). Sailhamer argues that originally, especially with reference to Johann Augustus Ernesti’s use of the term, the grammatical elements of exegesis and the historical elements of exegesis were not distinct elements but one. That is, the meaning of the biblical text was a function of understanding the grammatical rules of the Bible’s languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek).

Sailhamer argues that the events (things) recounted in Scripture are best understood philologically by studying the meaning of the words of the ancient biblical texts. What modern biblical scholars—even evangelical ones—attempt to do is investigate the events (things) of Scripture in the context of ancient history and then interpret the words of Scripture with reference to “our growing knowledge of ancient history” (101). Sailhamer intimates the danger of this approach by saying, “Hence, we come to see the events apart from their biblical setting and within the new context of the ancient world” (101).

The basic difference is that the modern historical approach to hermeneutics fails to appreciate that the events of Scripture are not actual events—as if reading the text were like watching a live news broadcast of events. The biblical narratives are “written texts that recount for their readers a narrative version of the events they contain. They are, of course, not the events themselves; they are verbal versions of those events” (102). Sailhamer here reminds us that when we read the Bible we are given the author’s view of those events—an author who has done his own historical work. To seek to interpret the author’s words from one’s understanding of the events as understood independently of the author through historical reconstruction is to reverse the proper order of the “words and things” dynamic. As Ernesti reminds us “Entirely deceitful and fallacious is the approach of gathering the sense of words from things. Things, rather, ought to be known from words” (114).

Sailhamer ends the chapter by treating the impact of this reversal on biblical theology as witnessed in Friedriech Schleiermacher’s influence in the field. Finally, Sailhamer appeals to the work of Abraham Geiger to show how even the final and fixed shape of the Masoretic versions of the Hebrew Bible reflect a move away from the biblical author’s text and its meaning to a form of the text more in line with dominant Jewish peshat, i.e., historical interpretive traditions—even anti-Christian readings of the text.

Sailhamer’s use of Rembrandt paintings as an illustration of the kind of interpretive perversion of the author’s text personally helped me understand what he envisions as proper biblical hermeneutics more than anything. I simply refer the reader to page 104 for this.

Discussion Questions

1. Is Sailhamer’s use of art, namely a painting, a valid analogy for two different approaches to biblical hermeneutics? Or is it like comparing apples and oranges—the interpretation of wordless pictures and the interpretation of written texts.

2. One common criticism of Sailhamer from evangelicals is that he is against historical background information in biblical hermeneutics. In light of this chapter is that an accurate understanding of what Sailhamer is up to hermeneutically? Or is he just against a certain kind of historical background info.?