Maybe this is not the best venue to reveal that I sometimes wonder about all that deep exegesis: the chiasms, the numerology, vowel modifications, the typological labyrinthes, the innumerable exodus patterns that are so often limned by Peter Leithart or James Jordan or Alastair Roberts. Maybe it’s because I am no theologian and, if I were, it wouldn’t appear to strain plausibility at all. But it’s not even that I am skeptical of whether or not this or that reading is plausible, although I understand why someone might be. I actually find myself intellectually convinced by many of the readings. But I can’t help wondering what sort of mind could write the kinds of texts this deep exegesis claims the Bible to be. What sort of culture could read the Bible in this way and absorb it as such? What sort of book is the Bible after what deep exegesis has done with it?
As I said above, I am intellectually a fan of these readings. The textual arguments are persuasive: chiasms really are, undeniably, everywhere, and the typological patterns hop here, there, everywhere throughout the Old and New Testaments like frogs in Pharaoh’s bed. But something else gives me pause. The mind is willing, but the sensibility is weak. I can locate some of my hesitation, I think, in the fact that I have bought into one of those well-worn bromides one hears: “the Bible is a story.” This is true and it’s helpful–to an extent. But if “story” is a metaphor or genre through which to see the Bible, there may well be others. And “story” may only be good insofar as our sense of what “stories” are matches the Bible’s. But what if it doesn’t? I would like to suggest another, complementary heuristic for a hermeneutic which relies heavily on typology, archetypal patterns, and so forth.
But, first, it’s worth asking: what exactly makes the Theopolitan hermeneutical method feel implausible, perceptually, to me and, perhaps, to others? One of the things is the amount of reflection it assumes out of Bible readers. If the Bible is a story, then–well, maybe it’s simple-minded of me, but I picture myself being told the Torah around a campfire. But I can’t think of many campfire stories I’ve been told where I perseverate over every detail, every noun, every jot and tittle, thinking to myself, “Where have I heard this number or name before?” or “How many times have I heard this word so far in the story?”
Or, take the chiasm: the stories I am used to are linked by causality, each event a consequence of some prior event. Chiasms seem to subordinate causality to some predetermined structure which I must lift myself out of the narrative in order to recognize. To put it another way, how do I perceive a chiasm as I am being told a story? I won’t recognize the chiasm until I start thinking, “What other events does this remind me of?” But, on the other hand, how will I know when the chiasm started, since I didn’t notice it until I had already reached the second half of the chiastic structure?
Here is another way to put the problem: these Theopolitans make out the Bible to be a book full of implicit silence and implicit repetition. Repetition, because only after hearing again and again, reading over and over, do the patterns become perceptible. Silence, because after each laconic sentence of the Torah, a world of import stretches beyond the horizons of my imagination, and I need time to reflect on that import, to compare to what has come before and what will come after. Every sentence of the Bible is, in a way, a question, to which some future sentence of the Bible might be an answer. This is no normal story I’m used to.
This is why we need to move beyond “story” as the only metaphor or genre descriptor for the Bible. I would say an equally important one is “riddle.”
“Equally important” is a big claim, especially given that most of us have cultural associations with the riddle that don’t rise much higher than popsicle sticks and Bazooka bubble gum. Lucky for me, I can bring even better witnesses for the importance of riddles than popsicles and bubble gum: “For now we see through a glass, darkly,” I Cor. 13:12. But, literally, the Apostle Paul says “through a glass en ainigmati,” in a riddle.
Once you begin to see it, riddles are everywhere in the Bible. It is possible to describe almost every parable Jesus told as a riddle, and it makes a great deal of sense of the format of so many of his parables: he tells a story or image which needs some deciphering; people think it over and are either stumped or get it. After quite a few of these in a row, Matthew feels the need to explain: “Jesus spoke all these things to the crowds in parables. He did not tell them anything without using a parable. So was fulfilled what was spoken through the prophet: ‘I will open My mouth in parables; I will utter things hidden since the foundation of the world,’” Matthew 13:34-35. Matthew is quoting Psalm 78:2, which in the original Hebrew reads, “I will open my mouth in a parable: I will utter dark sayings of old.” This is a bit like Psalm 49:4, “I will incline my ear to a proverb; I will solve my riddle to the music of the lyre.”
First, it may be helpful to understand a little about what a riddle is, beyond our current era’s rather impoverished notion of it as a puerile parlor-game. A riddle is, in fact, a pretty cognitively complex phenomenon, which several scholars have analyzed with a great deal of helpful scrutiny.
A riddle is, first and foremost, a question. And, in so being, it is foundational to thought itself. “Questions are the engines of intellect,” as David Fischer Hackett puts it, “the cerebral machines which convert energy to motion, and curiosity to controlled inquiry.” But questions, even implicit ones, also capture and form our imaginations and condition what we think is possible. When the text of the Bible gives a strange, seemingly irrelevant detail, and we allow ourselves to think, “Why?”, the Holy Spirit is already molding our minds. And, conversely, when we suppress the “why,” we have missed the opportunity for crucial formation.
A riddle is a unique form of a question, as Shlomith Cohen put in the volume Untying the Knot: On Riddles and Other Enigmatic Modes: “In genuine questioning, the questioner seeks some information of which he is ignorant, and which he believes is accessible to the addressee. In the case of riddles, however, the riddler is in possession of some information which he manipulates the addressee into seeking.” Or, in Katelijne Schiltz’s pithy description, “A riddle is a question which already contains the answer.”
Riddles are arresting; they “manipulate the addressee into seeking,” as Cohen says. Don Handelman goes even further: “Behind [the riddle’s] mystery lies the seductive implication that despite the perplexities that confront us, a meaning does exist, present and available, burning to get our attention.”
This begins to get at our problem: if we think of the Bible as a book full of riddles and a book which riddles its reader, then we can assume silence and repetition. We can expect the Bible’s utterances to be punctuated by pauses, going back over, carefully considering and studying the pericope in order to unlock the hidden answer.
But is the Bible full of riddles? Just because the riddle is a complex cognitive structure doesn’t mean it is applicable to the Bible. Even if a few parts of the Bible are riddle-like here and there–some proverbs, a few parables, and the occasional prophetic utterance–this doesn’t mean that it has any applicability to the larger fabric of Scripture.
But here the early-twentieth-century Dutch historian Johan Huizinga might disagree with us. In his book Homo Ludens, he develops a theory of the ancient riddle as an absolutely crucial element of both knowing and worshipping. For Huizinga, riddles were central to how ancient cultures developed their most basic institutions, from ritual sacrifice to theology, philosophy to education. “Archaic thought,” says Huizinga, “brooding in rapture on the mysteries of Being, is hovering here over the border-line between sacred poetry, profoundest wisdom, mysticism and sheer verbal mystification. …The poet-priest is continually knocking at the door of the Unknowable, closed to him as to us.”
Of course, the Bible is less about “knocking on the door of the Unknowable,” that is, it is not as if we are making riddles about God so much as God who seems to enjoy giving us riddles. This can be seen in the grammar of the Old Testament which, as with most riddles, heavily “depends on knowledge of ritual and its symbols.” Huizinga notes that riddles rely on specialized knowledge: “You have to know the secret language of the adepts and be acquainted with the significance of each symbol–wheel, bird, cow, etc.–for the various categories of phenomena.” And this does sound a lot like those Theopolitan types.
But I have probably realized the worst fears of the detractors: I’ve made deep exegesis sound even more gnostic! Isn’t this just trafficking in secret arts, making Biblical interpretation into a conspiracist’s corkboard full of red yarn and pushpins?
No, and here, again, Huizinga is helpful. Riddles also serve a catechetical and pedagogical function. Much as Handleman noted about the cognitive structure of the riddle, the “seductive implication…burning to get our attention,” riddles do not permanently keep their knowledge secret but aim, eventually, to disclose their knowledge. Two of Huizinga’s examples are notable: first, of course, Solomon’s questioning by the Queen of Sheba, who cannot stump him with a question, thus proving his greatness and wisdom as a king; and, second, a Swiss clergyman from the 18th century who wrote a catechism called Rätselbüchlein, literally “a little book of riddles.” The clergyman, says Huizinga, “little knew how near this title led him to the actual fount of all catechisms and creeds!”
Huizinga discusses one aspect of the ancient riddle that, at first sight, seems to have no applicability at all to the present discussion: “The riddle is a sacred thing full of secret power, hence a dangerous thing…a ‘capital riddle,’ which you either solve or forfeit your head.” This Huizinga calls the agonistic element of riddles: they were a stage on which competition could take place between two people, with knowledge as the weapon. One such competition was the “dilemma,” that is, “the question calculated to ‘catch’ your opponent…the answer to which, by forcing [the opponent] to admit something else not covered by the original proposition, invariably falls out to his disadvantage.”
But here too we shouldn’t dismiss the relevance too quickly, for Huizinga has accidentally described Mark 11:27-33, in which Jesus tricks the Pharisees into just such a dilemma: was John’s baptism from heaven or from men? The reason Jesus’s response works, the reason he clearly bests the Pharisees in this context, is because he is engaged in a very old game whose rules and rituals are apparent to his audience. This agonistic principle also makes a great deal of sense of the end of Job. Job has been riddling at God, asking him traps for questions in order to force an answer out of God: “Does it seem good to You that You should oppress, That You should despise the work of your Hands, and smile on the counsel of the wicked? Do You have the eyes of flesh? Or do You see as man sees? Are Your days like the days of a mortal man?” (Job 10:3-5) God’s answer also makes sense given the context of the agonistic riddle-game: He enters the ring and poses the best riddles of anyone in the final chapters, asking questions which elicit nothing but silence from the other contestants, and thus wins the match.
Above all these elements, riddles reflect what Huizinga calls the “ludic” element of human nature, the play aspect. There is something playful in the riddle, not in any frivolous or silly way, but playful nonetheless, insofar as it is a game with rules. And it is a game which the Bible’s authors, both human and divine, enjoy playing. For Huizinga, the identification of the sacred ritual and play act is a universal feature of humans in the ancient world. He cites an extraordinary passage in Plato’s Laws: “I say that a man must be serious with the serious. God alone is worthy of supreme seriousness, but man is made God’s plaything and that is the best part of him. Therefore every man and woman should live life accordingly, and play the noblest games and be of another mind from what they are at present.”
But for the God of the Bible, the play is initiated and sustained not just by his creatures but by God himself, who enjoys infusing his texts with potential questions, avenues of exploration, unexplained seeming-irrelevancies which, when probed, reveal much about the author. Yes, of course, the Bible is a story and it is full of stories; but alongside these stories are mysteries and dark sayings which demand silence and a repeat. Stop; go back; read it over again. What is the text asking me to recall? What knowledge have I acquired already that would allow me to see a hidden aspect to this story? These are not embarrassing questions to ask, nor do they render the Bible an implausibly overwrought text. Quite the contrary, they render it an exciting one, a playful dialogue between God and his people.
John Ahern is a graduate student pursuing a PhD in musicology from Princeton University. He is a substitute organist for the Princeton University chapel on occasion. He loves his wife and son, and they all frequently sing, to greater and lesser degrees of success, Renaissance bicinia over dinner.