How do we learn to read, and are there rules for typology?
First, the Pleasantries
I am honored to be invited to participate in this conversation, as I have been stimulated by and feel gratitude and appreciation for the participants. So I hope everything I have to say will be received as I intend to communicate it: as a warm friend wearing a big smile as we joyfully—and earnestly—seek the truth together. I hope the smile and the friendliness will particularly be remembered if I say things that are contradictory, and especially if I seem forceful in the way I take some exception to some of the things that have been written here.
A Friendly Objection
For instance, while I agree with many things Dr. Leithart has written, and, as usual with his prose, admire its elegance, beauty, and power, this notion that “the trajectory of humanity’s growth toward adulthood moves from priest to king to prophet” is nonsense. And that assertion allows me to introduce what I think is the most important rule for reading Scripture (or any other text): authorial intent. I would entertain this idea about the trajectory of humanity’s growth if it came with an attempt to demonstrate that some human author of Scripture sought to teach this idea. It comes with no such attempt, and I think a case can be made that Moses intends to present Adam in the garden as a prophet, priest, and king, and I see no indication that Moses intends his audience to discern any kind of progression from one role to another. Similarly, it seems to me that later Old Testament authors understand the significance of these roles, giving no indication of a progression from one to another, even as they indicate in various ways that when the future king from David’s line arises he will fulfill them each—not in turn progressing from lower to higher—but all at once forever. Jesus is the prophesied prophet like Moses, the king from David’s line, and he holds his high priesthood according to the order of Melchizedek forever—and note that a constitutive feature of this high-priesthood is that a king-priest holds it.
The Golden Rule and Interpretation
I’m not a big fan of “rules for reading Scripture,” because it seems to me that no sooner do I hear about some rule, but lo and behold the beautiful book goes and breaks it. The Bible just doesn’t seem concerned with man-made rules. It’s like the rules are trying to put the Bible in a box, and the Bible keeps bursting loose, unconstrained and uncontainable. So if we need a rule, let’s have the Golden One: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Applied to interpretation, this simply means that we interpret what others say or write the way we would want our own words to be heard or read: the way we intended them.
As I write this, I want to be read as I intend to be understood. No communicator wants his statements interpreted to mean something he did not intend to communicate. We all want to be understood in accordance with what we intended to say.
We must follow the Golden Rule as we read the Bible. And I’m of the opinion that the divine author has communicated his intent by inspiring the human author. That is, we discern the intent of Scripture’s divine author by discerning the intent of Scripture’s human authors.
Keep Reading the Bible
Along with seeking the intent of the human author, the best advice I have for understanding the Bible is simple: keep reading it, keep memorizing it, and keep meditating on it day and night. God by his Spirit will use the Bible itself to teach us how to read. (This is not that far from a good deal of what Dr. Liethart was saying).
Before I make some comments on the intent of the human author and then propose a test case (Rahab and the scarlet cord—but don’t assume you know where I’m going), let me add this: the best languages in which to read, study, memorize, and meditate upon the Scriptures are the originals. We should never stop trying to improve our abilities in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. There is more for us to see.
The Intent of the Human Author
In order to understand the intent of any author, we have to know the meaning of the words used, and we have to understand the syntactical relationships between those words when they’re put together to build sentences. Understanding both the meaning of the words and their syntactical coordination means interpreting in a grammatical and historical way. This kind of interpretation has to be grammatical because people use phrases to communicate their thoughts, and this means we have to understand and use these phrases in ways that other speakers of our language do. And, of course, we want to understand the meaning of the terms employed in those phrases according to the usage of those terms in historical context. If we are reading a text written in the 1800s, a line such as “the gay lads are in camp,” might carry manly, soldierly, martial overtones describing joyful warriors encamped against their foes. Such a line written in 2020 communicates an entirely different set of connotations.
Saying “grammatical” and “historical,” however, is not enough. In order to come to terms with the intent of an author, we have to understand how his words and phrases function in relationship to his whole book. For lack of a better way of describing this, I will refer to it as a “literary” approach to grammatical and historical interpretation. And then beyond the bounds of the whole book, we have to understand the broader conversation the author means to engage with his book. With the biblical authors, the primary conversation into which they speak is the one being had in the (as they were writing) growing collection of canonical books. So I will refer to this as a “canonical” approach to grammatical, historical, and literary interpretation. Every individual book of the Bible needs to be read in light of preceding Scripture, and then we need to ask how later biblical authors interpreted the book.
So I contend that the initial steps to understanding the intent of the human authors we are interpreting involve grammatical, historical, literary, and canonical sensitivity. More could be said, but let’s consider together the example of Rahab.
2. Rahab and the Scarlet Cord
The example of Rahab and the scarlet cord in her window pointing forward to the red blood of Christ is often cited to illustrate the arbitrary, unwarranted, indefensible character of early Christian exegesis. Clement of Rome, Justin Martyr, and Origen all found a way to Christ from Rahab and the scarlet cord. From their comments, however, it seems possible they arrived at their conclusion along the lines of what I propose below. What I mean is that they do not show us their work. They state their sum, but they do not turn in the scratch paper where they may have written out all the work, showing the steps where they carried their numbers and tallied their figures, so to speak.
What if they got to their conclusion by calculating as follows?
In the Pentateuch Moses himself indicates that the exodus from Egypt typifies the future salvation that God will accomplish on behalf of his people. He does this by establishing historical correspondence between several installments in an exodus pattern of events, and the repetition of the patterns produces an escalated sense of the significance of the pattern.
How would Moses create historical correspondence? For instance, by having both Abraham and Jacob and his children descend into Egypt because of a famine in the land of promise. Like the children of Israel, once in Egypt Abraham faced oppression and bondage, Sarah being taken into the house of Pharaoh. Just as Israel plundered Egypt at the exodus, Pharaoh enriched Abraham. Just as Israel was liberated from slavery in Egypt by plagues, the Lord visited plagues on the house of Pharaoh to free Sarah (see Gen 12:10–20). Like Israel, Abraham and Sarah came up out of Egypt and made their way to the land of promise. Like Israel, Abraham heard the words, “I am Yahweh who brought you out” (Gen 15:7; cf. Exod 20:2). Just as Yahweh came down on Mount Sinai in smoke and fire in Exodus 19 to enter into covenant with Israel, the smoking firepot and flaming torch passed between the pieces to make covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15. And in Genesis 15 the Lord tells Abraham of the exodus (Gen 15:13–16).
Moses gives a preview of the exodus in Abraham’s life (Gen 12–15), then he narrates the event of the exodus itself (Exod 1–15), and in the institution of the Passover Feast and in the song of the sea Moses teaches Israel to expect more of this kind of thing in the future. Moses speaks of the defeat of the kings of Canaan with the same terms used to speak of the defeat of Pharaoh (cf. Exod 15:5, 16). Moses presented these repetitions to establish that the exodus is a type of the way that God would save his people in the future.
Joshua understood this, and in a host of ways he presented the conquest of Canaan as an installation in the exodus-pattern of events. Joshua establishes the conquest as a new exodus by, for instance, repeated use of the “Passover” verb (עבר), using the crossing of the Jordan to remind his audience of the crossing of the Red Sea (Josh 3:17; 4:23), and recounting how the Lord hardened the hearts of the kings of Canaan exactly as he had hardened Pharaoh’s (11:20). There is more evidence along these lines, but I have a word limit and must get to Rahab.
The people of Israel are going to “pass over” Jericho just as the Lord himself passed over Egypt. In the same way that the Israelites were to put the lamb’s blood on their doorposts, gather the family into the house, and not go outside, the spies instruct Rahab to put the scarlet cord on the window they used as a door, gather her family into the house, and not go outside (cf. esp. Josh 2:19 and Exod 12:22). I am convinced that in his presentation of these events, Joshua intends to remind his audience of the Passover as he narrates the deliverance of Rahab.
If it is the case that Joshua meant to remind his audience of the Passover, and if he understood the exodus as a type of the way that God would save his people in the future, then we can say something like this: Joshua intends the deliverance of Rahab to be understood as an installation in an exodus-pattern of events, and thereby he means to add to the escalating expectation for more like this in the future, culminating in the fulfillment of the exodus that the carpenter’s son accomplished in Jerusalem.
I am arguing here that the human authors Moses and Joshua have been inspired by the divine author to communicate their intent in a discernible way. We know from historical, grammatical interpretation that is sensitive to literary and canonical context that these human authors meant to create a typological relationship between the exodus from Egypt and its fulfillment in God’s salvation of his people. They created that expectation by building up historical correspondence that caused an increasing expectation and significance to build from one installation in the pattern to another until fulfillment in Christ. And as the New Testament authors do their work, they intended to communicate that Christ was the typological fulfillment of the expectation of the same that the Old Testament authors intended to provoke.
Let us keep reading the Bible, preferably in the original languages, and let us keep seeking to understand what the human authors meant to communicate by attention to their grammar, understood in its historical context, with attention to the literary structures they employed in their books, read in conversation with the Canon of Scripture.
Take up and read indeed.
Dr. James Hamilton is Professor of Biblical Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has written God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment: A Biblical Theology and God’s Indwelling Presence: The Ministry of the Holy Spirit in the Old and New Testaments. He has contributed chapters to many other books, and has authored many scholarly articles. He currently serves as the preaching pastor at Kenwood Baptist Church.
How do we learn to read, and are there rules for typology?
First, the Pleasantries
I am honored to be invited to participate in this conversation, as I have been stimulated by and feel gratitude and appreciation for the participants. So I hope everything I have to say will be received as I intend to communicate it: as a warm friend wearing a big smile as we joyfully—and earnestly—seek the truth together. I hope the smile and the friendliness will particularly be remembered if I say things that are contradictory, and especially if I seem forceful in the way I take some exception to some of the things that have been written here.
A Friendly Objection
For instance, while I agree with many things Dr. Leithart has written, and, as usual with his prose, admire its elegance, beauty, and power, this notion that “the trajectory of humanity’s growth toward adulthood moves from priest to king to prophet” is nonsense. And that assertion allows me to introduce what I think is the most important rule for reading Scripture (or any other text): authorial intent. I would entertain this idea about the trajectory of humanity’s growth if it came with an attempt to demonstrate that some human author of Scripture sought to teach this idea. It comes with no such attempt, and I think a case can be made that Moses intends to present Adam in the garden as a prophet, priest, and king, and I see no indication that Moses intends his audience to discern any kind of progression from one role to another. Similarly, it seems to me that later Old Testament authors understand the significance of these roles, giving no indication of a progression from one to another, even as they indicate in various ways that when the future king from David’s line arises he will fulfill them each—not in turn progressing from lower to higher—but all at once forever. Jesus is the prophesied prophet like Moses, the king from David’s line, and he holds his high priesthood according to the order of Melchizedek forever—and note that a constitutive feature of this high-priesthood is that a king-priest holds it.
The Golden Rule and Interpretation
I’m not a big fan of “rules for reading Scripture,” because it seems to me that no sooner do I hear about some rule, but lo and behold the beautiful book goes and breaks it. The Bible just doesn’t seem concerned with man-made rules. It’s like the rules are trying to put the Bible in a box, and the Bible keeps bursting loose, unconstrained and uncontainable. So if we need a rule, let’s have the Golden One: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Applied to interpretation, this simply means that we interpret what others say or write the way we would want our own words to be heard or read: the way we intended them.
As I write this, I want to be read as I intend to be understood. No communicator wants his statements interpreted to mean something he did not intend to communicate. We all want to be understood in accordance with what we intended to say.
We must follow the Golden Rule as we read the Bible. And I’m of the opinion that the divine author has communicated his intent by inspiring the human author. That is, we discern the intent of Scripture’s divine author by discerning the intent of Scripture’s human authors.
Keep Reading the Bible
Along with seeking the intent of the human author, the best advice I have for understanding the Bible is simple: keep reading it, keep memorizing it, and keep meditating on it day and night. God by his Spirit will use the Bible itself to teach us how to read. (This is not that far from a good deal of what Dr. Liethart was saying).
Before I make some comments on the intent of the human author and then propose a test case (Rahab and the scarlet cord—but don’t assume you know where I’m going), let me add this: the best languages in which to read, study, memorize, and meditate upon the Scriptures are the originals. We should never stop trying to improve our abilities in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. There is more for us to see.
The Intent of the Human Author
In order to understand the intent of any author, we have to know the meaning of the words used, and we have to understand the syntactical relationships between those words when they’re put together to build sentences. Understanding both the meaning of the words and their syntactical coordination means interpreting in a grammatical and historical way. This kind of interpretation has to be grammatical because people use phrases to communicate their thoughts, and this means we have to understand and use these phrases in ways that other speakers of our language do. And, of course, we want to understand the meaning of the terms employed in those phrases according to the usage of those terms in historical context. If we are reading a text written in the 1800s, a line such as “the gay lads are in camp,” might carry manly, soldierly, martial overtones describing joyful warriors encamped against their foes. Such a line written in 2020 communicates an entirely different set of connotations.
Saying “grammatical” and “historical,” however, is not enough. In order to come to terms with the intent of an author, we have to understand how his words and phrases function in relationship to his whole book. For lack of a better way of describing this, I will refer to it as a “literary” approach to grammatical and historical interpretation. And then beyond the bounds of the whole book, we have to understand the broader conversation the author means to engage with his book. With the biblical authors, the primary conversation into which they speak is the one being had in the (as they were writing) growing collection of canonical books. So I will refer to this as a “canonical” approach to grammatical, historical, and literary interpretation. Every individual book of the Bible needs to be read in light of preceding Scripture, and then we need to ask how later biblical authors interpreted the book.
So I contend that the initial steps to understanding the intent of the human authors we are interpreting involve grammatical, historical, literary, and canonical sensitivity. More could be said, but let’s consider together the example of Rahab.
2. Rahab and the Scarlet Cord
The example of Rahab and the scarlet cord in her window pointing forward to the red blood of Christ is often cited to illustrate the arbitrary, unwarranted, indefensible character of early Christian exegesis. Clement of Rome, Justin Martyr, and Origen all found a way to Christ from Rahab and the scarlet cord. From their comments, however, it seems possible they arrived at their conclusion along the lines of what I propose below. What I mean is that they do not show us their work. They state their sum, but they do not turn in the scratch paper where they may have written out all the work, showing the steps where they carried their numbers and tallied their figures, so to speak.
What if they got to their conclusion by calculating as follows?
In the Pentateuch Moses himself indicates that the exodus from Egypt typifies the future salvation that God will accomplish on behalf of his people. He does this by establishing historical correspondence between several installments in an exodus pattern of events, and the repetition of the patterns produces an escalated sense of the significance of the pattern.
How would Moses create historical correspondence? For instance, by having both Abraham and Jacob and his children descend into Egypt because of a famine in the land of promise. Like the children of Israel, once in Egypt Abraham faced oppression and bondage, Sarah being taken into the house of Pharaoh. Just as Israel plundered Egypt at the exodus, Pharaoh enriched Abraham. Just as Israel was liberated from slavery in Egypt by plagues, the Lord visited plagues on the house of Pharaoh to free Sarah (see Gen 12:10–20). Like Israel, Abraham and Sarah came up out of Egypt and made their way to the land of promise. Like Israel, Abraham heard the words, “I am Yahweh who brought you out” (Gen 15:7; cf. Exod 20:2). Just as Yahweh came down on Mount Sinai in smoke and fire in Exodus 19 to enter into covenant with Israel, the smoking firepot and flaming torch passed between the pieces to make covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15. And in Genesis 15 the Lord tells Abraham of the exodus (Gen 15:13–16).
Moses gives a preview of the exodus in Abraham’s life (Gen 12–15), then he narrates the event of the exodus itself (Exod 1–15), and in the institution of the Passover Feast and in the song of the sea Moses teaches Israel to expect more of this kind of thing in the future. Moses speaks of the defeat of the kings of Canaan with the same terms used to speak of the defeat of Pharaoh (cf. Exod 15:5, 16). Moses presented these repetitions to establish that the exodus is a type of the way that God would save his people in the future.
Joshua understood this, and in a host of ways he presented the conquest of Canaan as an installation in the exodus-pattern of events. Joshua establishes the conquest as a new exodus by, for instance, repeated use of the “Passover” verb (עבר), using the crossing of the Jordan to remind his audience of the crossing of the Red Sea (Josh 3:17; 4:23), and recounting how the Lord hardened the hearts of the kings of Canaan exactly as he had hardened Pharaoh’s (11:20). There is more evidence along these lines, but I have a word limit and must get to Rahab.
The people of Israel are going to “pass over” Jericho just as the Lord himself passed over Egypt. In the same way that the Israelites were to put the lamb’s blood on their doorposts, gather the family into the house, and not go outside, the spies instruct Rahab to put the scarlet cord on the window they used as a door, gather her family into the house, and not go outside (cf. esp. Josh 2:19 and Exod 12:22). I am convinced that in his presentation of these events, Joshua intends to remind his audience of the Passover as he narrates the deliverance of Rahab.
If it is the case that Joshua meant to remind his audience of the Passover, and if he understood the exodus as a type of the way that God would save his people in the future, then we can say something like this: Joshua intends the deliverance of Rahab to be understood as an installation in an exodus-pattern of events, and thereby he means to add to the escalating expectation for more like this in the future, culminating in the fulfillment of the exodus that the carpenter’s son accomplished in Jerusalem.
I am arguing here that the human authors Moses and Joshua have been inspired by the divine author to communicate their intent in a discernible way. We know from historical, grammatical interpretation that is sensitive to literary and canonical context that these human authors meant to create a typological relationship between the exodus from Egypt and its fulfillment in God’s salvation of his people. They created that expectation by building up historical correspondence that caused an increasing expectation and significance to build from one installation in the pattern to another until fulfillment in Christ. And as the New Testament authors do their work, they intended to communicate that Christ was the typological fulfillment of the expectation of the same that the Old Testament authors intended to provoke.
Let us keep reading the Bible, preferably in the original languages, and let us keep seeking to understand what the human authors meant to communicate by attention to their grammar, understood in its historical context, with attention to the literary structures they employed in their books, read in conversation with the Canon of Scripture.
Take up and read indeed.
Dr. James Hamilton is Professor of Biblical Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has written God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment: A Biblical Theology and God’s Indwelling Presence: The Ministry of the Holy Spirit in the Old and New Testaments. He has contributed chapters to many other books, and has authored many scholarly articles. He currently serves as the preaching pastor at Kenwood Baptist Church.
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