12. Light for Distant Nations

The Salarjung Museum in Hyderabad holds surprises for visitors in practically every display room. But nothing can equal the 17th century French chandelier in a hall full of hourglasses and clocks. Suspended from the ceiling by one gracious arm, the lamp cascades down in a waterfall of glittering pieces of crystal. I remember on one occasion looking at it and admiring its beauty. Suddenly there was an electrical power failure. The light died in all the crystal mirror images. Yet, the chandelier did not look drab and dull. For though the light from inside had gone, some light from the window reflected in the crystal pieces in a startlingly new way. It struck me then how beautiful things depend on light for their beauty, and that light can come from different sources. Without such light striking them from outside, beauty and color simply don’t exist.

The same is true of human words. We may think that words carry meaning in themselves. But this is not so. The words we speak have meaning only because of the light of external circumstances that shine on them. Words are signs that obtain their specific meaning from the situation in which they are spoken, from their context. I would like to discuss the importance of this for our understanding of the Old Testament in this chapter. When we consider the context of a particular passage, we have to think not only of the original context but also of subsequent contexts in which the passage was read and understood. I will try to make this clear. Even though the topic may seem somewhat academic, it is, I assure you, of importance to our understanding of God’s inspired words.

Context has sometimes been defined as the “comparison-field” in which we speak. Usually there are many comparison-fields that we have to take note of. Let us take an everyday example. The simple phrase “your time has come” can mean different things to different people. From the dictionary we know what it signifies in a general sort of way, but to really understand its meaning we need to know the context. A man condemned to death will be afraid to hear those words. A woman who is going to give birth will be extremely happy. A prisoner who has completed his sentence will dance with joy when hearing it. In Ezekiel, it indicates the end of God’s patience:

“An end is coming, the end is coming upon you! See it coming! The climax has come for you who dwell in the land! The time has come, near is the day: a time of consternation, not of rejoicing” (Ez 7:6-7).

For Jesus, “the hour has come” meant suffering, glorification and return to his Father. In all these cases the phrase receives a different meaning from the comparison-fields within which it is spoken.

Or consider the following sentence from Isaiah: “You will be like a garden that has plenty of water” (Is 58:11). What does it mean to be like a garden that has plenty of water? If we lift this sentence out of its context, it could have unexpected connotations. For instance, in Holland much of the land lies low and is soggy and water-logged. A garden that has plenty of water poses a problem to the gardener: It requires extra expense to pump the water out. In that context, to be a garden with plenty of water is certainly not a compliment!

In China, on the other hand, people would smile at the expression. The phrase “plenty of water” would remind them of the burglar’s proverb: Where there is plenty of water, there must be fish. This means that in a fine large mansion there are things worth stealing. To be a garden that has plenty of water means, therefore, to be rich, loaded with expensive articles that attract robbers and thieves!

In Andhra Pradesh this sentence might have yet another meaning. People familiar with Telugu literature will remember a warning from the Sumathi Shatakam poetry:

Where property is assembed
relatives will flock in.
A pond with plenty of water
will abound with frogs, will it not?

Again, a pointer to wealth, but now with reference to its social implications.

In the context of Isaiah, however,the connotations are different. Abundance of water is an advantage in a country that is dry and warm - the geographical comparison-field. Plenty of water remains one of the covenantal blessings - the religious comparison-field. The literary theme of closeness to water implies closeness to God (Ps 1:3; Jer 17:8)-the literary comparison-field. From such a study of the context of the original passage, we can understand that to become “a garden that has plenty of water” promises blessing and spiritual communion with God.

From all this we may draw a simple but important conclusion. Individual sentences should not be interpreted on their own. They have to be read in larger units: in paragraphs and chapters. For Isaiah 58, this means reading the whole unit consisting of verses 1-12. Moreover, we have to understand them within the larger context within which they were written. When we approach the Old Testament we should always study paragraphs or sections together. Only after having observed the meaning of the larger unit, and after having reflected on the comparison-fields implied, may we focus on individual phrases or statements. I already mentioned this in passing when discussing reflective reading. Now we know the reason for that recommendation. But there is more to come!

One Context After Another

In ordinary circumstances words have a limited life. They are spoken only once. They take their meaning from a particular context and that is it. They fade and are forgotten. But other statements we make take on new functions. When Napoleon was defeated in his Russian Campaign of 1812, he retreated to Warsaw where he met the French Ambassador, the Abbe’ de Pradt. In a characteristic comment on his failure Napoleon said: “It is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.” He meant that the sublime, a triumphant conquest of Russia, had been within is grasp and that his ignominous retreat was but one step removed from it. The phrase “from the sublime to the ridiculous” survived and is now widely used without people even knowing the original context. The phrase has acquired a life of its own. Many sayings entered the language in this way: “Can a leopard change its spots?” (Jer 13:23); “That is but cold comfort” (William Bradford, 1856); “All hope abandon, who enter here” (Dante Alighieri, 1314, about hell).

Larger chunks of literature can also acquire such a longer life. Many present-day English nursery rhymes began as political jingles. Here is one of them:

Oh, the grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men.
He marched them up to the top of the hill
And marched them down again!
And when they were up, they were up.
And when they were down, they were down.
And when they were only half-way up,
They were neither up nor down.

The duke referred to in these verses was a historical person, a certain Frederick who fought in Belgium. But we don’t know the exact battle the jingle refers to. One thing is certain: His contemporaries did not look upon him as a glorious general. Later, however, the verses were memorized and used to entertain children, one generation after the other. That is how they became a nursery rhyme. In our own days, fans of a football team, let us say in Yorkshire, could adopt it as their club song. In this way the old rhyme could take on the novel function of expressing the identity of this particular group. The rhyme thus has a number of meanings because of the different contexts in which it has been employed.

I am giving this kind of example because the same thing happened in the Old Testament. Certain passages that had been written down for a particular audience and that therefore had a well-defined meaning from that context, were later given a new meaning through a process of re-interpretation in a new context. The original author had a particular meaning in mind, but what God wanted to say may have exceeded that original intention. We need not be surprised about this. After all, God made use of these time-bound authors as his instruments, but he was speaking not only to their contemporaries, but also to later generations. Since relationship to the audience is part of the context and is an important comparison-field, God’s message had, of necessity, to transcend the limitations of the situation of origin. This means that true scriptural meanings can be found in extensions of the original literal sense.

Let us look at a scriptural example:

A voice cries out,
“Prepare in the wilderness a road for the LORD!
Clear the way in the desert for our God!”
“Then the glory of the LORD will be revealed,
and all mankind will see it” (Is 40:3,5).

The text is part of the vision of the new Exodus. The prophecies of Deutero-Isaiah (Is 40-55) were intended to comfort the people in exile with the promise of a new return to the Promised Land. The promise was fulfilled, in a way, when Jewish exiles returned from the countries where they had been in captivity and were actually allowed to go back to Palestine. But reflecting on the full meaning of the promises, the Isaian School of disciples realized that in the future God would fulfill his promises in an even more magnificent way. Thus the texts acquired their wider messianic meaning. It is on account of this wider messianic meaning that the early Christians could see how the vision had been realized abundantly, had been “fulfilled,” in Jesus. In the words quoted about (Is 40:3,5) they could see it fulfilled even in such detail as the “voice in the desert,” John the Baptist. And in a manner not imagined in the old prophecy it had come about in Jesus that “all mankind will see God’s salvation” (Lk 3:6). This unexpected wider meaning of the prophecies is known as the fuller sense - fuller than understood in its earlier context, but not in contradiction to it. The fuller sense is homogeneous with, and an extension of, the literal sense.

Meanings That Go Beyond

The fuller sense is a deeper meaning intended by God even though the human authors did not clearly see it. The original seer who wrote about the “voice in the desert” could not possibly have foreseen that this would be fulfilled in John the Baptist’s announcing the coming of Jesus. What we have to remember, though, is that this original seer was not the only seer of the passage. On account of the later re-reading and  interpretation given by the disciples who followed other persons became seers in the sense that they too gave the words new meaning. The same can be said, to some extent, of the Christians who started using the text in a christological way. In fact, as the text moved along, different people (new authors) used it in a different situation (a new context) with a different meaning (fuller sense).

A true fuller sense as I have described in this example is a limited phenomenon in the Old Testament. We can only speak with absolute certainty of such a fuller sense if we find that the interpretation is made explicit in later writings, especially in the New Testament. The texts involved usually carry messianic meanings and can be easily recognized by the way they are quoted in the New Testament. But there is another way in which the original literal meaning is extended: namely, through the way in which it can have a special meaning in our lives. This meaning, too, is intended by God, even though there is a subjective element in it. For when God inspired the scriptures, he also had us in mind. He wanted to address each one of us through these sacred words, and so he wanted them to have a special meaning within the context of our lives. This meaning we might call the applied literal sense. It is this specific meaning a text has for a particular person, the message from God for him or her. Obviously, this meaning must be based on the literal sense, but it goes beyond the literal sense because the message is now addressed to this particular person.

For instance, the words of Isaiah quoted earlier could have special meaning for someone who is reflecting on his life. “A voice cries out, ‘Prepare in the wilderness a road for the Lord!’ ” Imagine that the person in question has grown careless in religion and now feels a new desire to experience God. Reading scripture he comes upon this passage. It suddenly may dawn on him that the text applies to him in a special way. The prophecy promises that God will come, but demands preparation. “Prepare a road for the Lord!” Translated to the person’s situation this indicates God’s reassurance that he will reveal himself, but also that the person may go through a desert of penance and silence. The person concerned realizes he will need to sort things out. He will have to fill the valleys and level the hills. This kind of interpretation is not fanciful speculation; it is exactly what the prophecy wants to say. But the original meaning is now actualized in the context of this person’s life. This applied literal sense is genuinely scriptural: it is God’s word speaking here and now.

Biography of a Chant

Now let us turn to a more complicated example. Psalm 45 was composed as a royal wedding song. It describes how the bride is led to the king:

The princess is in the palace - how beautiful she is!
Her gown is made of gold thread.
In her colorful gown she is led to the king
followed by her bridesmaids (Ps 45:13).

The psalm seems to point to a historical wedding. The bride is from another nation (v.10), perhaps from Tyre or Sidon (v.12). The description of the king’s palace (v.8) and the bride’s wedding gown (v.13) are too detailed to be poetic fancy. Many authors believe the occasion was the wedding between King Ahab of Israel and Jezebel, the daughter of the king of Sidon (1 Kgs 16:31). This was the original context.

The wedding was also a religious event. The song was probably composed by a Levite, a singer attached to a sanctuary. After the wedding, the song may have been preserved within a body of sacred chants. Later it was used as a religious song itself. When it began to be sung in Temple, it acquired a new religious meaning. The king whose praises are sung - “You are the most handaome of men” (v.2) - was gradually understood to be the future Messiah. “The kingdom that God has given you,” addressed to the king (v.6), was now read as “Your kingdom, O God.” The bride may have been looked upon as a personification of God’s wisdom as in Proverbs 8:1-31. The song was spiritualized in this sanctuary context.

After the coming of Christ, many Old Testament passages were seen in a new light. The early Christians knew that the Old Testament had served to prepare for Christ’s coming. In this context of Christian reinterpretation the whole psalm was applied to Christ himself. The letter to the Hebrews quotes Psalm 45:6-7 as speaking of Christ:

About the Son, however, God said:
“Your kingdom, O God, will last forever and ever!
You rule over your people with justice” (Heb 1:8).

In later centuries Christian devotion took a special fancy to the bride introduced in the second half of the psalm. The psalm was aelected for liturgies in honor of Mary, St. Agnes, St. Anne, St. Cecilia and of holy virgins in general. The words about the bride were quoted and amplified in antiphons. Again it required a new meaning, this time in a Christian liturgical context.

It is not the end of the story. The psalm can be recited with relevance by people in our own times. A sister who is taking her religious vows may well feel that God is speaking to her in words such as:

Bride of the king, listen to what I say-
Forget your people and your relatives.
Your beauty will make the king desire you;
he is your master, so you must obey him (Ps 45:10-11).

Someone else may feel inspired by the opening words of the psalm:

Beautiful words fill my mind
as I compose this song for the king (Ps 45:1).

It could be the beginning of a personal prayer of praise and thanksgiving. Such meanings are acquired by the text in our contemporary context.

To recapitulate what we have seen regarding Psalm 45, the following table may be useful:

This analysis, obviously, is rather incomplete and crude, but it serves the purpose of showing that different contexts do produce new meanings. The question is: Are all these meanings inspired?

It is clear that we have to make some distinctions here. The messianic interpretation that arose in the Israelite sanctuary and among the early Christians belongs to the fuller sense. It is truly scriptural, as is confirmed by its quotation in Hebrews 1:8-9. The association of the bride with Mary or with another saint, however, is an accommodated sense. It is not scriptural in the true sense of the word. The contemporary application to an individual’s vocation is an applied literal sense. This too is meant by God. All this seems rather complicated. In practice, however, we will not find it so difficult to distinguish these various meanings.

Among the various contexts that matter for Old Testament texts, three stand out. The original context gives rise to the literal meaning. The context of Christian interpretation frequently brings out the fuller sense. Our own contemporary context determines how the literal sense is applied to our own life. As a rule of thumb, it is often useful to examine a text from the point of view of these three contexts.

Deutero-Isaiah was aware he had received a wide commission:

Listen to me, distant nations,
you people who live far away!
Before I was born, the LORD chose me
and appointed me to be his servant.
The LORD said to me,
“ ...I will also make you a light to the nations-
so that all the world may be saved” (Is 49:1,6).

Looking at the long history of his prophecies and how they inspired people through the centuries, from post-exilic Jews to Jesus himself and countless generations of Christians, we may confirm that the author did not fully realize how far his light would shine!

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