Intertextuality has made its way into biblical studies by means of literary criticism, where it generally describes a reader-oriented approach, one in which the reader provides meaning and makes their own connections between texts. Biblical study mostly went the other way and favored an author-oriented approach, in which an author has already fixed the meaning through the use of an earlier text or a reinterpretation of it, and it followed the same methodology under other names, including inner-biblical allusion and inner-biblical exegesis.[1]
The two differ at almost every point. Reader-oriented study reads texts as they stand, side by side and without regard for when each was written, so that all texts are potentially interdependent and no meaning is ever final. Author-oriented study follows the historical development of the material instead, concentrates on a small group of texts held to be closely connected, and seeks a fixed meaning that rules other readings out as improbable. Only the second needs criteria for establishing that a connection was intended, because only the second makes a claim about intention.[2]
Put that way, the reader-oriented approach can sound like permission to find anything anywhere. That is usually how it registers for a reader who expects a passage to mean what its author meant by it. The unexpected part is how much of Jewish and Christian interpretive history follows similar practices, and how rarely their histories considered it to be a problem.
Matthew Quotes Hosea About a Different Son
In Hosea 11, God is described as having loved Israel as a child and summoned his son out of Egypt. The account is retrospective, and it runs directly into a complaint about that same son sacrificing to the Baals. Matthew narrates Joseph taking the child Jesus into Egypt to escape Herod, and presents the return after Herod died as the fulfillment of the prophetic phrase about a son called out of Egypt.
Hosea's subject is not in doubt, and neither is Matthew's. Hosea is reoriented in a way the prophet very likely would not have recognized, and this connection is a product of Matthew's interpretation. Matthew's prior conviction that Jesus is the son of God is what motivates this reading, and thus a reference to God's son in the Hebrew Bible now invites such a connection.[3]
The case attracts attention because it looks like an unusually clear example of a highly theologized reading that sets Hosea's own setting aside, and much effort has gone into defending Matthew against the charge of arbitrariness. That defense succeeds, though not in the direction a modern reader expects. Matthew works with interpretive principles that can be recovered and described, and they do not match present-day expectations about responsible exegesis.[4]
That is intentional reader-oriented intertextuality. The earlier passage has not been misunderstood, and there is little reason to think Matthew was confused about which son the prophet had in view. The connection is made independently of the intent of the author on purpose, and the meaning that emerges from this belongs to Matthew, not Hosea.
Psalm 82, the Divine Council, and an Eroded Tradition
Psalm 82 describes a scene that modern scholarship has made accessible to modern readers. God stands in a courtroom, the assembly of El, and declares judgment to the gods, the patron deities of the nations. These gods are condemned for failing to govern justly, and for this they are sentenced to die like mortals. Divine council settings of this kind are common in Mesopotamian and Ugaritic literature, where the gods gather for deliberation and judgment, and Psalm 82 was identified as a similar instance in large part through discoveries made over roughly the past century and a half.[5]
Readers of this psalm in antiquity and the following centuries almost certainly had no access to its ancient Near Eastern background. What they had was a psalm in which God addresses beings called gods, and they interpreted it within traditions where the identity of those gods was already hotly debated.[6] Jewish traditions from the Dead Sea Scrolls to rabbinic texts produced several interpretations of who those beings are, identifying them with angels, with Melchizedek, with the judges of Israel, and with Israel itself at Sinai, made immortal by receiving the Torah.[7] With the last interpretation Israel was said to have forfeited that condition when they worshipped the golden calf, losing the status of gods along with it.[8]
The interpretation that identifies them as judges became a popular point of rabbinic discussion. There the opening of the psalm functions as a warning about human courts, so that a judge who judges truthfully causes the divine presence to dwell in Israel and a judge who does not causes it to depart. The Aramaic Targum of Psalms handles the same verse conditionally, placing God among judges of truth rather than among judges generally, a further narrowing of a scene that otherwise uses divine language.[9] The connections drawn between the psalm and Israel's courts, or between the psalm and Sinai, are reader-oriented in the strict sense, produced by interpreters who presumably believed they were describing what the psalm had been about all along.Want to learn more about this? Divine Council
Death Swallowed Up, in Isaiah and in Paul
In Isaiah 25, God is described as holding a banquet on his mountain and then swallowing up death permanently. In the Ugaritic Baal Cycle, Motu, Death, is himself the one who swallows his enemies, Baal in particular, and Isaiah 25:8 reverses that motif in order to assert God's superiority over Death.[10] A reversal of that kind only works if the audience recognizes the story it inverts, which points toward an author who deliberately connects his material to traditions outside Israel's writings.
Paul quotes this verse in 1 Corinthians 15 in a form closer to Theodotion than to either the Hebrew or the Greek Septuagint. Theodotion is the name attached in antiquity to a revision of that Greek translation, ascribed to a figure of the late second century CE although the revision itself is considerably older.[11] That version gives him a death swallowed up in victory, and provides him the opportunity to argue that Christ had already defeated death and the Corinthians were victors over it.[12]
Two different kinds of reader-oriented interpretation have been identified in Paul's language. The prophetic use of the swallowing imagery is very likely intentional, aimed at a myth an ancient audience would have recognized. Paul's use of the verse is not. He was working from a Greek text in which the imagery had already been reshaped, several centuries removed from a Canaanite god of death whose story he would have had no particular occasion to know.
A Practice Older Than the Objection to It
Reading a text without regard for its contextual sense was, for centuries, the preferred method of Jewish interpretation. Creative interpretation, midrash, approaches the Bible as a fundamentally ambiguous collection of texts, a divine puzzle that has to be wrestled with intellectually and communally. The simple or contextual sense, peshat, which begins with the premise that the Bible is ordinary human language, was studied much less frequently.[13]
Christian interpretation began inside that environment rather than as a departure from it. Jewish approaches to scripture in the first century were already marked by considerable creativity, treating scripture as a source of guidance for circumstances it was not written to address. The flexible reader-oriented interpretations that this required are likewise found throughout the New Testament.[14]
Modern discomfort with this kind of interpretation comes from a standard where a text means what its author meant by it and nothing else. Author-oriented study depends on that standard entirely, since without it there is no way to establish that one writer used another, or in which direction the material traveled. Applied backward as a rule for what earlier interpreters were permitted to do, it would reject nearly all of them.
Distinguishing the two approaches is therefore a description rather than a judgment. An author-oriented study of Matthew and Hosea answers a historical question about a writer using a passage he understood perfectly well. A reader-oriented study of Psalm 82 in rabbinic literature answers a different question, about what a community did with a psalm whose cultural background was now unknown.