Paul the Rabbi
Explore how Paul's methods of reading scripture, reasoning, arguing, and telling stories anticipate the techniques later expanded and codified in rabbinic traditions.
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Introduction
These first two steps establish the historical and methodological frame. They define what proto-rabbinic actually means in a first-century setting and recover the world of the Pharisee whose traditions Paul inherited.
1
What 'Proto-Rabbinic' Means
The label “rabbi” carries a specific historical meaning that does not quite fit Paul. The Gospels do use the word for Jesus and his contemporaries, and the noun was already in circulation in the first century, but in that earlier setting it functioned as a general honorific meaning something close to “my teacher,” not yet the formal scholarly title for ordained members of a defined rabbinic class. Rabbinic Judaism as a coherent tradition, with its own institutional structures, oral Torah, and standardized methods of interpretation, took shape only after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and the consolidation of Jewish learning at Yavneh, and was codified in the Mishnah around 200 CE, well after Paul’s lifetime.[1] Calling Paul a rabbi in the technical sense is therefore an anachronism.
Paul, however, places himself more than once inside a community whose ideas, methods, and concerns flow directly into what later becomes rabbinic Judaism. He calls himself a Pharisee (Philippians 3:5), trained in the “tradition of the fathers” (Galatians 1:14), and the rabbis themselves traced their spiritual ancestry back to those same Pharisees. He remained throughout his life a Jew shaped by the scriptures, by the Pharisaic conversation about Torah, and by Jewish thought about how the God of Israel relates to the gentiles.[2] The transition from Pharisaism to rabbinism was not clean, and the rabbis of the Mishnah may have inherited Pharisaic traditions selectively rather than wholesale, but the line of continuity is real enough that the term “Pharisaic-rabbinic” Judaism has been in use for more than a century.
Rabbinic midrash, the close and often inventive engagement with the wording of scripture that runs through the Mishnah, the Talmuds, and the major midrashic collections, overlaps with Paul’s interpretive practice in ways too dense and too specific to be coincidence.[3] Paul and the later sages worked the same scriptural material with what looks like the same toolkit. They drew arguments from a lighter case to a heavier one, linked verses by shared vocabulary, parsed grammatical singulars and plurals for theological weight, and retold the same stories about Adam, Abraham, and the wilderness generation. Both took it for granted that scripture was inexhaustible, that every word was worth close attention, and that the right way to argue a difficult question was to argue it from the text. What seems to be at work is not derivation in either direction but common membership in a culture of reading whose techniques rabbinic Judaism would later expand and codify.
The label “proto-rabbinic” tries to name this overlap without overclaiming. It identifies Paul, along with the author of certain Second Temple Jewish writings and certain figures at Qumran, as standing within a stream of Jewish interpretation that runs toward the Mishnah without yet reaching it. The label is useful precisely because it resists a collapse in either direction. Paul is not retroactively a rabbi, and the rabbis are not Paul’s heirs. The two grew out of the same Pharisaic root and worked through similar problems with similar instincts.
Reading Paul as proto-rabbinic fits with a broader shift in recent scholarship that has framed him as a figure who lived and thought entirely inside first-century Judaism, a Second Temple Jew and Pharisee who joined and helped lead the early Jesus movement.[4] On this reading, his messianic conviction belongs alongside other Second Temple movements that found fresh and sometimes surprising meaning in the same shared scriptures. His letters offer a window onto how a first-century Pharisee thought when he reasoned, argued, and read scripture in the light of Jesus.
Paul, however, places himself more than once inside a community whose ideas, methods, and concerns flow directly into what later becomes rabbinic Judaism. He calls himself a Pharisee (Philippians 3:5), trained in the “tradition of the fathers” (Galatians 1:14), and the rabbis themselves traced their spiritual ancestry back to those same Pharisees. He remained throughout his life a Jew shaped by the scriptures, by the Pharisaic conversation about Torah, and by Jewish thought about how the God of Israel relates to the gentiles.[2] The transition from Pharisaism to rabbinism was not clean, and the rabbis of the Mishnah may have inherited Pharisaic traditions selectively rather than wholesale, but the line of continuity is real enough that the term “Pharisaic-rabbinic” Judaism has been in use for more than a century.
Rabbinic midrash, the close and often inventive engagement with the wording of scripture that runs through the Mishnah, the Talmuds, and the major midrashic collections, overlaps with Paul’s interpretive practice in ways too dense and too specific to be coincidence.[3] Paul and the later sages worked the same scriptural material with what looks like the same toolkit. They drew arguments from a lighter case to a heavier one, linked verses by shared vocabulary, parsed grammatical singulars and plurals for theological weight, and retold the same stories about Adam, Abraham, and the wilderness generation. Both took it for granted that scripture was inexhaustible, that every word was worth close attention, and that the right way to argue a difficult question was to argue it from the text. What seems to be at work is not derivation in either direction but common membership in a culture of reading whose techniques rabbinic Judaism would later expand and codify.
The label “proto-rabbinic” tries to name this overlap without overclaiming. It identifies Paul, along with the author of certain Second Temple Jewish writings and certain figures at Qumran, as standing within a stream of Jewish interpretation that runs toward the Mishnah without yet reaching it. The label is useful precisely because it resists a collapse in either direction. Paul is not retroactively a rabbi, and the rabbis are not Paul’s heirs. The two grew out of the same Pharisaic root and worked through similar problems with similar instincts.
Reading Paul as proto-rabbinic fits with a broader shift in recent scholarship that has framed him as a figure who lived and thought entirely inside first-century Judaism, a Second Temple Jew and Pharisee who joined and helped lead the early Jesus movement.[4] On this reading, his messianic conviction belongs alongside other Second Temple movements that found fresh and sometimes surprising meaning in the same shared scriptures. His letters offer a window onto how a first-century Pharisee thought when he reasoned, argued, and read scripture in the light of Jesus.
Citations
- [1] Boyarin, Daniel A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (pp. 10) University of California Press, 1994
- [2] Levine, Amy-Jill The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (pp. 65–69) HarperOne, 2006
- [3] Fisch, Yael Written for Us: Paul's Interpretation of Scripture and the History of Midrash (pp. 1) Brill, 2023
- [4] Boccaccini, Gabriele Paul the Jew: Rereading the Apostle as a Figure of Second Temple Judaism (pp. 18) Fortress Press, 2016
Introduction
These first two steps establish the historical and methodological frame. They define what proto-rabbinic actually means in a first-century setting and recover the world of the Pharisee whose traditions Paul inherited.
2
What It Meant to be a First Century Pharisee
Paul names his Pharisaic identity directly in Philippians, listing it alongside circumcision, tribe, and ancestry as the credentials of a faithful Israelite.
Philippians 3:4-6
4 —though mine, too, are significant. If someone thinks he has good reasons to put confidence in human credentials, I have more: 5 I was circumcised on the eighth day, from the people of Israel and the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews. I lived according to the law as a Pharisee. 6 In my zeal for God I persecuted the church. According to the righteousness stipulated in the law I was blameless.
The Pharisees were not the legalistic foils that Christian tradition has often made of them. They were a lay movement of the Second Temple period, distinct from the priests who ran the Temple and from the Sadducees who controlled it, distinguished by their commitment to the careful interpretation of Torah and to a body of inherited custom they called the “tradition of the fathers.” Five sources tell us about the Pharisees, namely the Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus, the Gospels, Paul’s letters, and rabbinic literature, and each must be read with care, since none of them is neutral.[1]
What Paul offers in Philippians 3:5-6 is one of only two firsthand witnesses we have from a self-identified Pharisee, the other being Josephus. The terms of his self-description are genealogical and credentialed rather than polemical. Being circumcised on the eighth day signals strict observance from infancy. Tribe of Benjamin signals a family memory of pre-exilic Israel that traced lineage rather than convert status. “Hebrew of Hebrews” likely signals a household in which Hebrew or Aramaic was kept alongside Greek. His Pharisaic identity placed him within the lay movement that insisted Torah obligations applied to ordinary Jews everywhere, not only to priests inside the Temple precincts.[2]
The Pharisees’ most distinctive intellectual move was their commitment to a body of inherited oral tradition that supplemented the written Torah. Josephus describes them as following a paradosis, a traditional handing-down “from a succession of fathers” not written in the Torah of Moses. Paul echoes the same vocabulary in Galatians 1:14 when he describes himself as “extremely zealous for the traditions of my ancestors,” a phrasing that locates him squarely within the Pharisaic self-presentation as keepers of an inherited and continuously transmitted body of teaching.[3] This commitment to a continuously transmitted body of teaching is what gave the Pharisees their characteristic stance toward Torah, and what later became the foundation of the rabbinic project, the conviction that the proper interpretation of Torah was itself part of Torah, received and handed on through generations of teachers.
The clearest crystallization of this self-understanding comes in the opening saying of Pirkei Avot, the small tractate of the Mishnah that gathers the maxims of the early sages.
What Paul offers in Philippians 3:5-6 is one of only two firsthand witnesses we have from a self-identified Pharisee, the other being Josephus. The terms of his self-description are genealogical and credentialed rather than polemical. Being circumcised on the eighth day signals strict observance from infancy. Tribe of Benjamin signals a family memory of pre-exilic Israel that traced lineage rather than convert status. “Hebrew of Hebrews” likely signals a household in which Hebrew or Aramaic was kept alongside Greek. His Pharisaic identity placed him within the lay movement that insisted Torah obligations applied to ordinary Jews everywhere, not only to priests inside the Temple precincts.[2]
The Pharisees’ most distinctive intellectual move was their commitment to a body of inherited oral tradition that supplemented the written Torah. Josephus describes them as following a paradosis, a traditional handing-down “from a succession of fathers” not written in the Torah of Moses. Paul echoes the same vocabulary in Galatians 1:14 when he describes himself as “extremely zealous for the traditions of my ancestors,” a phrasing that locates him squarely within the Pharisaic self-presentation as keepers of an inherited and continuously transmitted body of teaching.[3] This commitment to a continuously transmitted body of teaching is what gave the Pharisees their characteristic stance toward Torah, and what later became the foundation of the rabbinic project, the conviction that the proper interpretation of Torah was itself part of Torah, received and handed on through generations of teachers.
The clearest crystallization of this self-understanding comes in the opening saying of Pirkei Avot, the small tractate of the Mishnah that gathers the maxims of the early sages.
Pirkei Avot 1:1
1 Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly. They said three things: Be patient in [the administration of] justice, raise many disciples and make a fence round the Torah.
What Avot describes is a handing-on of Torah from teacher to disciple, not by family descent but by relationships of learning. The line skips over the priesthood and the kingship, the two great institutional forms of Israel’s earlier history, and runs instead through Moses, the elders, the prophets, and the Men of the Great Assembly into the rabbinic period. The opening of Avot in its present form is rabbinic, written in the second or third century, but what it shows is the same self-understanding that Paul claims for himself in Philippians, the conviction that one stands inside an unbroken line of teachers through whom Torah and its interpretation pass.[4]
When Paul calls himself a Pharisee in Philippians, he locates himself inside that line and inside the same intellectual culture that would produce the chain of Avot, the seven rules of Hillel, and the developed interpretive methods of midrash in the centuries to come. The substance of that culture, well before its rabbinic codification, was already in place, namely scripture as an inexhaustible body of teaching, oral tradition as its proper companion, and the careful, argumentative handing-down of Torah from teacher to student as the most important form of Jewish life. Paul writes from inside that world, and his letters offer some of the earliest evidence we have of how its members reasoned and read.
When Paul calls himself a Pharisee in Philippians, he locates himself inside that line and inside the same intellectual culture that would produce the chain of Avot, the seven rules of Hillel, and the developed interpretive methods of midrash in the centuries to come. The substance of that culture, well before its rabbinic codification, was already in place, namely scripture as an inexhaustible body of teaching, oral tradition as its proper companion, and the careful, argumentative handing-down of Torah from teacher to student as the most important form of Jewish life. Paul writes from inside that world, and his letters offer some of the earliest evidence we have of how its members reasoned and read.
Citations
- [1] Green, William Scott What Do We Really Know About the Pharisees? in In Quest of the Historical Pharisees (pp. 410–415) Baylor University Press, 2007
- [2] Levine, Amy-Jill The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (pp. 64–65) HarperOne, 2006
- [3] Sivertsev, Alexei M. Households, Sects, and the Origins of Rabbinic Judaism (pp. 173–175) Brill, 2005
- [4] Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, Daniel The More Torah, The More Life: A Christian Commentary on Mishnah Avot (pp. 31–41) Eerdmans, 2018
Reading Scripture Like a Rabbi
Eight steps trace specific interpretive and argumentative techniques in the letters of Paul, each paired with a rabbinic counterpart that codifies the same move. The pattern is not derivation but shared inheritance, a culture of reading that Paul and the later sages drew from in common.
3
Receiving and Handing Down Tradition
When Paul wants to introduce a teaching that he himself learned from another, he reaches for a pair of verbs that would have signaled, to any first-century Jew with a Pharisaic background, the careful handing-down of authoritative tradition. The Greek pair is paralambano and paradidomi, “to receive” and “to deliver” or “to pass on.” Paul uses them in two of his most important passages, the eucharistic tradition in 1 Corinthians 11 and the resurrection creed in 1 Corinthians 15.
1 Corinthians 15:3-5
3 For I passed on to you as of first importance what I also received—that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, 4 and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.
What the reader sees here is the earliest piece of Christian creedal language we have. Paul writes to the Corinthians in the early 50s of the first century, perhaps twenty years after the events it describes. He frames the formula as something he received and is now handing on as part of a continuous transmission, a chain whose first link was the Jerusalem community of Jesus-followers. The opening of the eucharistic passage in 1 Corinthians 11:23 uses the same vocabulary, “For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night in which he was betrayed...” Both passages frame the content as an inherited deposit, not as something Paul is making up on the spot.
The technical pair Paul reaches for has a Hebrew counterpart that runs through every stratum of rabbinic tradition. The Hebrew qibbel, “received,” and masar, “delivered” or “handed on,” are the verbs that the rabbis would later use whenever they wanted to identify a teaching as part of the chain that ran back to Sinai. The Greek paralambano translates qibbel, and paradidomi translates masar.[1] Paul, writing to Greek-speaking communities, uses the Greek pair, and the rabbis, working in Hebrew, used the Hebrew equivalent, with the verbal substance the same in both.[2]
The pattern shows up in countless rabbinic passages. A clean example comes from the Mishnah’s tractate Peah, which gathers halakhah on harvest gleaning and gifts to the poor.
The technical pair Paul reaches for has a Hebrew counterpart that runs through every stratum of rabbinic tradition. The Hebrew qibbel, “received,” and masar, “delivered” or “handed on,” are the verbs that the rabbis would later use whenever they wanted to identify a teaching as part of the chain that ran back to Sinai. The Greek paralambano translates qibbel, and paradidomi translates masar.[1] Paul, writing to Greek-speaking communities, uses the Greek pair, and the rabbis, working in Hebrew, used the Hebrew equivalent, with the verbal substance the same in both.[2]
The pattern shows up in countless rabbinic passages. A clean example comes from the Mishnah’s tractate Peah, which gathers halakhah on harvest gleaning and gifts to the poor.
Mishnah Peah 2:6
It happened that Rabbi Shimon of Mitzpah planted his field [with two different kinds] and came before Rabban Gamaliel. They both went up to the Chamber of Hewn Stone and asked [about the law]. Nahum the scribe said: I have a tradition from Rabbi Meyasha, who received it from Abba, who received it from the pairs [of sages], who received it from the prophets, a halakhah of Moses from Sinai, that one who plants his field with two species of wheat, if he makes up of it one threshing-floor, he gives only one peah, but if two threshing-floors, he gives two peahs.
What stands out in this Mishnah passage is that the formula is doing real work. Nahum the scribe is producing a halakhic ruling about a farmer’s obligation, and he supports it by tracing the ruling through a chain of named teachers all the way back to Moses at Sinai. The same is true in 1 Corinthians 11 and 15. The content of Paul’s teaching is anchored in the chain through which it has come to him, and the chain itself is what confers the authority of the ruling.
When Paul writes to the Corinthian community of mostly gentile Jesus-followers, he is using vocabulary that locates him squarely within his Pharisaic training, even as he applies the technique to new content, namely the Jesus tradition that he learned from the Jerusalem community after his Damascus-road experience.[3] The form of authority is Pharisaic, and what Paul transmits with it is messianic. The same intellectual habit that the rabbis would later use to anchor halakhic rulings, Paul uses to anchor the eucharistic tradition and the resurrection creed.
The receive/transmit formula was, in Paul’s day, characteristic of the Pharisaic self-presentation as keepers of an inherited tradition.[4] When Paul reaches for the same vocabulary in 1 Corinthians, he is doing what a Pharisee would naturally do, marking the source of his teaching as authoritative by virtue of where it stood in a continuous chain. The content has shifted, from Sinai to Jerusalem and from Torah to Jesus tradition, but the form of authority is exactly the form a first-century Pharisee would have known.
When Paul writes to the Corinthian community of mostly gentile Jesus-followers, he is using vocabulary that locates him squarely within his Pharisaic training, even as he applies the technique to new content, namely the Jesus tradition that he learned from the Jerusalem community after his Damascus-road experience.[3] The form of authority is Pharisaic, and what Paul transmits with it is messianic. The same intellectual habit that the rabbis would later use to anchor halakhic rulings, Paul uses to anchor the eucharistic tradition and the resurrection creed.
The receive/transmit formula was, in Paul’s day, characteristic of the Pharisaic self-presentation as keepers of an inherited tradition.[4] When Paul reaches for the same vocabulary in 1 Corinthians, he is doing what a Pharisee would naturally do, marking the source of his teaching as authoritative by virtue of where it stood in a continuous chain. The content has shifted, from Sinai to Jerusalem and from Torah to Jesus tradition, but the form of authority is exactly the form a first-century Pharisee would have known.
Citations
- [1] Davies, W. D. Paul and Rabbinic Judaism: Some Rabbinic Elements in Pauline Theology (pp. 247–250) Fortress Press, 1980
- [2] Stemberger, Günter Rabbinic Conceptions of Revelation, in Jerusalem, Alexandria, Rome: Studies in Ancient Cultural Interaction in Honour of A. Hilhorst (pp. 297–299) Brill, 2003
- [3] Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, Daniel The More Torah, The More Life: A Christian Commentary on Mishnah Avot (pp. 41–43) Eerdmans, 2018
- [4] Sivertsev, Alexei M. Households, Sects, and the Origins of Rabbinic Judaism (pp. 173–175) Brill, 2005
Reading Scripture Like a Rabbi
Eight steps trace specific interpretive and argumentative techniques in the letters of Paul, each paired with a rabbinic counterpart that codifies the same move. The pattern is not derivation but shared inheritance, a culture of reading that Paul and the later sages drew from in common.
4
Arguments from Light to Heavy
The first of Hillel’s seven middot, his seven rules of biblical interpretation, was the qal vahomer, a phrase that translates “from the light to the heavy” or, in Latin scholastic terms, a minori ad maius. The rule is straightforward. If something is true in a lesser case, it must be all the more true in a greater case. Paul reaches for this argument repeatedly across his letters, and one of the cleanest examples comes in 1 Corinthians 9, where he is defending his right to material support from the communities he serves.
1 Corinthians 9:9-11
9 For it is written in the law of Moses, “Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.” God is not concerned here about oxen, is he? 10 Or is he not surely speaking for our benefit? It was written for us, because the one plowing and threshing ought to work in hope of enjoying the harvest. 11 If we sowed spiritual blessings among you, is it too much to reap material things from you?
The argument is qal vahomer in textbook form. Torah commands that a working ox not be muzzled while it threshes grain, an instruction that protects the animal’s basic right to eat what it labors over. Paul reads the verse with the typical Pharisaic move of asking what the human application is. If God commands kindness to an ox, how much more must the principle apply to a human laborer in spiritual things.[1] The argument moves from a clear rule about a lower case to a stronger conclusion about a higher one, and the move itself is what carries the rhetorical weight.
Paul stacks the same form three times in 2 Corinthians 3:7-11, where he is comparing the ministry of Moses to his own ministry of the Spirit. The structure repeats in each verse, with a lesser thing that came with glory followed by a greater thing whose glory must be even greater. The framework of the argument, known in Latin as a minori ad maius, is the logical structure that Paul uses across his letters, including Romans 5:9-10, Romans 11:12 and 24, and 2 Corinthians 3:9 and 11.[2] Paul reaches for it constantly because it gives him a way to extract a binding conclusion about a new situation from a recognized rule about an older one.
Paul stacks the same form three times in 2 Corinthians 3:7-11, where he is comparing the ministry of Moses to his own ministry of the Spirit. The structure repeats in each verse, with a lesser thing that came with glory followed by a greater thing whose glory must be even greater. The framework of the argument, known in Latin as a minori ad maius, is the logical structure that Paul uses across his letters, including Romans 5:9-10, Romans 11:12 and 24, and 2 Corinthians 3:9 and 11.[2] Paul reaches for it constantly because it gives him a way to extract a binding conclusion about a new situation from a recognized rule about an older one.
2 Corinthians 3:7-11
7 But if the ministry that produced death—carved in letters on stone tablets—came with glory, so that the Israelites could not keep their eyes fixed on the face of Moses because of the glory of his face (a glory which was made ineffective), 8 how much more glorious will the ministry of the Spirit be? 9 For if there was glory in the ministry that produced condemnation, how much more does the ministry that produces righteousness excel in glory! 10 For indeed, what had been glorious now has no glory because of the tremendously greater glory of what replaced it. 11 For if what was made ineffective came with glory, how much more has what remains come in glory!
The same move shows up again and again in rabbinic literature. The Sifre on Deuteronomy contains a clean example in which the rabbis derive a teaching about prayer from the example of Moses and David.
Sifre Deuteronomy 26:6
Two goodly leaders rose up for Israel — Moses and David king of Israel — and they could have asked for reward on the basis of their good deeds, but they asked of the Holy One Blessed be He only that he "grace" them, (this being the thrust of "chaneini" and of "va'etchanan"). Now does this not follow a fortiori, viz.: If these, who could have asked for reward on the basis of their good deeds, asked of the Holy One Blessed be He only that He "grace" them, then we, who are not even a thousandth of the thousands and ten thousands of his disciples, how much more so should we ask of the L-rd only that He "grace" us!
The structure is identical to Paul’s in 1 Corinthians 9. If two figures who could have stood on the merit of their own works asked God for grace, how much more should the rest of us ask for grace alone.[3] The reasoning works because the lesser case, of Moses and David, presents the strong argument for asking on merit, and the greater case, of everyone else, inherits the conclusion with even greater force.
What is at work in both Paul and the Sifre is the same Pharisaic logical instinct. Both writers assume that scripture’s commands and examples are meant to be extended by inference, and both assume that the right inferences run from explicitly stated minor cases to unstated major ones. The argument is not arbitrary. It follows a logical rule that the entire Pharisaic-rabbinic tradition considered legitimate, codified later in the seven middot attributed to Hillel and the thirteen attributed to Rabbi Ishmael. Paul, reaching for the same rule, is doing what any Pharisee of his time would have done when faced with a new question that needed a binding answer.
Paul’s deployment of the technique in 2 Corinthians 3, where he applies it across an extended comparison between two ministries rather than a single point, is more ambitious than most rabbinic uses. There the qal vahomer becomes the structuring device of an entire argument about Moses and the new covenant.[4] What stays constant across his letters and across the rabbinic literature is the underlying conviction that scripture rewards careful logical attention, and that one of the most important things the careful reader can do is move from what scripture clearly says about a smaller case to what it must therefore mean for a larger one.
What is at work in both Paul and the Sifre is the same Pharisaic logical instinct. Both writers assume that scripture’s commands and examples are meant to be extended by inference, and both assume that the right inferences run from explicitly stated minor cases to unstated major ones. The argument is not arbitrary. It follows a logical rule that the entire Pharisaic-rabbinic tradition considered legitimate, codified later in the seven middot attributed to Hillel and the thirteen attributed to Rabbi Ishmael. Paul, reaching for the same rule, is doing what any Pharisee of his time would have done when faced with a new question that needed a binding answer.
Paul’s deployment of the technique in 2 Corinthians 3, where he applies it across an extended comparison between two ministries rather than a single point, is more ambitious than most rabbinic uses. There the qal vahomer becomes the structuring device of an entire argument about Moses and the new covenant.[4] What stays constant across his letters and across the rabbinic literature is the underlying conviction that scripture rewards careful logical attention, and that one of the most important things the careful reader can do is move from what scripture clearly says about a smaller case to what it must therefore mean for a larger one.
Citations
- [1] Keener, Craig S. The IVP Bible Background Commentary on the New Testament (pp. 478) InterVarsity Press, 1993
- [2] Fitzmyer, Joseph A. Romans (Anchor Yale Bible) (pp. 419) Doubleday, 1993
- [3] Sanders, E. P. Paul and Palestinian Judaism (pp. 144–146) Fortress Press, 1977
- [4] Fisch, Yael Written for Us: Paul's Interpretation of Scripture and the History of Midrash (pp. 155–159) Brill, 2023
Reading Scripture Like a Rabbi
Eight steps trace specific interpretive and argumentative techniques in the letters of Paul, each paired with a rabbinic counterpart that codifies the same move. The pattern is not derivation but shared inheritance, a culture of reading that Paul and the later sages drew from in common.
5
Linking Two Texts by a Shared Word
The second of Hillel’s seven middot, his seven rules of biblical interpretation, is gezerah shavah, “comparison with an equal” or “equal cut,” a rule that lets the reader bring two scriptural passages together by virtue of a word they have in common. Once the link is made, what is clear in one verse can be applied to the other.[1] The technique runs through every layer of the rabbinic tradition, and it also runs through Paul.
The cleanest example in Paul’s letters comes in Galatians 3, where he is arguing that the gentiles in Galatia who have heard his message are heirs of Abraham’s promise apart from circumcision. Two verses from Deuteronomy hold the argument together, both of which contain the word “cursed.”
The cleanest example in Paul’s letters comes in Galatians 3, where he is arguing that the gentiles in Galatia who have heard his message are heirs of Abraham’s promise apart from circumcision. Two verses from Deuteronomy hold the argument together, both of which contain the word “cursed.”
Galatians 3:10-13
10 For all who rely on doing the works of the law are under a curse because it is written, “Cursed is everyone who does not keep on doing everything written in the book of the law.” 11 Now it is clear no one is justified before God by the law because the righteous one will live by faith. 12 But the law is not based on faith, but the one who does the works of the law will live by them. 13 Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us (because it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree”)
One word links both verses. Deuteronomy 27:26, cited in verse 10, speaks of the curse on anyone who does not abide by everything written in Torah. Deuteronomy 21:23, cited in verse 13, speaks of the curse on anyone who hangs on a tree. In Paul’s Greek, both verses contain epikataratos, the same word for “cursed.” The Hebrew Bible uses different words in the two passages, and the LXX likewise uses different forms, but Paul’s quotations conform the wording so that the shared term stands out across both verses.[2] By that shared word, Paul links the curse on Torah failure to the curse on the crucified, and lets the second illuminate the first.
The argument moves in more than one direction across the four verses Paul cites in Galatians 3:10-13. Leviticus 18:5, “the one who does these things shall live by them,” and Habakkuk 2:4, “the righteous one will live by faith,” share the verb “will live,” and that link is what makes one verse correct the other inside Paul’s argument.[3] Across all four citations, Paul is reading the texts as a connected web in which catchwords carry the weight of the argument.
The rabbis would later codify this exact technique. The Bavli on Berakhot 21b deduces that a quorum of ten is required for any communal sanctification by reading two scriptural passages together because they share the word “among.”
The argument moves in more than one direction across the four verses Paul cites in Galatians 3:10-13. Leviticus 18:5, “the one who does these things shall live by them,” and Habakkuk 2:4, “the righteous one will live by faith,” share the verb “will live,” and that link is what makes one verse correct the other inside Paul’s argument.[3] Across all four citations, Paul is reading the texts as a connected web in which catchwords carry the weight of the argument.
The rabbis would later codify this exact technique. The Bavli on Berakhot 21b deduces that a quorum of ten is required for any communal sanctification by reading two scriptural passages together because they share the word “among.”
Berakhot 21b:5
The Gemara asks: How is this inferred from that verse? The Gemara responds: This must be understood in light of a baraita, which was taught by Rabbenai, the brother of Rabbi Ḥiyya bar Abba: It is inferred by means of a verbal analogy [gezera shava] between the words among, among. Here it is written: “And I shall be hallowed among the children of Israel,” and there, regarding Korah’s congregation, it is written “Separate yourselves from among this congregation” (Numbers 16:21). Just as there among connotes ten, so too here, among connotes ten. The connotation of ten associated with the word among written in the portion of Korah is, in turn, derived by means of another verbal analogy between the word congregation written there and the word congregation written in reference to the ten spies who slandered Eretz Yisrael: “How long shall I bear with this evil congregation?” (Numbers 14:27). Consequently, among the congregation there must be at least ten.
The structure is the same Paul uses in Galatians. The rabbis are arguing that “among” must mean “ten” in Leviticus 22:32 because it means “ten” in Numbers 16:21, with the shared word as the link that lets one verse define the other. Paul is arguing that the curse of Torah failure must be interpretable through the curse on the crucified, with the shared word “cursed” as the link that lets one passage be read by the other.
The technique is known by the same name in both literatures only because the rabbis had a name for it. What Paul is doing in Galatians 3:10-13 has no formal name in the New Testament, but the technique Paul deploys is the same one the rabbis would later name and discipline with rules. A word that appears in two passages, drawn from each, can let the reader apply the meaning of one to the other.[4]
What stands out in Galatians 3 is how much theological weight Paul lets the shared word carry. The argument that the death of Jesus by crucifixion bears the curse of Torah failure depends on the reader accepting that “cursed” in Deuteronomy 27 and “cursed” in Deuteronomy 21 are the same word doing the same work. That connection is exactly what gezerah shavah authorizes.
The technique is known by the same name in both literatures only because the rabbis had a name for it. What Paul is doing in Galatians 3:10-13 has no formal name in the New Testament, but the technique Paul deploys is the same one the rabbis would later name and discipline with rules. A word that appears in two passages, drawn from each, can let the reader apply the meaning of one to the other.[4]
What stands out in Galatians 3 is how much theological weight Paul lets the shared word carry. The argument that the death of Jesus by crucifixion bears the curse of Torah failure depends on the reader accepting that “cursed” in Deuteronomy 27 and “cursed” in Deuteronomy 21 are the same word doing the same work. That connection is exactly what gezerah shavah authorizes.
Citations
- [1] Baron, Lori and Oropeza, B. J. Midrash, in Exploring Intertextuality: Diverse Strategies for New Testament Interpretation of Texts (pp. 101–103) Cascade, 2016
- [2] Borgen, Peder Openly Portrayed as Crucified, in Christology, Controversy, and Community: New Testament Essays in Honour of David R. Catchpole (pp. 350–351) Brill, 2000
- [3] Avemarie, Friedrich Exegesis in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Pauline Epistles, in Echoes from the Caves: Qumran and the New Testament (pp. 97–106) Brill, 2009
- [4] Halivni, David Weiss Peshat and Derash: Plain and Applied Meaning in Rabbinic Exegesis (pp. 75) Oxford University Press, 1991
Reading Scripture Like a Rabbi
Eight steps trace specific interpretive and argumentative techniques in the letters of Paul, each paired with a rabbinic counterpart that codifies the same move. The pattern is not derivation but shared inheritance, a culture of reading that Paul and the later sages drew from in common.
6
And to Your Seed, Singular Not Plural
Galatians 3:16 makes its argument by attending to a single grammatical detail. Paul is establishing that the gentiles in Galatia are full heirs of Abraham’s promise, and his case hangs on the form of a single word.
Galatians 3:16
16 Now the promises were spoken to Abraham and to his descendant. Scripture does not say, “and to the descendants,” referring to many, but “and to your descendant,” referring to one, who is Christ.
Paul’s argument depends entirely on the grammatical form of one Greek word, sperma. The promise to Abraham was given “to your seed” rather than “to your seeds,” and the singular form, Paul claims, restricts the reference to a single descendant rather than a collective body of descendants, with Paul then identifying that single descendant as Jesus.[1]
The grammatical observation is technically accurate. The Greek sperma and the Hebrew zera are both grammatically singular forms, even though both function as collective nouns referring to many descendants. English “offspring” is the closest equivalent, a singular form that almost always means many. Paul knows this perfectly well. Two paragraphs later, in Galatians 3:29, he himself uses “seed” in the collective sense, writing that “if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, heirs according to the promise,” and reading the same word as plural now that it suits his argument.[2]
Paul’s move in Galatians 3:16 falls under what is sometimes called atomistic exegesis. The phrase names a way of working with scripture in which a single grammatical detail carries interpretive weight beyond what it would carry in ordinary use. In normal use, the singular form of “seed” is a collective noun referring to many descendants. Under an atomistic reading, the singular form alone is enough to carry an argument.[3]
The rabbis, working in Hebrew rather than Greek, applied the same kind of reading to scripture. The Mishnah’s treatment of Cain and Abel in Sanhedrin 4:5 turns on the difference between a singular Hebrew form and the plural form actually present in the verse.
The grammatical observation is technically accurate. The Greek sperma and the Hebrew zera are both grammatically singular forms, even though both function as collective nouns referring to many descendants. English “offspring” is the closest equivalent, a singular form that almost always means many. Paul knows this perfectly well. Two paragraphs later, in Galatians 3:29, he himself uses “seed” in the collective sense, writing that “if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, heirs according to the promise,” and reading the same word as plural now that it suits his argument.[2]
Paul’s move in Galatians 3:16 falls under what is sometimes called atomistic exegesis. The phrase names a way of working with scripture in which a single grammatical detail carries interpretive weight beyond what it would carry in ordinary use. In normal use, the singular form of “seed” is a collective noun referring to many descendants. Under an atomistic reading, the singular form alone is enough to carry an argument.[3]
The rabbis, working in Hebrew rather than Greek, applied the same kind of reading to scripture. The Mishnah’s treatment of Cain and Abel in Sanhedrin 4:5 turns on the difference between a singular Hebrew form and the plural form actually present in the verse.
Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5
… The proof for this is as we found with Cain, who killed his brother, as it is stated concerning him: “The voice of your brother’s blood [demei] cries out to Me from the ground” (Genesis 4:10). The verse does not state: Your brother’s blood [dam], in the singular, but rather: “Your brother’s blood [demei],” in the plural. This serves to teach that the loss of both his brother’s blood and the blood of his brother’s offspring are ascribed to Cain. …
The structure of the argument is the same one Paul deploys in Galatians 3:16. The difference between singular and plural in a single word becomes the basis for a conclusion with substantive consequences. Where Paul argues that the singular “seed” must refer to a single descendant, the rabbis argue that the plural “bloods” must refer to Abel and all his potential descendants.[4] Both arguments turn on the exact grammatical form of the same word, and both would collapse if the singular-versus-plural distinction were taken as a mere accident of expression.
What this kind of reading assumes is that scripture’s grammar, down to the smallest detail of singular and plural, is intentional and meaningful, and that the text itself is malleable enough to be turned and re-read in different directions. For the rabbis, a verse was not exhausted by a single reading, and what looked like an idle grammatical detail could become the basis for a new teaching whenever a fresh question called for one. Paul shares that conviction, reading the singular “seed” in Galatians 3:16 to mean a single descendant and then, a few sentences later in Galatians 3:29, treating the same word collectively to name all who belong to Jesus. The same instinct would later let Rabbi Akiva derive teachings from the smallest particles of Hebrew grammar.[5]
What this kind of reading assumes is that scripture’s grammar, down to the smallest detail of singular and plural, is intentional and meaningful, and that the text itself is malleable enough to be turned and re-read in different directions. For the rabbis, a verse was not exhausted by a single reading, and what looked like an idle grammatical detail could become the basis for a new teaching whenever a fresh question called for one. Paul shares that conviction, reading the singular “seed” in Galatians 3:16 to mean a single descendant and then, a few sentences later in Galatians 3:29, treating the same word collectively to name all who belong to Jesus. The same instinct would later let Rabbi Akiva derive teachings from the smallest particles of Hebrew grammar.[5]
Citations
- [1] Enns, Peter The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn''t Say about Human Origins (pp. 105–107) Brazos Press, 2012
- [2] Levine, Amy-Jill The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (pp. 79) HarperOne, 2006
- [3] Fisch, Yael Written for Us: Paul's Interpretation of Scripture and the History of Midrash (pp. 45–46) Brill, 2023
- [4] Sarna, Nahum M. The JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis (pp. 34) Jewish Publication Society, 1989
- [5] Boyarin, Daniel A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (pp. 24) University of California Press, 1994
Reading Scripture Like a Rabbi
Eight steps trace specific interpretive and argumentative techniques in the letters of Paul, each paired with a rabbinic counterpart that codifies the same move. The pattern is not derivation but shared inheritance, a culture of reading that Paul and the later sages drew from in common.
7
Reading Abraham by the Calendar
Paul’s argument in Romans 4 turns on a question of timing. He is asking whether the gentile believers in Rome can be regarded as righteous before God without first being circumcised, and his answer comes from the order of events in the Abraham story. Genesis 15:6 says that Abraham believed God and that this belief was credited to him as righteousness. Genesis 17 describes the institution of circumcision. Between those two chapters the text places the births of Ishmael and Isaac, leaving a substantial gap on the Genesis calendar between Abraham’s crediting of righteousness and his circumcision.[1]
Romans 4:9-12
9 Is this blessedness then for the circumcision or also for the uncircumcision? For we say, “faith was credited to Abraham as righteousness.” 10 How then was it credited to him? Was he circumcised at the time, or not? No, he was not circumcised but uncircumcised! 11 And he received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised, so that he would become the father of all those who believe but have never been circumcised, that they too could have righteousness credited to them. 12 And he is also the father of the circumcised, who are not only circumcised, but who also walk in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham possessed when he was still uncircumcised.
Paul’s reading depends on a single observation. The verse that credits Abraham with righteousness comes before the institution of circumcision, and the gap between the two events is what carries his argument. Because the credit of righteousness was applied while Abraham was still uncircumcised, that credit cannot have depended on circumcision. Whatever circumcision does, it does not produce righteousness, since it comes later in the story and serves a different function, the “seal,” as Paul puts it, of a righteousness that Abraham already had on the basis of trust in God’s promise.[2]
The argument is a straightforward piece of sequential reading, and it generalizes naturally. If Abraham was credited as righteous while uncircumcised, then he is the father not only of those who become circumcised but of every uncircumcised believer who shares his trust in God. Paul lands precisely there in verses 11 and 12, identifying Abraham as the father of every believer regardless of circumcision status. The chronological argument produces an inclusive conclusion, namely that gentiles, like the Abraham of Genesis 15, can be credited as righteous on the basis of faith alone.
None of this is Paul’s invention. The same kind of reading was familiar to him from the Pharisaic environment in which he was trained, where rabbis read the Abraham story sequentially and noticed the same kinds of chronological details. They asked which event came first, what counted, what set the precedent. In a tradition found in the Babylonian Talmud, Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi performs a closely related move on the same body of material.
The argument is a straightforward piece of sequential reading, and it generalizes naturally. If Abraham was credited as righteous while uncircumcised, then he is the father not only of those who become circumcised but of every uncircumcised believer who shares his trust in God. Paul lands precisely there in verses 11 and 12, identifying Abraham as the father of every believer regardless of circumcision status. The chronological argument produces an inclusive conclusion, namely that gentiles, like the Abraham of Genesis 15, can be credited as righteous on the basis of faith alone.
None of this is Paul’s invention. The same kind of reading was familiar to him from the Pharisaic environment in which he was trained, where rabbis read the Abraham story sequentially and noticed the same kinds of chronological details. They asked which event came first, what counted, what set the precedent. In a tradition found in the Babylonian Talmud, Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi performs a closely related move on the same body of material.
Nedarim 32a:5
It is taught in a baraita: Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi says: Great is the mitzva of circumcision, for there is no one who was engaged in mitzvot like Abraham our Patriarch, and yet he was called wholehearted only due to the mitzva of circumcision, as it is stated: “Walk before Me and you should be wholehearted” (Genesis 17:1), and it is written in the next verse: “And I will make My covenant between Me and you” (Genesis 17:2), and Abraham was then commanded with regard to circumcision. This indicates that he was not called wholehearted until he performed circumcision.
The structure of the argument is identical to Paul’s. Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi reads the Genesis narrative as a sequence and asks which event comes when. Because Abraham was not called “perfect” until after he was circumcised, circumcision is the act that completes him, the step that brings his observance into its full form. The technique is the same one Paul uses. A chronological reading of Genesis carries an argument about what circumcision does, with one verse setting up the next and the order of events serving as the precedent that defines the conclusion.[3]
Paul reads the same Genesis chapters, uses the same sequential reasoning, and reaches the opposite conclusion. For Paul, the sequence proves that righteousness does not depend on circumcision. For Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, the sequence proves that Abraham was not yet complete until he was circumcised. The disagreement is not over the technique but over what the technique proves. Both parties accept that the order of events in the Genesis narrative sets a precedent for how Abraham’s later children are to be understood, and they differ only on which event in the sequence is the precedent that matters.[4]
The relevance for Paul’s argument in Romans is that his case for gentile inclusion is framed in terms his Pharisaic audience would have recognized. The form of the reading places him squarely within first-century Jewish exegesis. The conclusion he draws places him within a particular branch of that tradition, where the precedent set by Abraham’s faith in Genesis 15 carries more interpretive weight than the precedent set by his circumcision in Genesis 17.
Paul reads the same Genesis chapters, uses the same sequential reasoning, and reaches the opposite conclusion. For Paul, the sequence proves that righteousness does not depend on circumcision. For Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, the sequence proves that Abraham was not yet complete until he was circumcised. The disagreement is not over the technique but over what the technique proves. Both parties accept that the order of events in the Genesis narrative sets a precedent for how Abraham’s later children are to be understood, and they differ only on which event in the sequence is the precedent that matters.[4]
The relevance for Paul’s argument in Romans is that his case for gentile inclusion is framed in terms his Pharisaic audience would have recognized. The form of the reading places him squarely within first-century Jewish exegesis. The conclusion he draws places him within a particular branch of that tradition, where the precedent set by Abraham’s faith in Genesis 15 carries more interpretive weight than the precedent set by his circumcision in Genesis 17.
Citations
- [1] Fitzmyer, Joseph A. Romans (pp. 416) Doubleday, 1993
- [2] Eisenbaum, Pamela Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle (pp. 233) HarperOne, 2009
- [3] Strack, Hermann L. and Paul Billerbeck Commentary on the New Testament from the Talmud and Midrash, Vol. 1 (pp. 730) Hendrickson, 2022
- [4] Visotzky, Burton L. Reading the Book: Making the Bible a Timeless Text (pp. 104) Schocken, 1991
Reading Scripture Like a Rabbi
Eight steps trace specific interpretive and argumentative techniques in the letters of Paul, each paired with a rabbinic counterpart that codifies the same move. The pattern is not derivation but shared inheritance, a culture of reading that Paul and the later sages drew from in common.
8
The Two Mothers as Two Covenants
In Galatians 4 Paul shifts gears. The arguments in chapter 3 and the early part of chapter 4 have been the kind of sequential, grammatical, comparative readings that any first-century Pharisee would have recognized. At verse 21 he switches to a different mode. He names the move allegory, using the participle allegoroumena, and then builds a layered identification of biblical women with covenants, mountains, and cities.[1]
Galatians 4:22-26
22 For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and the other by the free woman. 23 But one, the son by the slave woman, was born by natural descent, while the other, the son by the free woman, was born through the promise. 24 These things may be treated as an allegory, for these women represent two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai bearing children for slavery; this is Hagar. 25 Now Hagar represents Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. 26 But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother.
The mechanism of the reading is a multi-step mapping. Hagar, the slave woman in Genesis, is identified with the covenant from Sinai, with the present city of Jerusalem, and with a population enslaved with their children. Sarah, the free woman, is identified with the Jerusalem above and with the community Paul considers free. The allegory does not derive its conclusions from the literal Genesis narrative. It derives them by treating the matriarchs as figures who stand for covenants, mountains, and cities, and then drawing conclusions from those identifications.[2]
The boldness of the move should not be downplayed. Reading Genesis at face value, Sarah’s line is the line of biblical Israel, including the people who received the Sinai covenant, but Paul reverses that reading and reassigns Sarah’s line, in the allegory, away from ethnic Israel and onto a community of faith that includes gentiles, while Hagar’s line gets reassigned to those who require Torah observance for inclusion in the family of Abraham. The conclusion is not waiting in the surface of the text. It is something Paul produces by a deliberate reassignment of the figures.[3]
The technique has clear precedent in Jewish reading. Rabbinic midrash regularly takes biblical figures and adds layers of identity to them, layers that the Genesis text alone does not require or produce. The midrash takes a name, a phrase, an apparent inconsistency, and uses it as the starting point for a reading that reorients the character. In a tradition found in Genesis Rabbah, Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai performs this kind of move on Hagar herself.
The boldness of the move should not be downplayed. Reading Genesis at face value, Sarah’s line is the line of biblical Israel, including the people who received the Sinai covenant, but Paul reverses that reading and reassigns Sarah’s line, in the allegory, away from ethnic Israel and onto a community of faith that includes gentiles, while Hagar’s line gets reassigned to those who require Torah observance for inclusion in the family of Abraham. The conclusion is not waiting in the surface of the text. It is something Paul produces by a deliberate reassignment of the figures.[3]
The technique has clear precedent in Jewish reading. Rabbinic midrash regularly takes biblical figures and adds layers of identity to them, layers that the Genesis text alone does not require or produce. The midrash takes a name, a phrase, an apparent inconsistency, and uses it as the starting point for a reading that reorients the character. In a tradition found in Genesis Rabbah, Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai performs this kind of move on Hagar herself.
Genesis Rabbah 45:1
...Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai said Hagar was Pharaoh’s daughter. When he saw the deeds on behalf of Sarah in his house, he took his daughter and gave her to him, saying, ‘Better that my daughter be a maidservant in this house than a mistress in another house.’ This is what is written: “She had an Egyptian handmaid whose name was Hagar.” [In other words:] ha agrikh: ‘This is your reward.’
The midrash takes the same character Paul takes and adds an entirely new layer to her identity. Hagar in Genesis 16 is a foreign maidservant. In Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai’s reading, she is a princess, the daughter of Pharaoh, who chose servitude in Abraham’s household over rule in another. The reading turns on a Hebrew wordplay on her name, with ha agrikh (“this is your reward”) supplying the new identity. As in Paul, the midrash reaches its conclusion by letting the figure of Hagar carry meaning beyond what Genesis says about her. Unlike Paul, the conclusion is one of nobility rather than slavery.[4]
What the comparison shows is that Paul’s allegory in Galatians 4 has a counterpart in rabbinic midrash. The technique of taking a biblical character and giving them meanings the text does not directly assert is shared with rabbinic midrash, even where the conclusions move in opposite directions. Paul makes Hagar carry the present Jerusalem and its enslavement, while the rabbinic reading lifts her into Egyptian royalty. Both treat the literal Genesis text as the starting point of a reading rather than its end.
Even the mode of reading in which Paul looks most distinctive, his explicit allegory, has parallels in the tradition he was trained in. The shape of the move, making a biblical figure stand for something more than what the surface of the text says, is one that the rabbis perform as well, on the same characters, in different directions, but with the same interpretive instinct.
What the comparison shows is that Paul’s allegory in Galatians 4 has a counterpart in rabbinic midrash. The technique of taking a biblical character and giving them meanings the text does not directly assert is shared with rabbinic midrash, even where the conclusions move in opposite directions. Paul makes Hagar carry the present Jerusalem and its enslavement, while the rabbinic reading lifts her into Egyptian royalty. Both treat the literal Genesis text as the starting point of a reading rather than its end.
Even the mode of reading in which Paul looks most distinctive, his explicit allegory, has parallels in the tradition he was trained in. The shape of the move, making a biblical figure stand for something more than what the surface of the text says, is one that the rabbis perform as well, on the same characters, in different directions, but with the same interpretive instinct.
Citations
- [1] Eastman, Susan Recovering Paul’s Mother Tongue: Language and Theology in Galatians (pp. 178) Eerdmans, 2007
- [2] Martyn, J. Louis The Covenants of Hagar and Sarah (pp. 160–192) Scholars Press, 1990
- [3] Callaway, Mary C. The Mistress and the Maid: Midrashic Traditions Behind Galatians 4.21-31 (pp. 94–101) Radical Religion 2.2-3, 1975
- [4] Strack, Hermann L. and Paul Billerbeck Commentary on the New Testament from the Talmud and Midrash, Vol. 3 (pp. 1147) Hendrickson, 2022
Reading Scripture Like a Rabbi
Eight steps trace specific interpretive and argumentative techniques in the letters of Paul, each paired with a rabbinic counterpart that codifies the same move. The pattern is not derivation but shared inheritance, a culture of reading that Paul and the later sages drew from in common.
9
The Word in Your Mouth and in Your Heart
In Romans 10 Paul performs one of his most distinctive readings of scripture. He takes a passage from Deuteronomy 30 about the nearness of the Torah and uses it to argue for the nearness of his own message about Jesus. The passage in Deuteronomy says that the commandment is not in heaven, that one need not ask “who will ascend into heaven for us and bring it down,” and that the word is near, “in your mouth and in your heart.” Paul takes that passage line by line and inserts a parenthetical identification after each phrase.
Romans 10:6-8
6 But the righteousness that is by faith says: “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’” (that is, to bring Christ down) 7 or “Who will descend into the abyss?” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). 8 But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith that we preach),
The mechanism is unmistakable. Each phrase of Deuteronomy 30 is given an immediate equivalent. “Who will ascend into heaven?” becomes a question about bringing Jesus down. “Who will descend into the abyss?” becomes a question about bringing Jesus up from the dead. “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” becomes a description of the message Paul preaches. The biblical lemma keeps its surface form, while a contemporary reference is paired with each phrase as its real meaning.[1]
The pattern has clear precedent. The same formal procedure is found in the pesher commentaries from Qumran, where a verse from a prophetic book is quoted and an “Interpreted, this concerns…” formula follows. The biblical line and its interpretation are placed side by side, with the interpretation always pointing to the situation of the Qumran community. The most extensive surviving example, the Habakkuk Pesher, applies this method to Habakkuk chapters 1 and 2 line by line. When the commentary reaches Habakkuk 2:4, “But the righteous shall live by his faith,” the interpretation that follows maps the prophet’s line directly onto the Qumran community’s faith in their Teacher.[2]
The pattern has clear precedent. The same formal procedure is found in the pesher commentaries from Qumran, where a verse from a prophetic book is quoted and an “Interpreted, this concerns…” formula follows. The biblical line and its interpretation are placed side by side, with the interpretation always pointing to the situation of the Qumran community. The most extensive surviving example, the Habakkuk Pesher, applies this method to Habakkuk chapters 1 and 2 line by line. When the commentary reaches Habakkuk 2:4, “But the righteous shall live by his faith,” the interpretation that follows maps the prophet’s line directly onto the Qumran community’s faith in their Teacher.[2]
1QpHab 1:8
… Interpreted, this concerns all those who observe the Law in the House of Judah, whom God will deliver from the House of Judgement because of their suffering and because of their faith in the Teacher of Righteousness. …
The technique is the same as Paul’s. A biblical line that, on its own terms, is about the righteous in general is given an immediate contemporary referent. The Qumran community’s faith in their Teacher is read into the prophet’s words. As in Paul, the surface text and the interpretation are paired without comment on the gap between them. The biblical word and its allegedly intended meaning are simply placed alongside one another.[3]
What both Paul and the Qumran scribe assume is that scripture’s primary meaning lies beyond its literal sense. The text is taken to be speaking, in its surface words, about something else, and the interpreter’s job is to specify what that something else is. The “this is” formula introduces the new referent. Where Paul says “that is,” the pesher commentary says “interpreted, this concerns.” Both phrases authorize the move from one referent to another, and both treat the resulting application as the meaning the text actually intends.[4]
The same pesher / zeh hu pattern carries forward into rabbinic literature. The Sifre on Deuteronomy is a third-century rabbinic commentary that works through the book verse by verse, attaching to each phrase the practice or teaching the rabbis took it to refer to. When the Sifre reaches Deuteronomy 11:18, a verse from one of the passages that, like Deuteronomy 30, instructs Israel to keep the words of God on the heart, the rabbinic move is the one Paul also makes.
What both Paul and the Qumran scribe assume is that scripture’s primary meaning lies beyond its literal sense. The text is taken to be speaking, in its surface words, about something else, and the interpreter’s job is to specify what that something else is. The “this is” formula introduces the new referent. Where Paul says “that is,” the pesher commentary says “interpreted, this concerns.” Both phrases authorize the move from one referent to another, and both treat the resulting application as the meaning the text actually intends.[4]
The same pesher / zeh hu pattern carries forward into rabbinic literature. The Sifre on Deuteronomy is a third-century rabbinic commentary that works through the book verse by verse, attaching to each phrase the practice or teaching the rabbis took it to refer to. When the Sifre reaches Deuteronomy 11:18, a verse from one of the passages that, like Deuteronomy 30, instructs Israel to keep the words of God on the heart, the rabbinic move is the one Paul also makes.
Sifre Deuteronomy 44:1
… (Devarim 11:18) "And you shall place these words upon your hearts and upon your souls": This refers to Torah. "and you shall bind them as a sign upon your hands": This refers to tefillin. This tells me only of tefillin and Torah study. Whence do I derive (the same for) other mitzvoth? …
The structure is the same as Paul’s. A biblical phrase is quoted; the formula “this refers to” names what it identifies. “These words upon your hearts” becomes the study of Torah. “A sign upon your hands” becomes the practice of tefillin, the small leather boxes containing scriptural passages worn on the arm and forehead during morning prayer. The Sifre interpreter does for Deuteronomy 11 what Paul does for Deuteronomy 30, mapping each phrase onto something concrete in the present life of the community.[5]
The technique Paul uses in Romans 10 sits in a continuous Jewish reading practice that runs from the Qumran scribes through the Tannaitic compilers, with Paul’s example in the middle of that history rather than off to its side.
The technique Paul uses in Romans 10 sits in a continuous Jewish reading practice that runs from the Qumran scribes through the Tannaitic compilers, with Paul’s example in the middle of that history rather than off to its side.
Citations
- [1] Hays, Richard B. Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (pp. 81) Yale University Press, 1989
- [2] Horgan, Maurya P. Pesharim: Qumran Interpretations of Biblical Books (pp. 172–173) Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1979
- [3] Bekken, Per Jarle The Word Is Near You: A Study of Deuteronomy 30:12-14 in Paul’s Letter to the Romans in a Jewish Context (pp. 21) de Gruyter, 2007
- [4] Fisch, Yael Written for Us: Paul’s Interpretation of Scripture and the History of Midrash (pp. 44–67) Brill, 2023
- [5] Strack, Hermann L. and Günter Stemberger Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash (pp. 270–273) Fortress Press, 1996
Reading Scripture Like a Rabbi
Eight steps trace specific interpretive and argumentative techniques in the letters of Paul, each paired with a rabbinic counterpart that codifies the same move. The pattern is not derivation but shared inheritance, a culture of reading that Paul and the later sages drew from in common.
10
‘I, Not the Lord,’ A Ruling for the Community
The Pauline letter to the Corinthians shows Paul operating as a halakhist, someone whose job is to apply received tradition to the live questions of a community. In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul faces a question the Jesus-tradition does not directly address. What should happen when one spouse becomes a follower of Jesus and the other remains an unbeliever? Paul’s answer is structured around an explicit two-tier distinction. He cites a teaching he attributes to Jesus, and then issues his own ruling for the cases Jesus did not cover.
1 Corinthians 7:10-12
10 To the married I give this command—not I, but the Lord—a wife should not divorce a husband 11 (but if she does, let her remain unmarried, or be reconciled to her husband), and a husband should not divorce his wife. 12 To the rest I say—I, not the Lord—if a brother has a wife who is not a believer and she is happy to live with him, he should not divorce her.
The structure is the move of a working legal authority. The teaching attributed to Jesus, that a wife should not divorce her husband and a husband should not divorce his wife, comes in verses 10 and 11 with the phrase “not I, but the Lord” identifying its source as received authoritative tradition. The ruling on mixed marriages with non-believers comes in verse 12 with the phrase “I, not the Lord” identifying it as Paul’s own pesak, his own halakhic ruling for a case the source did not cover.[1]
In the rabbinic legal world, this kind of two-tier distinction is fundamental. Tannaitic literature regularly distinguishes between rulings that stem directly from the Torah and rulings introduced later by rabbinic authority. The first category is treated as binding because it comes from Sinai; the second is treated as binding because the rabbis ruled it. The literature is transparent about which category applies to which ruling, and the rabbis themselves often draw the line in their own voice, citing the tradition they received and then issuing their own legal extension.[2]
The most famous example of a sage doing exactly what Paul does is Hillel, in a story from the Babylonian Talmud. The leaders of the day had forgotten whether the paschal lamb may be slaughtered when the eve of Passover falls on a Sabbath. They sought out Hillel, who had received the tradition from his teachers Shemaya and Avtalyon. Hillel handed down the answer, and was appointed nasi, head of the community, for his answer. The story continues with a follow-up question, this time about whether one may carry a knife on Shabbat to slaughter the lamb if one forgot to bring it the day before. Hillel’s response is the move.
In the rabbinic legal world, this kind of two-tier distinction is fundamental. Tannaitic literature regularly distinguishes between rulings that stem directly from the Torah and rulings introduced later by rabbinic authority. The first category is treated as binding because it comes from Sinai; the second is treated as binding because the rabbis ruled it. The literature is transparent about which category applies to which ruling, and the rabbis themselves often draw the line in their own voice, citing the tradition they received and then issuing their own legal extension.[2]
The most famous example of a sage doing exactly what Paul does is Hillel, in a story from the Babylonian Talmud. The leaders of the day had forgotten whether the paschal lamb may be slaughtered when the eve of Passover falls on a Sabbath. They sought out Hillel, who had received the tradition from his teachers Shemaya and Avtalyon. Hillel handed down the answer, and was appointed nasi, head of the community, for his answer. The story continues with a follow-up question, this time about whether one may carry a knife on Shabbat to slaughter the lamb if one forgot to bring it the day before. Hillel’s response is the move.
Pesachim 66a:7
… He said to them: I once heard this halakha from my teachers but I have forgotten it. But leave it to the Jewish people; if they are not prophets to whom God has revealed His secrets, they are the sons of prophets, and will certainly do the right thing on their own. …
Hillel acknowledges the limit of his received tradition with explicit transparency. He has heard a halakha from his teachers, but the present case does not match what he recalls, and he says so plainly. Then he extends the principle differently than Paul does, deferring to the community on the assumption that they will arrive at the right practice on their own. Both moves operate within the same legal framework. Tradition is one source of authority, and the ruling that comes from a recognized sage when the tradition runs out is another. The transparency about which is which is part of what makes the move intelligible as a halakhic act.[3]
Paul’s phrase in verse 12, “I, not the Lord,” performs the same kind of self-aware identification. He could have presented his ruling as if it were Jesus’s teaching, and there is no internal mechanism in the early Jesus-movement that would have stopped him. He chooses not to. He uses the formula his Pharisaic training had given him for separating received tradition from one’s own ruling, with the implicit acknowledgment that both are necessary in the daily work of guiding a community. The cases the original tradition addresses are handled with that tradition. The cases it does not address require a ruling from someone who knows the tradition well enough to extend it sensibly.[4]
The structure of Paul’s response, the explicit attribution of authority, and the willingness to issue his own ruling alongside an acknowledged tradition all place him within the legal culture of first-century Pharisaic Judaism. The same Paul who later said of himself “I am a Pharisee, the son of Pharisees” is in this passage doing what Pharisees did when their communities faced new cases.
Paul’s phrase in verse 12, “I, not the Lord,” performs the same kind of self-aware identification. He could have presented his ruling as if it were Jesus’s teaching, and there is no internal mechanism in the early Jesus-movement that would have stopped him. He chooses not to. He uses the formula his Pharisaic training had given him for separating received tradition from one’s own ruling, with the implicit acknowledgment that both are necessary in the daily work of guiding a community. The cases the original tradition addresses are handled with that tradition. The cases it does not address require a ruling from someone who knows the tradition well enough to extend it sensibly.[4]
The structure of Paul’s response, the explicit attribution of authority, and the willingness to issue his own ruling alongside an acknowledged tradition all place him within the legal culture of first-century Pharisaic Judaism. The same Paul who later said of himself “I am a Pharisee, the son of Pharisees” is in this passage doing what Pharisees did when their communities faced new cases.
Citations
- [1] Tomson, Peter J. Paul and the Jewish Law: Halakha in the Letters of the Apostle to the Gentiles (pp. 124) Van Gorcum, 1990
- [2] Hayes, Christine What’s Divine about Divine Law? Early Perspectives (pp. 307) Princeton University Press, 2015
- [3] Flesher, Paul V. M. and Bruce Chilton The Targums and Rabbinic Literature: An Introduction to Jewish Interpretations of Scripture (pp. 317) Cambridge University Press, 2011
- [4] Instone-Brewer, David 1 Corinthians 7 in the Light of the Jewish Greek and Aramaic Marriage and Divorce Papyri (pp. 225–243) Tyndale Bulletin 52.2, 2001
Sharing the Stories of the Sages
Paul does more than argue like a sage. He retells stories that show up again, sometimes centuries later, in midrash and Talmud. These four steps follow shared narrative traditions, from the Shema reread around Jesus to a vision of the heavens that the Mishnah would later guard with strict rules of access.
11
The Shema Reread
The argument in 1 Corinthians 8 is about meat sacrificed to idols, but Paul makes the case by invoking the Shema, the central confession of Israel’s daily prayer. He cites the line that “there is no God but one” in verse 4, and then in verse 6 restates it in a reformulated version that has two distinct subjects rather than one.
1 Corinthians 8:4-6
4 With regard then to eating food sacrificed to idols, we know that “an idol in this world is nothing,” and that “there is no God but one.” 5 If after all there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as there are many gods and many lords), 6 yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we live, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we live.
The structure of the verse is the Shema split in two. The Hebrew Shema names God twice in its central line, “the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.” In Paul’s restatement, the first naming becomes “one God, the Father” and the second naming becomes “one Lord, Jesus Christ.” Each clause now picks out a different figure, with Father and Jesus distributed across the two halves of the Shema’s parallelism. The Greek behind Paul’s words borrows directly from the Septuagint version of Deuteronomy 6:4, with theos and kyrios as the two key terms.[1]
The boldness of the reformulation is not at issue. Paul restructures the central liturgical statement of the Jewish tradition in which he was raised, distributing the divine identification across two figures. The authors of Deuteronomy knew nothing of this kind of move, and neither did the daily prayer life of Paul’s audience until he wrote it. What is interesting is that the technique of splitting the Shema’s two clauses into two distinct affirmations is one the rabbis themselves used, on a different axis but with the same underlying move.[2]
In a passage from the Sifre on Deuteronomy, the rabbis read the same two clauses of the Shema as making two distinct affirmations rather than one. The split is temporal rather than figural, but the structural move is identical to Paul’s. One clause is identified with the present age and the other with the world to come.
The boldness of the reformulation is not at issue. Paul restructures the central liturgical statement of the Jewish tradition in which he was raised, distributing the divine identification across two figures. The authors of Deuteronomy knew nothing of this kind of move, and neither did the daily prayer life of Paul’s audience until he wrote it. What is interesting is that the technique of splitting the Shema’s two clauses into two distinct affirmations is one the rabbis themselves used, on a different axis but with the same underlying move.[2]
In a passage from the Sifre on Deuteronomy, the rabbis read the same two clauses of the Shema as making two distinct affirmations rather than one. The split is temporal rather than figural, but the structural move is identical to Paul’s. One clause is identified with the present age and the other with the world to come.
Sifre Deuteronomy 31:10
Variantly (Devarim 6:4) "the L-rd is our G-d": in this world; "the L-rd is One": in the world to come. And thus is it written (Zechariah 14:9) "And the L-rd will be the King over all the land. On that day the L-rd will be One and His name will be One."
The two halves of the Shema are split apart in the rabbinic reading and given two different referents. “The Lord is our God” is read as a statement about the relation that obtains right now, between God and the people of Israel. “The Lord is one” is read as a statement about the future, when, on the prophet Zechariah’s vision, God’s name and unity will be confessed by all people on the earth. The same structural move Paul performs, reading the Shema’s two clauses as two distinct theological propositions, appears in classical rabbinic literature, with content that differs from Paul’s but technique that does not.[3]
Paul’s reformulation of the Shema, however bold its content, sits within a Jewish reading practice in which the Shema’s two clauses can be assigned distinct identifications. The claim Paul makes about Jesus is novel; the technique of splitting the Shema is not. Most Christian theological treatments of the verse have focused on the novelty of Paul’s content. The rabbinic side of the comparison shows that the move itself, as a piece of Jewish exegetical practice, has parallels.[4]
Paul’s audience in Corinth would have recognized the form. The two-clause confession in verse 6 reads as a parallel to the Shema both in word and in structure. What changes is the identity of who is named in each half. Where the rabbinic reading distributes the two clauses across time, Paul distributes them across persons. The shape of the move is the same; the content is what makes the verse explosive.
Paul’s reformulation of the Shema, however bold its content, sits within a Jewish reading practice in which the Shema’s two clauses can be assigned distinct identifications. The claim Paul makes about Jesus is novel; the technique of splitting the Shema is not. Most Christian theological treatments of the verse have focused on the novelty of Paul’s content. The rabbinic side of the comparison shows that the move itself, as a piece of Jewish exegetical practice, has parallels.[4]
Paul’s audience in Corinth would have recognized the form. The two-clause confession in verse 6 reads as a parallel to the Shema both in word and in structure. What changes is the identity of who is named in each half. Where the rabbinic reading distributes the two clauses across time, Paul distributes them across persons. The shape of the move is the same; the content is what makes the verse explosive.
Citations
- [1] Fletcher-Louis, Crispin Jesus Monotheism, Volume 1: Christological Origins (pp. 58) Cascade Books, 2015
- [2] MacDonald, Nathan Deuteronomy and the Meaning of ‘Monotheism’ (pp. 110) Mohr Siebeck, 2003
- [3] Baron, Lori A. The Shema in John’s Gospel Against its Backgrounds in Second Temple Judaism (pp. 401) Duke University, 2015
- [4] Bird, Michael F. How God Became Jesus (pp. 94) Zondervan, 2014
Sharing the Stories of the Sages
Paul does more than argue like a sage. He retells stories that show up again, sometimes centuries later, in midrash and Talmud. These four steps follow shared narrative traditions, from the Shema reread around Jesus to a vision of the heavens that the Mishnah would later guard with strict rules of access.
12
The Rock That Followed in the Wilderness
In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul opens an extended argument with a detail that is not in the book of Exodus. He tells the Corinthians that during the wilderness wandering, the Israelites drank from a rock, and that the rock followed them through the desert.
1 Corinthians 10:1-4
1 For I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea, 2 and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, 3 and all ate the same spiritual food, 4 and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they were all drinking from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.
The rock that followed is not a feature of the biblical narrative. Exodus 17 and Numbers 20 each describe a single moment when water comes from a rock at a particular location. Neither passage says the rock travels. Paul drops the “followed them” detail in passing, as though his audience already knows what he is talking about, and then identifies the following rock with Jesus. The off-handedness of the reference is itself evidence that the underlying tradition was already circulating widely in Jewish settings by the middle of the first century.[1]
The earliest witness for the tradition is Pseudo-Philo’s Biblical Antiquities, a Jewish retelling of the Hebrew Bible composed in the first century. In that work, the well of water that miraculously feeds Israel in the wilderness “followed them in the desert forty years and went up to the mountains with them and went down into the plains.” The well does not stay put. It travels with the camp.[2]
The fullest form of the tradition is found in rabbinic literature, where it gets the name it is best known by, the well of Miriam. The Tosefta on Sukkah collects the developed version of the story. The well is not just water. It is a rock the size of a sieve, gushing upward like a flask, traveling with Israel across the terrain of the wilderness.
The earliest witness for the tradition is Pseudo-Philo’s Biblical Antiquities, a Jewish retelling of the Hebrew Bible composed in the first century. In that work, the well of water that miraculously feeds Israel in the wilderness “followed them in the desert forty years and went up to the mountains with them and went down into the plains.” The well does not stay put. It travels with the camp.[2]
The fullest form of the tradition is found in rabbinic literature, where it gets the name it is best known by, the well of Miriam. The Tosefta on Sukkah collects the developed version of the story. The well is not just water. It is a rock the size of a sieve, gushing upward like a flask, traveling with Israel across the terrain of the wilderness.
Tosefta Sukkah 3:4
… So the well, which was with Israel in the wilderness, was like a rock of the size of a k'bara, and was oozing out and rising as from the mouth of this flask, travelling with them up the mountains and going down with them to the valleys. Wherever Israel encamped it encamped opposite them before the door of the Tabernacle. …
The match between this text and Paul’s is not coincidental. The image of a rock that travels with the camp, gives water, and serves as the abiding source of Israel’s refreshment in the wilderness is the same image in both. The rabbis identify the rock with the well that came to Israel through the merit of Miriam. Paul identifies it with Jesus. The shared content is the rock itself and its movement. The disagreement is over who or what it stands for.[3]
Behind the rabbinic identification of the well with Miriam is a midrashic move on Numbers 20. The death of Miriam in Numbers 20:1 is followed almost immediately by Israel running out of water in 20:2. The juxtaposition is taken to mean that the water had been arriving all along through Miriam’s merit, and the well disappears when she dies. The rabbinic reading uses the sequence of the verses to attach the wandering well to a specific matriarch.[4]
What 1 Corinthians 10:4 shows is Paul reaching for a story his contemporaries already knew. The rock that travels with Israel is not Paul’s invention any more than it is the Tosefta’s. The two texts are independent recipients of the same underlying tradition, and they put it to opposite uses. The rabbinic tradition uses the rock to honor Miriam and to read the silences of Numbers as evidence of her standing. Paul uses the same rock to identify Jesus with the divine source that fed Israel during the wilderness years. Both moves treat the wandering rock as a piece of inherited Jewish narrative; the question is what to do with it.
Behind the rabbinic identification of the well with Miriam is a midrashic move on Numbers 20. The death of Miriam in Numbers 20:1 is followed almost immediately by Israel running out of water in 20:2. The juxtaposition is taken to mean that the water had been arriving all along through Miriam’s merit, and the well disappears when she dies. The rabbinic reading uses the sequence of the verses to attach the wandering well to a specific matriarch.[4]
What 1 Corinthians 10:4 shows is Paul reaching for a story his contemporaries already knew. The rock that travels with Israel is not Paul’s invention any more than it is the Tosefta’s. The two texts are independent recipients of the same underlying tradition, and they put it to opposite uses. The rabbinic tradition uses the rock to honor Miriam and to read the silences of Numbers as evidence of her standing. Paul uses the same rock to identify Jesus with the divine source that fed Israel during the wilderness years. Both moves treat the wandering rock as a piece of inherited Jewish narrative; the question is what to do with it.
Citations
- [1] Hays, Richard B. Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (pp. 94) Yale University Press, 1989
- [2] Kugel, James L. The Bible as it Was (pp. 387) Harvard University Press, 1997
- [3] Strack, Hermann L. and Paul Billerbeck Commentary on the New Testament from the Talmud and Midrash, Vol. 3 (pp. 829) Hendrickson, 2022
- [4] Pardes, Ilana The Biography of Ancient Israel: National Narratives in the Bible (pp. 75) University of California Press, 2000
Sharing the Stories of the Sages
Paul does more than argue like a sage. He retells stories that show up again, sometimes centuries later, in midrash and Talmud. These four steps follow shared narrative traditions, from the Shema reread around Jesus to a vision of the heavens that the Mishnah would later guard with strict rules of access.
13
Adam, Death, and the Evil Inclination
Romans 7 contains one of Paul’s most personal-sounding passages, a description of an inner conflict between what the speaker wants to do and what he actually does. Paul writes in the first person as someone divided against himself, knowing the Torah is good and yet unable to follow it consistently.
Romans 7:14-20
14 For we know that the law is spiritual—but I am unspiritual, sold into slavery to sin. 15 For I don’t understand what I am doing. For I do not do what I want—instead, I do what I hate. 16 But if I do what I don’t want, I agree that the law is good. 17 But now it is no longer me doing it, but sin that lives in me. 18 For I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my flesh. For I want to do the good, but I cannot do it. 19 For I do not do the good I want, but I do the very evil I do not want! 20 Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer me doing it but sin that lives in me.
The form of the description is intelligible to anyone, but the framework Paul is working within is specifically Jewish. The split between an inner self that approves of the Torah and an outer pull toward sin is a way of talking about human moral psychology that develops in Second Temple Judaism and reaches its mature shape in rabbinic literature, where it becomes the doctrine of the two inclinations.[1]
In rabbinic anthropology, every human being is endowed with two impulses given by God at creation. The good impulse, the yetzer ha-tov, draws a person toward Torah and toward acts of faithfulness. The evil impulse, the yetzer ha-ra, draws a person toward transgression. The evil impulse is not a foreign intruder. It is part of how each person is made, traced by the rabbis to Genesis 6:5, where “the inclination of the heart” (yetzer lev) of humanity is described as evil. Paul’s description of an internal conflict between a self that wants the good and a sin that lives within him sits comfortably inside this framework.[2][3]
The most concise rabbinic formulation of the doctrine appears in a baraita found in the Babylonian Talmud, where Rabbi Yose the Galilean classifies people by which of the two impulses rules them.
In rabbinic anthropology, every human being is endowed with two impulses given by God at creation. The good impulse, the yetzer ha-tov, draws a person toward Torah and toward acts of faithfulness. The evil impulse, the yetzer ha-ra, draws a person toward transgression. The evil impulse is not a foreign intruder. It is part of how each person is made, traced by the rabbis to Genesis 6:5, where “the inclination of the heart” (yetzer lev) of humanity is described as evil. Paul’s description of an internal conflict between a self that wants the good and a sin that lives within him sits comfortably inside this framework.[2][3]
The most concise rabbinic formulation of the doctrine appears in a baraita found in the Babylonian Talmud, where Rabbi Yose the Galilean classifies people by which of the two impulses rules them.
Berakhot 61b:2
With regard to one’s inclinations, it was taught in a baraita that Rabbi Yosei HaGelili says: The good inclination rules the righteous, as it is stated: “And my heart is dead within me” (Psalms 109:22); the evil inclination has been completely banished from his heart. The evil inclination rules the wicked, as it is stated: “Transgression speaks to the wicked, there is no fear of God before his eyes” (Psalms 36:2). Middling people are ruled by both the good and evil inclinations, as it is stated: “Because He stands at the right hand of the needy, to save him from them that rule his soul” (Psalms 109:31).
The taxonomy is three-fold. The fully righteous are governed only by the good impulse, the evil one having been banished from their hearts. The wicked are governed only by the evil impulse, the good one absent. Most people sit in the middle, ruled by both impulses and caught between them. This middle category, the so-called benoni, the in-between person, is where the rabbinic moral life is lived. The state Paul describes in Romans 7, the divided will of someone who knows the good but does the evil, is precisely the situation of the benoni.[4]
The rabbinic frame also helps explain a feature of Paul’s argument that has often puzzled later Christian readers. Paul writes that “sin that lives in me” performs the action he disapproves of. The construction sounds like an evasion of personal responsibility on a strict reading, but in the rabbinic frame it is the natural way to speak. The sin is not the self; it is one of two impulses given to the self at creation. When the evil impulse acts, it is not a stranger inside the person, but neither is it the whole of the person. The person is the contested ground on which the two impulses meet.[5]
The Adam-and-death theme that hovers behind Romans 7 also has its rabbinic counterpart. For Paul, sin and death enter the human story through Adam in Romans 5 and continue to animate the divided self of Romans 7. Rabbinic literature traces the origin of the evil impulse to creation as well, sometimes locating it in Adam’s heart from the beginning, sometimes in the post-flood declaration of Genesis 8:21 that the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth. The shared narrative is the one in which Adam’s descendants live with an evil impulse alongside a good one, fighting for control over their actions, with death as the eventual consequence of yielding too far. Paul’s “wretched man” in Romans 7 is one chapter in that shared story.
The rabbinic frame also helps explain a feature of Paul’s argument that has often puzzled later Christian readers. Paul writes that “sin that lives in me” performs the action he disapproves of. The construction sounds like an evasion of personal responsibility on a strict reading, but in the rabbinic frame it is the natural way to speak. The sin is not the self; it is one of two impulses given to the self at creation. When the evil impulse acts, it is not a stranger inside the person, but neither is it the whole of the person. The person is the contested ground on which the two impulses meet.[5]
The Adam-and-death theme that hovers behind Romans 7 also has its rabbinic counterpart. For Paul, sin and death enter the human story through Adam in Romans 5 and continue to animate the divided self of Romans 7. Rabbinic literature traces the origin of the evil impulse to creation as well, sometimes locating it in Adam’s heart from the beginning, sometimes in the post-flood declaration of Genesis 8:21 that the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth. The shared narrative is the one in which Adam’s descendants live with an evil impulse alongside a good one, fighting for control over their actions, with death as the eventual consequence of yielding too far. Paul’s “wretched man” in Romans 7 is one chapter in that shared story.
Citations
- [1] Talbert, Charles H. Romans (pp. 194–196) Smyth & Helwys Publishing, 2002
- [2] Porter, Stanley E. The Pauline Concept of Original Sin, in Light of Rabbinic Background (pp. 6) Tyndale Bulletin 41.1, 1990
- [3] Davies, W. D. Paul and Rabbinic Judaism: Some Rabbinic Elements in Pauline Theology (pp. 17–35) Fortress Press, 1980
- [4] Eisenbaum, Pamela Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle (pp. 56) HarperOne, 2009
- [5] Levison, John R. Portraits of Adam in Early Judaism: From Sirach to 2 Baruch (pp. 35) JSOT Press, 1988
Sharing the Stories of the Sages
Paul does more than argue like a sage. He retells stories that show up again, sometimes centuries later, in midrash and Talmud. These four steps follow shared narrative traditions, from the Shema reread around Jesus to a vision of the heavens that the Mishnah would later guard with strict rules of access.
14
A Vision of the Third Heaven
In 2 Corinthians 12, Paul tells the Corinthians about a visionary experience he had fourteen years earlier. He is reluctant to talk about it, referring to himself in the third person, hedging on whether the experience was bodily or spiritual, and finally refusing to disclose what he heard there.
2 Corinthians 12:1-4
1 It is necessary to go on boasting. Though it is not profitable, I will go on to visions and revelations from the Lord. 2 I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago (whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows) was caught up to the third heaven. 3 And I know that this man (whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, God knows) 4 was caught up into paradise and heard things too sacred to be put into words, things that a person is not permitted to speak.
The vocabulary of the passage is the vocabulary of Jewish visionary tradition. The “third heaven” reflects the layered cosmology familiar from texts like 2 Enoch and the Apocalypse of Abraham, in which heaven is divided into ascending tiers. The Greek word translated “paradise” here is paradeisos, a loanword from the Persian pairidaeza that arrived in Greek and Hebrew through the same channels and that became, in the Hebrew form pardes, the technical term for the heavenly garden. Paul’s reluctance to elaborate is also a feature of the visionary tradition. The seer who has been in the heavenly places is expected to be reticent about what was seen and heard.[1]
The rabbinic tradition has its own most famous heavenly traveler. In the Pesikta Rabbati, the ascent of Moses to receive the Torah is told as a guided tour through the seven firmaments. The sages who put together this midrash imagined Moses passing through hostile angels, conversing with the angel of death, and receiving a vision of a heavenly Sanctuary that the earthly Tabernacle below was made to copy.
The rabbinic tradition has its own most famous heavenly traveler. In the Pesikta Rabbati, the ascent of Moses to receive the Torah is told as a guided tour through the seven firmaments. The sages who put together this midrash imagined Moses passing through hostile angels, conversing with the angel of death, and receiving a vision of a heavenly Sanctuary that the earthly Tabernacle below was made to copy.
Pesikta Rabbati 20:2
… God then opened the seven firmaments and showed Moses the Sanctuary on high and the four colors He had used for the Tabernacle. He opened the portals of the seven firmaments and appeared over them and over Israel in His full glory. …
The shared framework is unmistakable, with both texts describing a visionary lifted up through layered heavens. Paul speaks of being “caught up to the third heaven”; the Pesikta speaks of seven firmaments opened in sequence. Both describe a heavenly Sanctuary or garden as the destination of the ascent. The paradeisos Paul enters is the heavenly counterpart of the earthly Eden in the visionary tradition; the “Sanctuary on high” the Pesikta shows Moses is the heavenly counterpart of the Tabernacle Israel built below. The visionary in both cases is taken into a real space already inhabited by angelic figures and seen only by special permission.[2]
The two accounts share a sense that the contents of heaven are dangerous to reveal in detail. Paul says the things he heard cannot be put into words and are not permitted to be spoken. The Pesikta is somewhat more forthcoming about what Moses saw, but the larger Jewish heavenly-ascent tradition consistently restricts who may speak about the heavenly realities and how. The reticence functions as a marker that the material is genuinely heavenly and that handling it requires care.[3]
Beneath the shared framework the two accounts also differ in their settings. The Pesikta tells of Moses, whose ascent is part of an established collective story about Sinai. Paul tells of a single anonymous visionary, hedged behind the third-person designation “a man in Christ,” recounted reluctantly under the pressure of a comparison with rival teachers in Corinth. The Pesikta is willing to describe what Moses was shown, including the heavenly Sanctuary and the four colors of the Tabernacle. Paul refuses to detail what he heard at all. The two texts share a vocabulary and a cosmology, but the rhetorical settings are different.[4]
What 2 Corinthians 12 shows is Paul drawing on the same body of Jewish visionary tradition that gave the rabbis their account of Moses on the firmaments. The technical vocabulary, the image of layered heavens with a heavenly Sanctuary at the top, and the sense that the heavenly journey is hedged about with danger and divine permission are all shared. Paul’s third heaven is not an isolated Christian innovation but a Jewish vision in a Pharisaic key, recognizable to anyone in his audience who knew the heavenly-Sanctuary tradition by its Hebrew name.
The two accounts share a sense that the contents of heaven are dangerous to reveal in detail. Paul says the things he heard cannot be put into words and are not permitted to be spoken. The Pesikta is somewhat more forthcoming about what Moses saw, but the larger Jewish heavenly-ascent tradition consistently restricts who may speak about the heavenly realities and how. The reticence functions as a marker that the material is genuinely heavenly and that handling it requires care.[3]
Beneath the shared framework the two accounts also differ in their settings. The Pesikta tells of Moses, whose ascent is part of an established collective story about Sinai. Paul tells of a single anonymous visionary, hedged behind the third-person designation “a man in Christ,” recounted reluctantly under the pressure of a comparison with rival teachers in Corinth. The Pesikta is willing to describe what Moses was shown, including the heavenly Sanctuary and the four colors of the Tabernacle. Paul refuses to detail what he heard at all. The two texts share a vocabulary and a cosmology, but the rhetorical settings are different.[4]
What 2 Corinthians 12 shows is Paul drawing on the same body of Jewish visionary tradition that gave the rabbis their account of Moses on the firmaments. The technical vocabulary, the image of layered heavens with a heavenly Sanctuary at the top, and the sense that the heavenly journey is hedged about with danger and divine permission are all shared. Paul’s third heaven is not an isolated Christian innovation but a Jewish vision in a Pharisaic key, recognizable to anyone in his audience who knew the heavenly-Sanctuary tradition by its Hebrew name.
Citations
- [1] Morray-Jones, C. R. A. Paradise Revisited (2 Cor 12:1-12): The Jewish Mystical Background of Paul’s Apostolate, Part 1: The Jewish Sources (pp. 177–217) Harvard Theological Review 86.2, 1993
- [2] Rowland, Christopher and Morray-Jones, C. R. A. The Mystery of God: Early Jewish Mysticism and the New Testament (pp. 393) Brill, 2009
- [3] Schäfer, Peter The Hidden and Manifest God: Some Major Themes in Early Jewish Mysticism (pp. 81) State University of New York Press, 1992
- [4] Gooder, Paula R. Only the Third Heaven? 2 Corinthians 12:1-10 and Heavenly Ascent (pp. 165–189) T&T Clark, 2006
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- Boyarin, Daniel. A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity. University of California Press, 1994.
- Callaway, Mary C.. The Mistress and the Maid: Midrashic Traditions Behind Galatians 4.21-31. Radical Religion 2.2-3, 1975.
- Davies, W. D.. Paul and Rabbinic Judaism: Some Rabbinic Elements in Pauline Theology. Fortress Press, 1980.
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- Fisch, Yael. Written for Us: Paul’s Interpretation of Scripture and the History of Midrash. Brill, 2023.
- Fitzmyer, Joseph A.. Romans (Anchor Yale Bible). Doubleday, 1993.
- Fitzmyer, Joseph A.. Romans. Doubleday, 1993.
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- Sarna, Nahum M.. The JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis. Jewish Publication Society, 1989.
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- Strack, Hermann L. and Günter Stemberger. Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash. Fortress Press, 1996.
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- Tomson, Peter J.. Paul and the Jewish Law: Halakha in the Letters of the Apostle to the Gentiles. Van Gorcum, 1990.
- Visotzky, Burton L.. Reading the Book: Making the Bible a Timeless Text. Schocken, 1991.