This review essay is part of the 2023 Society of Biblical Literature's review panel for Yael Fisch, Written for Us: Paul’s Interpretation of Scripture and the History of Midrash. Find the full panel here.
Yael Fisch’s Written For Us: Paul’s Interpretation of Scripture and the History of Midrash achieves something remarkable: it is a book about Pauline hermeneutics and rabbinic literature that is both new and grounded. It gives us a new way to think about a set of old problems, and it refrains from drawing genealogical conclusions in favor of making a series of more nuanced arguments about the landscape of interpretive strategies present in first century Judaism.
In this essay, I intend to think about the very broad implications of a very particular part of this work. I will both think about the ways that it enriches and enlivens my own ongoing projects, and offer insight where I believe it might be helpful to Yael, and to others reading and using this book. I should add, of course, that disagreements and departures between us are almost certainly a result of my own faulty understanding.
Chapter Two, “Hagar and Sarah: Midrash and Allegory” treats a central question of Pauline hermeneutics, and captures a critical issue of the enterprise of studying him. Is Paul a midrashist, or an allegorist? Are his interpretations typological? Is he using Jewish techniques, Greek techniques, or just sort of making things up as he goes along? In short: What kind of interpreter is he? This is, by my read, a central concern of this book, which provides pathways and new insights for thinking about the answers. Fisch locates this question squarely within scholarly concerns with Paul’s Jewishness: a Jewish Paul either performs midrash as a Jew, or breaks with his Jewishness, and performs allegory. Fisch displays her capacity to interweave discussions of form, function, and content here, as well: Her explication of Paul’s own rhetoric (that he does not allegorize, but rather that the text allegorizes itself [pg. 88]) relies on unraveling the particularly tangled comparison he makes between Sarah and Hagar in Galatians 4.
The allegory in question is famous. Hagar, enslaved to Abraham and Sarah, stands for the old covenant, while Sarah stands for the new. Fisch points out, though, that Paul makes use of a funny sort of allegory: each signifier represents multiple things. This has led past interpreters to claim that Paul is using typology; Fisch, however, shows that his strategy is still ultimately allegorical. She further returns to rabbinic literature, examining some of its most famous allegorists (the doreshei rashumot) to ultimately redescribe allegory as a literary strategy for the solving of textual problems (pg. 110). This understanding of allegory is central for Paul’s work, partially because it is also, for him, history. It does not simply explain how the covenant works for gentiles—it actively makes it so. In Fisch’s words, “Torah tells [the gentiles] not only how their story will end but how it has begun” (pg. 129). It is this comparison, and its intertexts—and Fisch’s discussion of them—that I wish to address.
I’ll post the relevant parts of the allegory, from the letter to the Galatians, for those of us, like me, who are a little less comfortable in the New Testament.
22 For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by an enslaved woman and the other by a free woman. 23 One, the child of the enslaved woman, was born according to the flesh; the other, the child of the free woman, was born through the promise. 24 Now this is an allegory: these women are two covenants. One woman, in fact, is Hagar, from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery. 25 Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. 26 But the other woman corresponds to the Jerusalem above; she is free, and she is our mother. 27 For it is written,
“Rejoice, you childless one, you who bear no children,
burst into song and shout, you who endure no birth pangs,
for the children of the desolate woman are more numerous
than the children of the one who is married.”
As Paul draws the dichotomy between Hagar and Sarah, he invokes Isaiah chapter 54, which tells the barren woman to rejoice:רני עקרה, לא ילדה . This is, according to a variety of interpreters, confusing, as neither Hagar, nor Sarah, is ultimately barren in this allegory: in fact, its success relies on the notion that both of them have children. Sarah’s barrenness, so critical to the biblical story, is barely an afterthought for Paul. The presence of the aqarah, the barren women, needs to be explained. Who is she, if she is not Sarah?
Some scholars have pointed to the broader context of Isaiah—particularly chapter 51:1-2—to explain this barren woman as Zion, linking the whole image together with “those who pursue righteousness” as children of Abraham.[1]
שִׁמְע֥וּ אֵלַ֛י רֹ֥דְפֵי צֶ֖דֶק מְבַקְשֵׁ֣י יְהֹוָ֑ה הַבִּ֙יטוּ֙ אֶל־צ֣וּר חֻצַּבְתֶּ֔ם וְאֶל־מַקֶּ֥בֶת בּ֖וֹר נֻקַּרְתֶּֽם׃ הַבִּ֙יטוּ֙ אֶל־אַבְרָהָ֣ם אֲבִיכֶ֔ם וְאֶל־שָׂרָ֖ה תְּחוֹלֶלְכֶ֑ם כִּֽי־אֶחָ֣ד קְרָאתִ֔יו וַאֲבָרְכֵ֖הוּ וְאַרְבֵּֽהוּ׃
Listen to me, those who pursue righteousness, seeking after God; look at the rock you were hewn from, and to the quarry from which you were cut. Look to Abraham your father, to Sarah who birthed you, for he was one when I called him, but I blessed him, and multiplied him.
Fisch, like me, is suspicious of this explanation, however: in Jewish interpretation of the Second Temple period, intertexts typically function as prooftexts, rather than as broad gestures to other parts of a biblical book. Similarly, if the implied, and perhaps even real, audience of Paul’s letters are largely gentiles, it is not clear to me that we can assume that textual context was meaningful to them, no matter how well-versed in the Hebrew Bible Paul was himself. I need to concede, though, that Paul’s implied audience could very well be a collection of gentiles exceedingly well-versed in scripture—itself a miraculous element of the letter, much like his insistence on communal coherence.[2]
We could say that second verse of Isaiah 54 seems to resolve any tensions brought on by the first verse, in classic biblical parallelism: while the childless one, the aqarah, is commanded to rejoice in the first verse, it is clear that this is because, while desolate, she becomes the mother of many children: ki rabbim b’nei šomemah. I find this tempting myself, although the fact that she is still called an aqarah—a barren woman, στεῖρα in the Greek New Testament—makes things much more complicated. Of course, the difficulty of the interpretation might itself be the point, and this is part of what I would like to think about here.
The presence of a difficult interpretation asks us to consider the circumstances in which it might have been formulated: can we put together a reasonable line of thought, given what we know about Paul and his audience? Paul’s audience, composed as it seems to be, of gentiles, might not know Isaiah well, which makes his interpretive choices either more confounding, or more understandable. They are more confounding, because they seem to require a level of knowledge his readers do not know—and more understandable, because freed of the constraints of an interpretive tradition that his audience holds dear, Paul can do what he likes. As Stowers has reminded us, though, the gentile reader of Paul is merely his implied, or inscribed audience: it is not necessarily the real, historical audience and recipient of his letter.[3]
Beyond this, Heidi Wendt, in her book At the Temple Gates, provides us with still more tools to think about Paul’s audience, and the way they might receive his biblical interpretations.[4] Gentile though they may be, she points out that independent religious specialists, like Paul, often engaged in ethnicizing religious practices.[5] Those reading, listening to, or hearing about Paul need not have known the Hebrew Bible well to put stock in its words, because it was Judaean. Claims of textual expertise were common among the religious entrepreneurs of the first century Roman Empire. When the texts in question could be associated with an ethnic group known for its antiquity and sagacity—well, such a strategy was well-known, and successful enough to be regularly repeated, as Paul’s activity, and the activity of figures like Apollonius of Tyana, Plotinus, and others show us. The discrepancy, or gap, between Paul’s own knowledge of the text, and what his audience knows of it, is an important locus of interpretive possibility.
Still: this doesn’t mean that trying to figure out what Paul is doing—what the implications of juxtaposing two biblical figures, or bringing forth a particular prooftext might be—is a worthless endeavor. Indeed, to those of us interested in texts, reading, and re-reading, it’s critical! Fisch offers us one way of thinking about this that moves beyond relying solely on assumptions about the ethnic and religious identities of Paul’s audience, which is a move that I appreciate immensely: she suggests thinking about Paul’s interpretation through a lens of practice that provides a creative possibility to the interpretive difficulties at play.
Fisch points out, in an intriguing, brief excursus, that there is a Jewish context in which Isaiah 54 and Genesis 16, the story of Sarah’s barrenness, are juxtaposed to each other. This is in the context of the haftarah: the practice of reading a selection from one of the biblical prophets after the regular weekly (or holiday) lectionary from the Torah. The selections from the prophets are linked to the Torah reading through a variety of interpretive traditions, including similar vocabulary, phrasing, or themes. In one particular lectionary tradition, the haftarah associated with Genesis 16 is the beginning of Isaiah 54. The connection comes from their first two lines: ושרי אשת אברם לא ילדה, and רני עקרה, לא ילדה. In later Jewish practice, which is based on the Babylonian lectionary tradition, this haftarah is read instead with an earlier portion of Genesis, the story of Noah—a fact I know well, because it was my own bar Mitzvah haftarah (and which elicited a prompt email to our author!). The juxtaposition of the two in the cycle that Fisch cites, however, makes perfect sense, of course. In addition to the connection between their vocabularies, the thematic connection is clear. Barrenness gives way to a child, and sadness to shouts of ringing joy—Sarah’s laughter.
Other scholars have used the Jewish lectionary cycle as an interpretive possibility for various parts of the New Testament. Aileen Guilding, the first woman appointed to a chair in Theology in the United Kingdom, argued that there was a triennial lectionary cycle that read the entire Pentateuch over the course of three years among Jews in first century Palestine, and that the fourth gospel was organized in such a way that revealed its reliance on this cycle.[6] Guilding’s thesis, in its details, is largely considered untenable these days, for a few different reasons, but the core observation has, I think, sunk in a bit more deeply than we might realize. It feels obvious these days to say that reading the Bible privately was one of the least popular, least common ways in which it was promulgated, made known, and internalized. Hearing it read, of course, was a major mode by which people might learn its contents, as were the teachings of both institutionalized and independent specialists, and various other modes of media and public interpretation. What Guilding’s proposal reminds us of—and, in a stronger way, I think, Yael’s suggestion—is that the format in which these texts were encountered, and the attendant social setting, is as much a necessary part of the hermeneutic background as the text itself.
An issue that arises with Guilding’s argument, though, and with looking at Paul’s juxtaposition of Isaiah 54 and Genesis 16 as deriving from a lectionary haftarah practice, is that the New Testament constitutes the sole corpus of our evidence for the reading of selections of the prophets as part of the synagogue lectionary for the first two centuries. There are several instances of the prophets being read in synagogues in the New Testament, of course, but it’s not necessarily clear, in my view, that this is a regular, institutionalized haftarah practice, rather than something a little more contingent and ad hoc. Michael Satlow, in How the Bible Became Holy, suggests that the famous scene in the gospel of Luke could be read as divinatory, rather than as a set element of a lectionary cycle.[7]
In chapter 4 of the Gospel of Luke, after Jesus’ temptation in the desert, he comes back home to Nazareth on the Sabbath. He goes to the synagogue, and stands up to read: ἀνέστη ἀναγνῶναι. He is given a scroll of Isaiah, and reads aloud from it, from three non-sequential verses (61:1, 58:6, and 61:2). The verses he reads are not listed as a haftarah anywhere in the seder lists that scholars today might use to identify an ancient prophetic reading. This does not mean, of course, that it could not have been a more formalized haftarah reading, but it also need not be read that way. Scholars argue about the formality and fixity of the Torah and haftarah reading cycles in antiquity, and the fact of the matter is that most of our documentary evidence is from medieval manuscripts, with a few mentions of readings for particular holidays in rabbinic literature. It is just as reasonable, I think, to assume that Jesus is picking and choosing the text himself, a fact that has led others to suggest that this was one of the haftarah practices current at the time. Plausible enough, especially because the Mishnah, in Megillah 4:4, suggests that it is acceptable to skip around while reading publicly from the Prophets.
Another possibility that builds on this, and the one that Satlow suggests, is that the practice in question is less about reading the text publicly and making it known through lection, and rather more a form of divination: bibliomancy. In this practice, a text is opened and selected at random, and then interpreted in such a way as to divine future events, or perhaps the divine will. Such a phenomenon is documented in various sources: Athanasius’ Life of Antony and Augustine’s Confessions both reference it obliquely, and even rabbinic sources in the Babylonian Talmud contain a version thereof.[8]
Jesus’ selected text is certainly easily understood in this context. Once again, this text comes from Isaiah. The text authorizes Jesus’ activities, turning his coming ministry throughout the Galilee into a divinely-ordained progress of miracles and teaching. Read this way, this scene tells us something about how texts from the Hebrew bible prophets were used—how prophetic scrolls continued to be prophetic, although differently prophetic, even in the late Second Temple period. What we give up, though, is any sort of claim to an organized haftarah practice in late antiquity. Something I wonder about, though, is if we can think about the practice of reading the haftarah—the prophetic lectionary—as ultimately deriving from this type of divinatory practice.
My point in diving deeply into this learned excursus in such a wonderful book is not to simply publicize my interest in lectionaries (although I do wish more people thought about them!) or to register a point of disagreement—especially because I don’t think any disagreement here really matters. It is to point to the generative possibilities that lie behind Fisch’s suggestion that a liturgical cycle might act as a source for the difficult way Paul puts texts together.
In making this suggestion, this book highlights something that scholars both think about regularly, and perhaps don’t discuss enough in discussions of Paul’s activities, and particularly his biblical interpretation—although it comes up regularly enough in my classes! Some of his interpretations are hard. Many of his claims, based as he says they are in the biblical text, are convoluted and twisted, or perhaps half-formed, not fully realized, and not entirely coherent.
We can attribute these to Paul’s idiosyncrasies—as, I think, we must. We can also think about them as representative of ways of reading the text, modes and manners of interpretation and textual encounter that are lost to us, and only recoverable as speculation drawn from hints and whispers. What we should also do, though, is consider the possibility that they are intentionally difficult: that Paul brings certain texts together, and invites certain interpretations that feel counter-intuitive, not in spite of them being difficult, but because of it.
Perhaps I show my hand a bit too much when I suggest that if we think about Paul as an independent religious specialist, as Heidi Wendt argues, it follows that we need to think about the way he is using texts as comparable to other independent, or freelance specialists. This doesn’t leave us with much material to go on, of course, as Paul is our single best first-person source for this category, but it is still a worthy exercise, I think.
Interpretation was critical to the practice of religion in a variety of different modes. Not only could it define, delineate, and justify practice, but it was in itself a religious practice. This is, of course, familiar to us with the rabbis, and the concept of their grammarian piety, although I am thinking of examples that are decidedly earlier as well.[9] Being able to interpret in specific ways—to make connections between little-known texts and abstract philosophical concepts, for example—was sometimes a prerequisite for participation, or initiation, in certain religious groups and practices. The Derveni Papyrus stands as one of the most important examples of this: a fourth century manuscript that contains a commentary on an Orphic poem, itself already used in the initiatory practices of mystery religions. The poem is accompanied by its own commentary and buried with a presumed initiate. The commentary allegorizes an Orphic theogony, explicitly stating that Orpheus did not mean what he plainly wrote. To understand that—to read the poem, to internalize its interpretation, to be buried with it—is to be reborn into a new set of secrets, of meanings, of interpretations.
These interpretations are not obvious: but it is the fact of their difficulty, of their disjointedness from the plain words written on the page, that makes them worthy of interpretation, that makes them able to initiate, that makes them, for lack of a better word, important. I wonder if this is not also the case for Paul—and, indeed, for the tannaitic and later rabbis. While a rhetoric of simplicity and clarity is sometimes used (the text speaks for itself, the text has a plain meaning), the necessity of interpretation suggests otherwise for the writer of the Derveni Papyrus, for Paul, for the rabbis. Perhaps, when we think about Paul’s interpretive strategies, and early rabbinic midrash, we should think about a hermeneutic of difficulty. The interpretation matters not only because it makes sense of a hard-to-understand text, but because the interpretation itself is difficult: because it requires a teacher to make sense of it.
This brings me back around to the haftarah, then, and the way this all seems to fit to me, so nicely, within a set of questions about the social context of Paul’s activity. The logic that connects a haftarah to the Torah reading that it accompanies is sometimes obvious: as we saw in the later connection of Isaiah 54 to Genesis 16, the verbal root of “giving birth” is a hermeneutic bridge. The haftarah cycle was not necessarily stable in antiquity, though. Rather than stymie us, however, I think that this knowledge frees us. It allows us to piece together a reading practice that was guided by the scruples of an individual interpreter as much as it might have been by broader communal trends; it allows us to understand that Jesus, when reading from Isaiah in the synagogue of Nazareth, might have been both divining the future, reading a liturgy, and interpreting a text.
Put another way: Fisch’s book has helped me to think about the initiators of interpretive texts, like Paul, like the rabbis, like the writer of the Derveni Papyrus. We tend to think about rabbinic interpretations, like midrash, arising from a difficulty in the text itself: smoothing out a piece of grit until, in the famous analogy, it becomes a pearl. What if, however, difficulties that arise from the juxtaposition of two texts are fertile ground for interpretation as well—and that interpretation is not meant to make them easier, but rather, harder? Sometimes the point of the pearl is its lustrous nacre—but sometimes, it’s the fact that it’s there, that it represents an obstacle. The process of understanding the texts together is itself embedded in the social relationship of an interpreter to their audience. What if both Paul and the rabbis, and later Jews deciding on prophetic selections to read alongside the Pentateuch, are choosing texts not because they are easy, but because they are hard?
[1] Fisch cites Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) 118-119.
[2] On Paul’s implied audience, see Stanley Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994) 21-29. On miraculous communal coherence, see Stanley Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’ and the History of Early Christianity,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23:3 (2011), 238-256.
[3] Stowers, Rereading Romans, 21-29.
[4] Heidi Wendt, At the Temple Gates: The Religion of Freelance Experts in the Roman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
[5] Wendt, At the Temple Gates, 74-113.
[6] Aileen Guilding, The Fourth Gospel and Jewish Worship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960).
[7] Michael Satlow, How the Bible Became Holy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 202.
[8] See bHagigah 15a-b, e.g.
[9] Krista Dalton, “Rabbis as Recipients of Charity and the Logic of Grammarian Piety.” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian Hellenistic & Roman Period 53:1 (2022): 94–130.