Spoken to, spoken for

When studying the Bible remember these two ideas.

Sigve K. Tonstad, MD, PhD, is professor of biblical interpretation, Loma Linda University, Loma Linda, California, United States.

have been spoken to. How else can I put it? Perhaps a statement by Samuel Coleridge will help explain what I mean: “In the Bible there is more that finds me than I have experienced in all other books put together.”1

It has been that way for years. When I was in high school, one evening, the encounter between Jesus and Pilate in the Gospel of John spoke to me so vividly that time and place and distance disappeared—it was no longer a story about Jesus and Pilate. Jesus was speaking to me. I was contemporaneous with Christ; Christ appeared in my time no less than at the time of Pontius Pilate. I was spoken to.

Spoken to

I have been an avid reader of the Bible since that encounter with the text. The experience of being “spoken to” has changed and matured but not so as to make it necessary to describe it some other way. My approach to Bible reading can hardly be called “reading” in the usual sense. Through the years I have gone through many Bibles, but my approach may be better characterized as “mutilation” rather than reading. I have underlined to the point of disfiguring the text, destroying Bibles in the process, and then, taking pleasure in buying a new Bible, only to start the process again.

While in medical school, I interviewed H. M. S. Richards Sr. at his home. He told me of his Bible-reading habits. They included reading through the entire Bible each January, a flyover to ascertain yet again the lay of the land, and then reading the Bible through more slowly the rest of the year. It became his habit to write SER in the margin, short for sermon, as though texts were clamoring for attention and exposure. “Preach me!” they seemed to shout to Pastor Richards. Texts that spoke to him expected to be spoken for.

I adopted the same habit, writing SER in the margin whenever a text seemed to speak to me, mostly to acknowledge that I had been spoken to but also with the recognition that the text expected to be spoken for and would pile on pressure until I delivered. A similar dynamic held sway in my habits and priorities in pastoral work: I preached on texts, not on topics. The text set the tone and agenda—texts led the way, and I sometimes pictured myself finding a text big enough for the next sermon that I could hide behind it so as not to get in its way.

The years have passed since the early days of being spoken to. I have finished medical school, worked as a physician, doubled as a church pastor, completed a PhD in New Testament studies, written books, and now find myself in the classroom as a teacher of religion and the Bible. It is an interesting life, still in the present tense, and the journey is not yet over. But the part that captures what is most meaningful is still the experience of being spoken to.

Familiarity with the Bible has not changed or diminished the experience, because familiarity is an illusion. The text has more on its mind than I expect. Close reading and close-up study discloses more than I thought was there. Working now in a more scholarly vein is not a less spiritual way of handling the texts of the Bible. Perhaps it is only now, working my way slowly through texts word for word in the original languages, that I see and hear what is there. Time and again the prior assumptions turn out to be inadequate. I am not exaggerating when I say that texts of Scripture put me at attention; they pin me to the wall; they refuse to let me go. And yes, again and again, when they do let me go, I leave in tears and not infrequently in a state of trembling. Bible texts have contexts that cannot be ignored except at the peril of missing the point.

Bible texts also do tone of voice. They have body language. They present excruciating moments of silence, the most intense of which is Abraham’s walk with Isaac to the Mount of Seeing (Gen. 22:6, 7). In the book of Job, in the last of the cycle of speeches between Job and his friends, Job seems to repeat what his friends have been saying almost word for word. Have the friends persuaded him? Is he ready to concede that they are right and he is wrong? Not at all. In the end, they concede defeat (Job 32:1). But Job’s clincher can be understood only if we do tone of voice. He repeats the friends’ sterile, inauthentic arguments, and the case is closed. The sclerotic arguments, now heard in playback, secure their defeat when repeated by Job. In the Gospel of John, there are double meanings, irony, tone of voice, and puzzled facial expressions—texts that are simple on the surface but emotionally, theologically, and psychologically as complex as can be imagined.

During the past eight years, I have worked on some of the most important and tantalizing passages in the Bible. I have been in the Garden of Eden—hearing, as it were, in ten different versions—the tone of voice of the serpent’s speech (Gen. 3:1). I have listened to Cain’s toxic speech with himself, a detail that even the most astute translations of the Bible struggle to convey (Gen. 4:8). I have walked with Abraham to the Mount of Seeing (Gen. 22:1–18), aided immensely by Søren Kierkegaard’s meditation on the story, a meditation that has given birth to enduring schools of thought in theology and philosophy over the past 150 years.2 I have been to Bethlehem both physically and in my mind; not (as you might expect) to see the hills David roamed as a child or the place where Jesus was wrapped and laid in a manger. I came to relive the story of the concubine in Judges 19, running in the early morning hours from Jerusalem to Bethlehem and back, intending to participate in her last journey. Then, in the evening after dark, I managed to get to Gibeah, where the unnameable deed took place. This took a close reading to discover that she was not unfaithful to him, as some translations suggest. Instead, he made her do it; he prostituted her until she left in disgust (Judg. 19:2). He goes to win her back. There is frightening procrastination on his part. She walks with him from Bethlehem to Jerusalem and then to Gibeah as darkness falls on the land. At night, the villagers attack the house in Gibeah, where they are staying. The Levite forces his concubine out over her pleading (Judg. 19:25). They abuse her all night, retreating only at sunrise. She crawls to the house in the cold morning hours, dying in utter loneliness with her hands reaching for the door (Judg. 19:27). It is unspeakable.

And yet I have been spoken to, here, too, in the darkest and most neglected corner of Scripture.

Spoken for

In this and many other stories, being spoken to will not be separated from the demand of these texts to be spoken for. The texts expect and accept nothing less, whether the story of Adam, Eve, and the serpent; Cain and Abel; or the stories of better-defined characters like Abraham, Moses, or Elijah. Of course, these texts have been spoken for many times in the history of interpretation—often with unsettling results. The most influential interpretations of the story of Cain and Abel are a case in point; interpretations of the book of Job another.

Now, in our time, the texts must be spoken for in the presence of new challenges, the greatest of which by far is the Holocaust of the twentieth century. The Holocaust brings new obligations to bear on our interpretations, but it also comes with new opportunities, and it provides for underappreciated resources to get their due. When we read the Bible within sight of Auschwitz, as I mean to do, we cannot pass by Bethlehem without paying attention to the rape and dismemberment of the concubine in Judges 19. David and Jesus will no longer be the only luminaries from Bethlehem. The Bethlehem Hall of Fame now has added a person—a woman, a concubine—seen and remembered in texts wanting to be spoken for. I do not see the Holocaust as a problem that defeats belief; I see a reality, rather, that demands a religious and theological account of human existence.

I have been spoken to. And I have spent years speaking for the texts that have spoken to me, lately mostly in writing. My motivation and sense of obligation have come mostly from the texts themselves. Life’s most precious moments are the times of feeling spoken to, these times enhanced and made more intense during attempts to speak for the most important texts to which a human being has access. In that sense, speaking for and being spoken to are two sides of the same coin and discipline.

Conclusion

And now what? Reading the Bible can be solitary and even lonely, but it will never be a completely private matter. Interpretation is irreducibly communal, an act of listening to and participation with others who have been spoken to and have spoken for what they found. I am indebted to mentors within and without my community. Spoken for is not only a matter that has reference to a text but also has reference to the community to which I belong—its reason for existence and its witness to the world. I admit to my community that I work with a sense of obligation to you. I hope you, too, will feel spoken for.

1 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Letter II” in Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge, 3rd ed. (London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street, 1853), 47.

2 Originally published in 1843 as Frygt og Bæven in Danish under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio (John of the Silence), an English version of this classic is Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (London: Penguin Books, 1985).


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Sigve K. Tonstad, MD, PhD, is professor of biblical interpretation, Loma Linda University, Loma Linda, California, United States.

July 2016

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