I HAVE a two-year old son. This means that I spend a lot of time reading Julia Donaldson books . . . and listening to Julia Donaldson audio books . . . and watching TV adaptations of Julia Donaldson stories. No one warned me that becoming a parent would involve single-handedly paying off Julia Donaldson’s mortgage for her.
When you’re listening to three different versions of the same stories over and over and over again, you notice all the subtle variations between them. One of the main distinctions between the book and TV versions is that often the same words are spoken by different people.
For example, let’s take The Highway Rat (our son’s latest obsession). As you may have guessed from the title, it follows a rat living the life of a highwayman, stealing food from other animals travelling the roads. One of the characteristics of this book is the use of repeated phrases. At one point, the eponymous highway rat is up to his usual misdeeds when he says: “For I am the rat of the highway! The highway! The highway!”
In the TV adaptation, it would presumably feel a bit clunky to have the rat say this (or perhaps David Tennant was being paid by the word?). So it gets reframed as a conversation between the rat and his victim:
“For I am the rat of the highway!”
“The highway?”
“The highway!”
Same words, different context — and, when it comes to language, context is everything. For example, what does the word “tip” mean? It could mean an end-point of something (“the tip of the iceberg”); or it could mean a place to take rubbish (“I’m taking this to the tip”); or it could mean to push something over (“Be careful not to tip it over”); or it could mean payment for good service (“They left a generous tip”); or it could mean a clue (“Here’s a tip for you”).
So, what does the word “tip” mean? It depends on the context. (Top tip for preachers: it’s worth avoiding the cliché “This Greek/Hebrew word means X.” Words don’t really have concrete meaning when detached from context.)
Maybe this is why — while watching The Highway Rat yet again, recently — I found myself thinking of the Letter to the Hebrews; because the ways in which the TV adaptations of Julia Donaldson stories recontextualise certain words as speech by characters in the narrative is exactly how Hebrews uses the Old Testament.
IN HEBREWS 1.5-14, we find a long list of Old Testament quotations used to demonstrate that Jesus is better than the angels. In verse 1.5, for example, there are two quotations, first from Psalm 2.7, and then from 2 Samuel 7.14: “For to which of the angels did God ever say, ‘You are my Son; today I have begotten you’? Or again, ‘I will be his Father, and he will be my Son’?”
Notice: these texts are not being quoted as texts: they are being quoted as speech — and not just anyone’s speech, but the Father’s speech to the Son.
This happens throughout Hebrews, not just in verses 1.5-14. And it’s not just the Father who does this, either: the Son speaks to the Father, too. In Hebrews 10.5-7, for example, we find Jesus speaking Psalm 40.6-8 (with some minor tweaks):
“Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said: ‘Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, But a body you have prepared for me. . .’”
iStockThe so-called Old Testament Trinity from the interior of Holy Trinity Cathedral, Sibiu, in Romania
Elsewhere, the Spirit speaks to the early Christian community, too. And so in verses 3.7-11, we see the Spirit “speaking” Psalm 95.7-11: “Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, ‘Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion. . .’”
Every time time the author of Hebrews quotes scripture, he engages in prosopological exegesis of scripture. What does that mean? And why does it matter?
Imagine that you’re driving down a road. You see a road sign for a theatre near by. What picture would you expect there to be on the road sign? Probably a couple of those Greek theatre masks? Those masks are called prosopoi. In Greek, a prosopos can refer to a face, but in the context of Greek theatre — because context changes meaning — it refers to an actor’s mask.
If “exegesis” refers to interpreting a text, then “prosopological exegesis” is essentially a technique in which a text is interpreted as if it were the dialogue for a play. So we might call it “dramatic exegesis” of scripture. In Hebrews, the Old Testament is no longer a text, but a script.
WHY does any of this matter? Why would the author of Hebrews read scripture in this way?
First, it matters because of who speaks scripture in Hebrews. The only people who speak scripture in this “dramatic” way are Father, Son, and Spirit. The epistle does not set out a fully systematic doctrine of the Trinity. But, in reserving the speaking of scripture exclusively to these three persons, we can see that the author is thoroughly Trinitarian in his theology.
Second, it matters because it shows the theology of Hebrews — and the work of Jesus which it portrays — to be fundamentally in continuity with the Old Testament. Hebrews is occasionally accused of being anti-Jewish in its theology: as rejecting outright the “old covenant” and “replacing” it with something new and better. This is reinforced by very bad translations of Hebrews 1.1-2, often rendered in English as: “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son” (NRSVue).
Here, the Greek word behind the English “but” is kai. This means “and”, not “but”, which is a very bad translation that I would not even allow in a first-year undergraduate Greek class. Rather than say “God has spoken but is now doing a new thing,” the text instead wants to say that “God has spoken, and this same God is now speaking again.” That is a significant difference.
This prosopological exegesis of scripture also helps us to resist anti-Jewish readings of Hebrews by reinforcing the notion that the same God who spoke in the Old Testament now speaks again through his Son.
Third and finally, it demonstrates the importance of the Old Testament for the Church today. No longer are Old Testament texts merely remnants of a bygone time from which we should feel estranged: they are part of an ongoing divine drama, a conversation and narrative into which are given privileged access.
Words take meaning only in context. By changing the context of Old Testament texts — by imagining them spoken afresh by Father, Son, and Spirit — the author of Hebrews invites us to listen in on a divine drama, a drama into which we, too, are called to play our part.
Dr Jonathan Rowlands is Graduate Tutor and Lecturer in Theology at St Mellitus College.