Theology and the Scientific Imagination by Funkenstein Amos

Author:Funkenstein, Amos [Funkenstein, Amos]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691181356
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

B. “SCRIPTURE SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE OF MAN”: THE EXEGETICAL PRINCIPLE OF ACCOMMODATION

1. A Legal Principle Turns Exegetical

The exegetical career of the medieval principle of accommodation (I mean its function within the interpretation of the Bible) is often tied to a phrase: “The Scriptures speak the language of man.” The Latin phrase—Scriptura humane loquitur1—is a literal translation from the Hebrew—dibra tora kileshon bne ’adam. In Jewish sources it appears at first in a legal context, and has little to do with its later employment.2 R. El’azar ben Azaria, the first tana to invoke the rule, refused to read into the laws concerning the discharge of Hebrew slaves the provision to endow the slave, whether or not he profited the household, with a gift, just because the biblical verse reduplicates the verb: “you should donate a donation” (ha’anek ta’anik). The reduplication has no specific legal meaning, but it is a rhetorical phrase only. If the narrative passages of the Bible contain colloquialisms, as for example “two by two” (shnayim shnayim), so do the legal parts. Similar differences arose between R. Akiba, who searched for (darash) the legal meaning of every seemingly redundant particle of speech, and R. Yishmael, who was much more willing to admit that rabbinical provisions cannot be deduced from the Scriptures. At best they can be related to a hint.

What to the ancients was primarily a legal hermeneutical principle became in the hands of medieval exegetes a general rule to justify or to limit the philosophical allegoresis. In this new sense it is employed in the Geonitic literature as well by Sa’adia or other early medieval philosophers. The numerous anthropomorphic expressions of the Bible could more or less easily be translated into a less offensive idiom; the right [hand] of God, yemin adonai, could be made to mean God’s power. Even those who deny that God can be spoken of with positive attributes could still claim that all scriptural predicates of God are reducible to attributes of action or negations of a privation. Still, the very original presence of prima facie anthropomorphism in the Bible was embarrassing and called for a justification. The reason they are employed is to accommodate the lesser capacity for abstraction of the masses. The law was given to all in a language to be understood by all (Maimonides).

Gradually, as the heuristic horizon of the principle broadened, it came to explain more than anthropomorphisms. Evidently the cosmology of the Bible differed from the last word of scientists—in the Middle Ages no less than today. But Scripture cannot be mistaken; rather, it speaks the language of everyday man, or of primitive man. At this very point in the career of the principle, “the Scripture speaks in human terms” splits into two possible approaches: a maximalistic and a minimalistic employment of the formula.

The maximalist will see the whole body of science and theology—needless to say, his science and his metaphysics—epitomized in the Bible. The Bible may not read as a general encyclopedia, but it is one to him.

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