Lesson 3 | Vocab
Invalid Exegesis
Imagine that, hundreds of years from now, Swahili has become the most dominant language in the world, rather than English. Archaeologists, digging in the ancient ruins of America, discover a fragment of text dating to the late 20th century, that reads as follows:
"Marilyn, tired of her glamorous image, embarked on a new project. She would now cultivate her mind, sharpen her verbal skills, pay attention to standards of etiquette. Most important of all, she would devote herself to charitable causes. Accordingly, she offered her services at the local hospital, which needed volunteers to cheer up terminal patients, many of whom had been in considerable pain for a long time. The weeks flew by. One day she was sitting at the cafeteria when her supervisor approached her and said: 'I didn’t see you yesterday. What were you doing?' 'I painted my apartment; it was my day off,' she responded."¹
Philologists pore over this exciting find to extract every drop of detail about that long-forgotten era. One philologist publishes his findings:
"We are unable to determine whether this text is an excerpt from a novel or from a historical biography. Almost surely, however, it was produced in a religious context, as is evident from the use of such words as devoted, offered, charitable. In any case, this passage illustrates the literary power of twentieth-century English, a language full of wonderful metaphors. The verb embarked calls to mind an ocean liner leaving for an adventuresome cruise, while cultivate possibly alerts the reader to Marilyn’s botanical interests. In those days North Americans compared time to a bird—probably the eagle—that flies. ... "A few syntactical notes may be of interest to language students. The preposition of had different uses: causal (tired of), superlative (most important of all), and partitive (many of whom). The simple past tense had several aoristic functions: embarked clearly implies determination, while offered suggests Marilyn’s once-for-all, definitive intention. Quite noticeable is the tense variation at the end of the text. The supervisor in his question uses the imperfect tense, 'were doing,' perhaps suggesting monotony, slowness, or even laziness. Offended, Marilyn retorts with a punctiliar and emphatic aorist, 'I painted.'"²
You can read more of the imaginary philologist's findings in Moisés Silva's pointed critique of much so-called "exegesis" in Chapter 1 of Foundations of Contemporary Interpretation. Have you ever heard this sort of exegesis in a sermon, or read it in a commentary, or done this sort of exegesis yourself? Let us not treat the language of Scripture based on a faulty understanding of language!
So as you read the Bible, recognizing the vocabulary words you've memorized, beware of the trap of reading too much into the meanings of words—overinterpretation, as Silva describes it.³ Rather, keep pursuing a more accurate knowledge of Greek, and the way language works, because the better you understand “the nature of language,” the better you’ll be equipped to rightly handle the word of truth (2 Tim 2:15).⁴