A famous Talmudic scholar reading an essay composed from a thread that took place here seven years ago,
Exegeting Circumcision, could read no further when he came to the exegesis of Genesis 17:12 that interprets the Hebrew word
semonat שמנת as the construct form of "fertility" rather than the construct form of the Hebrew word "eight." For this particular scholar, even though the exegesis breaks no rules of Hebrew grammar, the fact that it took the exegesis so far from Jewish tradition made it unreadable.
Is the Torah and its radiation outward via the tradition the final word of God to Israel or is there in the Messianic or apocalyptic view a new revelation, a new form of the word of God?
Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, p. 53.
As pointed out by Jewish Professors like Gershom Scholem, and Moshe Idel, the nature of the Hebrew text of the Torah lends itself to multiple readings. The traditional Jewish reading is one viable reading. But it's not the only viable reading such that the exegesis found in the essay,
Exegeting Circumcision, doesn't claim to be the correct, or right (as though there's only one) exegesis of the text. It's clearly a new reading of the text made possible by using the so-called new-testament as an exegetical prism.
What the essay makes clear, is that the Hebrew of the Torah text lends itself not only to a unique, newfangled, reading of the text, but, as the essay shows, a reading that (though it would disturb any Jewish reader who finishes the essay) unties knots, or answers to oddities, in the traditional interpretation, therein implying the possibility of seminal elements having been purposely hidden in the traditional reading of the text.
Importantly, the hidden elements don't betray the traditional reading so much as they free themselves from that reading for those who can read them and swallow what they're reading. The traditional reading isn't so much wrong, or incorrect, but merely incomplete.
When the Jewish guardians of the text imply that the traditional rendering of the text is complete and singular, that the reading given to them is the whole truth, that there's nothing hidden, they're distorting their own instructions since the meaning of the "decrees" חקים (required in order dig deeper into the meaning of the text) have, by their own understanding (that is, the understanding of the Jewish sages), been hidden from them by God until the life, times (and perhaps even death), of King Messiah, at which time the new revelation noted by Scholem will have arrived.
John
