This same literal interpretation was a marked feature of Old Testament interpretation. Jerome, in rejecting the strict literal method of interpretation, “calls the literal interpretation ‘Jewish,’ implies that it may easily become heretical and repeatedly says it is inferior to the ‘spiritual.'”1 It would seem that the literal method and Jewish interpretation were synonymous in Jerome’s mind.
Rabbinism came to have such a hold on the Jewish nation from the union of the authority of priest and king in one line. The method employed in Rabbinism by the scribes was not an allegorical method, but a literal method, which, in its literalism, circumvented all the spiritual requirements of the law. Although they arrived at false conclusions, it was not the fault of the literal method but the misapplication of the method by the exclusion of any more than the bare letter of what was written. Briggs, after summarizing the thirteen rules that governed Rabbinical interpretation, says:
“Some of the rules are excellent, and so far as the practical logic of the times went, cannot be disputed. The fault of Rabbinical exegesis was less in the rules than in their application, although latent fallacies are not difficult to discover in them, and they do not sufficiently guard against slips of argument” [italics mine].2
It must be concluded, in spite of al lthe fallacies of the Rabbinism of the Jews, that they followed a literal method of interpretation.
J. Dwight Pentecost,Things to Come: A Study in Biblical Eschatology (Zondervan Publishing House, 1958), 16–17.
notes
- F. W. Farrar, History of Interpretation (E. P. Dutton & Co., 1886), 47–48 .
- Charles Augustus Briggs, General Introduction to the Study of Holy Scripture (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), 431.
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To be clear, this passage isn’t presented here as an endorsement but as an illustration of how far the (modified) Dispensational approach to Scripture is from 1) the New Testament way of reading Scripture; 2) the historic Christian (and Reformation) way of reading Scripture.
In case anyone might say that, well this is just Pentecost’s opinion it’s worth knowing that this was a fairly standard Dispensational text used at Dallas Seminary for a long time. My copy contains an introduction by John Walvoord endorsing the book.