A Model for the Many Senses of Scripture: From the Literal to the Spiritual in Genesis 22 with Thomas Aquinas

Introduction: Many Senses Require Many Translations

• On the mountain the Lord appeared (NETS, Gen. 22:14b)

• On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided (RSV)¹

• In the mount of the LORD it shall be seen (KJV)

• On the mountain the LORD will see (NAB)

• ἐν τῷ ὄρει κύριος ὤφθη (LXX)

• in monte Dominus videtur (Nova Vulgata)

• in monte Dominus videbit (St. Jerome’s Vulgate)

In his book Abraham’s Curse, Bruce Chilton argues that in Gen. 22:14b, “the Septuagint’s Greek renders the Hebrew text” correctly (i.e., “with Yahweh as the subject of the verb”), whereas English translations like the King James Version (KJV) prefer to imply that the ram is the verbal subject. Chilton contends that “This is a case of translators caring more about doctrine than wording, and attempting to legislate what the Bible can say.”²

Chilton’s textual exegesis does have some value. He notes that “Contextually as well as grammatically, God is the subject: Yahweh ‘was seen’ on Moriah, liberating Isaac by means of divine intervention.”³ But with his polemics against the KJV, he fails to affirm the rich polysemy of the passage. He replaces one literal reading with another and then argues as if the two are at odds. But Scripture has many senses, a truth famously expressed in the medieval distich of Augustine of Dacia, best known in the version of Nicholas of Lyra: “The literal sense teaches what happened; what you believe, the allegorical; the moral, what you should do; where you are going, the anagogical.”⁴ Therefore Chilton is wrong to impute bad motives to anyone who would attempt to unfold the spiritual sense of a passage (“caring more about doctrine”), or even to anyone who would note that a passage has more than one literal meaning.

Chilton’s own insistence on uncovering the univocal original meaning of a passage (through his preferred historical method of “generative exegesis”)⁵ is excessively literal, as if recourse to grammar would allow one “to legislate what the Bible can say.” When Chilton says “Yahweh ‘was seen’ on Moriah,” he is not contending that God was seen directly, literally, but rather interpreting the metaphorical or parabolical sense of the phrase “Yahweh was seen” (in Gen. 22:14b), because he glosses the meaning of the metaphor as “liberating Isaac by means of divine intervention”;⁶ that is, God is seen indirectly, cognitively, rather than literally with the eyes. Because literally seeing a ram is not opposed to cognitively understanding God’s action, the KJV, pace Chilton, can be defended contextually. To my mind, the Revised Standard Version (RSV), echoing the KJV, does the best job of rendering the Hebrew text literally, with “On the mount of the lord it shall be provided,” because this leaves open the many senses of the third person singular “it,” to be unfolded by exegesis. Thus more than one translation is required in order to appreciate all the significations being deployed in the treatment of “seeing” in Gen. 22:8 and 22:14. “It shall be provided”: More than one univocal sense of the “it” has to be uncovered by exegesis in this Scripture, in order to see what “it” is all about.

To justify my opinion that the RSV most felicitously translates the Hebrew, I would like to prepare the way to a conclusion in which I compare the Septuagint’s translation (which follows Chilton’s preferred rendering of the context) with the Vulgate Latin translations. The path toward this conclusion will show that Chilton’s polemics, indicative of an exegetical attitude that is hostile to an appreciation of the many senses of Scripture, fail to see how the RSV translation is also defensible as keeping the reader’s mind open to the many senses of the Scriptural passage. But first things first. With the help of St. Thomas Aquinas, let me distinguish the various senses of Scripture and then point out how they are all exemplified here, all being signified by the text.