A manuscript in Riyadh’s Al-Faisal Museum for Arab-Islamic Art outlines four Arab-Islamic teaching methods: hearing (faithful transmission), riddles (intellectual stimulation), poetry (linking knowledge, grammar, and memory), and lexicons (structuring content). Applying these to the Bible, the text must be transmitted interpretively, balancing historical and theological readings. Jesus’ parables challenge and provoke, prophetic discourse remains vital, and biblical reading should be creative, drawing on tradition. Understanding biblical words requires more than dictionaries; we must grasp their intertextual force and historical depth.
I saw this book in the Al-Faisal Museum for Arab-Islamic Art in Riyadh. It is described as a manuscript that sheds light on the “most important teaching methods employed by scholars and educators of Arab-Islamic civilization.” It’s not dated, but it’s going to be pretty old.
The notice with it outlines four of these methods:
1. The most important is “hearing”: “to document the books and collections and faithfully transmit their content.”
2. Riddles are used “to stimulate intellect and strengthen memory.”
3. Poetry fosters “connections between knowledge, grammar, and memory.”
4. By means of lexicons scholars “arrange linguistic content for easy reference.”
I have been wondering what we can do with these as readers of the Jewish-Christian Bible—naturally, from a narrative-historical perspective.
1. We basically take it for granted now that the Bible is an accurate documentation of the Jewish scriptures and the witness of the earliest church to the person of Jesus and his immediate significance for Jews and gentiles in the ancient world. Text-critical discussions continue; some questions of dating, literary integrity, and authorship remain unresolved. But there are no serious objections to working with the canonical text as it is. At least, I have no serious objections.
But what it means faithfully to transmit its content is very much a live issue if we recognise that this is not a mechanical exercise but a matter of interpretation. We are all post-structuralists now, to varying degrees. But also the modern church has inherited a deeply divided hermeneutic. Do we read historically or theologically? Resolving that tension is probably the biggest hermeneutical challenge that we face.
2. There are more important things to be said about the parables of Jesus than that they “stimulate intellect and strengthen memory,” but it’s a good place to start. More broadly, it is part of prophetic discourse to provoke, mystify, tease, enrage, disturb, etc. That is true for biblical prophecy, but it should also be true for the prophetic discourse of the modern church in a period of crisis, keeping in mind that such prophetic discourse was directed more often against the covenant people than against outsiders.
3. Poetry or poiēsis is a “making,” a creative activity: “The heavens give an account of divine glory, and the firmament proclaims a making (poiēsin) of his hands” (Psalm.18:2* LXX). We could say that the cosmos generates its own poetry about the poetic activity of God and the psalmist has rendered this poetry about poetry in his own poetic language.
Anyway, the point is that our reading of the Bible should be a creative activity at the intersection of our knowledge of the world, the multiple grammars that make up the text, and the memory of the community, which we call tradition.
Normally, I would dismiss tradition because more often than not it gets in the way of a clear understanding of the text. But any good historical reading of the Bible must recognise that the prophetic mind makes sense of a present crisis by invoking older narratives. Jesus’ use of the language of gehenna in connection with the foreseen siege of Jerusalem, for example, makes use of a narrative “grammar” drawn from Jeremiah.
So nowadays, we may go back to stories of exile to make sense of the alienation and marginalisation of the western church after Christendom, or to the story of the flood to make sense of a climate crisis.
Our knowledge of the world is remote from the grammars of scripture, but by a prophetic recourse to community memories we generate a new poetry to explain where the living God is in our present evil age.
4. Finally, of course, we need lexicons to tell us what words mean, though I would makes this more an exercise in intertextuality. It’s not enough just to look up the meaning of a word in a dictionary. Words are blown along by strong winds of usage—stories, memories, chronicles, visions, arguments, traditions. We won’t understand the words of Jesus or of his followers well if we don’t feel the force of those winds on our faces.
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