Timothy to Hebrews - The Preterist Archive

Hebrews I. 10-12. 317
favour of the old covenant and the Old Testament Israel, by had
and untenable arguments. That supposition is all the more improbable
when it is considered, that the author has evidently quoted all
these passages not from memory, but has carefully copied them from
the LXX., so that he could not possibly be ignorant of their original
context. In general, however, it is a very superficial and shallow
view that would lead us all at once to consider the use of Old
Testament passages in the New Testament as parallel with the
exegetico-dogmatic method of argumentation pursued by the Eabbins.
The apostles and apostolical men have, indeed, exhibited in
their epistles such a freedom from the spirit of Jewish tradition,
such an originality and youthful vigour of new life, such a subtlety
and depth of psychological and historical intuition, and the whole
system of Christianity in its freshness and originality stands in such
contrast to the old insipid anti-Messianic Judaism, and appears so
thoroughly a new structure from the foundation resting on the depths
of Old Testament revelation, and so far from being a mere enlargement
of the Pharisaico-Rabbinical pseudo-Judaism, that it were
indeed wonderful, if the same apostolical men had in their interpretation
of Old Testament passages held themselves dependent on the
Jewish exegesis and hermeneutical method. In reality, however, the
apostolical exegesis of the Old Testament stands in directest opposition
to the Jewish-Rabbinical, so that one can scarcely imagine a
more complete and diametrical difference. In the Rabbinical interpretation
it is always single words—studiously separated from the
context—from which inferences, arbitrary, of course, are drawn. The
Rabbins affirm, for example, that when a man lies three days in the
grave, his entrails are torn from his body and cast in the face of the
dead ;
for it is written in Mai. ii. 3, "I wdll also cast the filth of
your festivals in your face." (Sepher joreh chattaim, num. QQ.)
'Nay, the later Rabbinism, as a direct result of this arbitrary procedure,
went the length of drawing inferences even from single letters.
They taught, for example, the transmigration of the soul, and that
the souls of men ever continue to live in men ; thus the life of Cain
passed into Jethro, his spirit into Korah, his soul into the Egyptians
(Ex. ii. 12, seq.), for it is written Gen. iv. 24 ^p tp^ and % p, and »
are the first letters of Jethro, Korah, and 'iti^a. (Jalkut rubeni,
num. 9.) The genuine pharisaical principle which forms the basis
of all this, is, that the letter as such is what is most significant. The
New Testament writers, on the contrary—as we hq,ve seen in reference
to Heb. i. 6-9, and as we shall see more and more as we proceed
with the epistle—drew all their arguments from the spirit of the
passages considered in their connexion. Nothing at all is inferred
frDm the mere letters of the passages quoted. In Ps. xlv. there is
not a syllable about angels. When the author, notwithstanding,