Exegesis and eisegesis
A message for Advent from, The Very Rev’d Paul Kennington, the interim Dean of Chelmsford:
Sorry to use such technical words right at the beginning! Simply put ‘exegesis’ means looking at the Bible and trying to discover what the original setting was and ‘eisegesis’ is not quite as simplistic as reading our own agendas into texts, but it does involve reading the Bible to see how it speaks to our own present day situations.
Nowhere is this more obvious that in Advent.
Christians read Micah and Isaiah at carol services with a clear assumption that the prophets were writing about the future birth of Jesus (eisegesis) whereas the original prophets were talking about God’s action in their own 8th C BCE contexts (exegesis).
Jewish scholars look at our interpretations of Micah 5:2 and Isaiah 7.14 with a certain amount of amazement at our ingenuity. These texts mean something quite different to them.
The great Jewish master Yohanan ben Bag Bag said of the Torah, “Turn it, and turn it, for all is contained in it” (Tanna De-Vei Eliahu Zuta 17:8), and the Christian tradition says “The word of God is alive and active”. (Hebrews 4:12). Both traditions warn us against limiting scripture to one interpretation only and invite us to treat every encounter with the Bible as the first day of Advent – a day when God does something new.