Issue 27 Changing ChurchBlog | Old Testament: Digging for gold Part 2: Drama by Helen Paynter
Old Testament: Digging for gold Part 2: Drama by Helen Paynter
Author: Andy PeckPost Date: 16.06.21
How do we read the stories of the Old Testament? And how do we preach them?
The first time I taught Hebrew, it was in a university rather than a theological college, to a small class of highly motivated classics students. I think only one student in the class was a Christian; certainly it seemed that very few knew anything about the story of Samson, which was the Hebrew text I was reading with them. Several years down the line now, I suspect that not many of those students remember much of the Hebrew that I taught them. What they may remember was that slightly crazy lady who kept throwing out her arms and proclaiming, ‘Ve-hinneh’!
Ve-hinneh might just be my favourite Hebrew word. Sadly, our English translations often omit it – though the King James and the ESV often translate it for us. It comes out as, ‘And behold’! But actually many Hebrew narratives are peppered with it. And it serves at least two important narrative functions.
First, it drops us down into the drama, so that we see things from the point of view of a character in the story. The point of view of the biblical narrator, most of the time, is what we call a bird’s eye perspective – perhaps this could be better described as the ‘God’s eye perspective’. We see things, as it were, from above. We know things that characters within the narrative don’t know. The narrator is omniscient, and all-seeing. But at moments of tension, surprise or drama, our narrator may use this little word ve-hinneh to drop our perspective right down into the story. Using the Samson story as an example, the first time we see this word ve-hinneh is when Samson is going down to Timnah, and suddenly a lion comes roaring towards him (Judges 14:5). One minute we are dispassionately viewing the comings and goings of Samson, from above as it were, the next we are standing beside him with a lion roaring towards us and our hearts thudding.
The next time we meet this same word is just a few verses later (v.8), when Samson is going back to Timnah a second time. He turns aside to see the carcass of the lion, and behold – ve-hinneh – there is a swarm of bees in there, with honey! Once again, we see the world through Samson’s eyes. We experience the emotion he is experiencing, in this case surprise.
