The Finer Details of Scripture: At the Table with Tracy McKenzie

Why do you enjoy roasting coffee?

For me, coffee roasting is about pulling the finer notes and the finer details out of a coffee bean. Coffee beans can be exploited, or they can be curated, and you can find little notes in coffee. We had our coffee roasting company at one point here in town, and even for our newest endeavor, a podcast, we chose a coffee cup as our first swag item.

As a matter of fact, studying the Old Testament is a lot like coffee roasting in that you can exploit the text for your own purposes, or you can kind of draw out the details. And this, for me, is a passion: to draw out the details in the text and how it relates to our lives. This takes a certain practice; it takes some study. It takes some know-how of how these texts are put together. But once you do that, you find out these texts are for us and about us.

What are a few things people should know about textual relationships in the Hebrew Bible?

Textual relationships are one of those details that you can draw out, and the interesting thing about textual relationships in the Hebrew Bible is that the texts — that is, the literature, the Bible, these writings — are literally composed of these textual relationships.

This is one of the reasons why it’s so important to know this because the Hebrew language loves the way that the words relate to one another. One word will be a hyperlink, so to speak, to another word. The authors plan this and convey meaning through this. Unfortunately, English doesn’t like repetition. So English, because of its style, sometimes minimizes or displaces those repetitions and that textual relationship altogether.

One word will be a hyperlink, so to speak, to another word. The authors plan this and convey meaning through this.

What are some of the biggest hurdles for people who want to rightly interpret and apply the Old Testament?

There are several hurdles. One of the hurdles is that these books are often longer and more complex than, let’s say, Ephesians or Timothy. Those books are short — five, six, four chapters — whereas a book like Isaiah is 66 chapters. Not only is it longer, but also it’s filled with seemingly challenging poetry. And because of its genre, which is much different than what we anticipate, we really struggle with how to make sense of those differences.

Again, we all get a New Testament letter because we’ve read letters. We know didactic teaching, or we know the theological treatises that Paul has given us in the New Testament. But a book like Jeremiah that has prose and narrative and poetry without seeming connection between these — it’s very strange for us. A book like Job? Again, with nothing in the middle but poetry? Very strange. So that’s one of the reasons, and maybe the main reason, that people struggle with these texts.

With those challenges in mind, what advice would you give someone who wants to become a better student of the Scriptures?

The first thing I would want to say is that we have to read the text. A lot of times, we overlook this basic facet. We have to read the text, and we have to become very familiar with it. I would say that, although learning Hebrew is a challenge, it’s the easiest way to discern the intentionality in the text. This is one of the things I’m very passionate about: looking for intentionality in the text.

One of the challenges or hurdles of reading is that oftentimes when we come to the Old Testament — let’s just say the Torah of Moses, the Pentateuch — we are expecting a certain genre, partly because we’ve been trained to read it in a certain way. And if we’re not looking at the details, we’ll never break out of that supposed genre into the genre of what the text really is. So, when you read it and reread it and reread it, and hopefully you can even access Hebrew, then you’ll begin to see some of these details. And you’ll see why your presuppositions that perhaps you’re bringing to the text were not quite right, and you can straighten those out. Then the beautiful thing is that you get to hear from God.

You’ve been here as a student and also as a professor. Why study Old Testament and Hebrew at Southeastern?

For me, one of the things that I desperately need is to hear from God. I desperately want to hear God’s plan for his people, right now, in this time, in what the New Testament also calls these last days. What does God have planned for his people? What does he say to his people? And what does he say even to me individually? I think that the way to access that on a regular basis is to understand the intentionality in the text.

What I’m encouraging students to do, especially young students, is to take on the challenge of learning Hebrew. If you’re going to handle the text for the next 30, 40, or 50 years, should God grant you that — whether you’re going to be a pastor, a missionary, an evangelist, a counselor, a mom, a dad — if you’re going to handle the Scriptures, then wouldn’t it be worth studying the languages so that you can access firsthand what these Spirit-inspired authors were trying to do with these texts?

We need to hear from God. We need to make sure that it’s God’s voice we’re hearing and not our culture’s voice. And I think the best way to do that is to, again, engage the Scriptures in the original languages.

We need to make sure that it’s God’s voice we’re hearing and not our culture’s voice. And I think the best way to do that is to, again, engage the Scriptures in the original languages.

In your own personal story, what precipitated this study of the Old Testament?

I remember when I was an MDiv student right here at Southeastern. My wife and I moved here in 2001, and I knew as soon as I got on campus that I wanted to invest in the original languages. I decided to go on for a PhD, and I asked my mentor at that point, John Sailhamer, whether I should do the Old Testament or the New Testament. He said, ‘Tracy, as I looked at the New Testament, and when I really studied the New Testament, I saw all the times that they were not only quoting the Old Testament but also the myriad of allusions that they had to Old Testament literature.”

And as I began to really study the Old Testament, what I saw is that the Old Testament itself is full of these allusions to earlier Scriptures, or even to Scriptures within Scriptures, and that this is how the authors were making meaning.

Do you have any examples of the importance of textual relationships?

I think of Genesis 5: this genealogy which most people would see as boring and pedantic and want to skip over. But in this genealogy, you see a pattern, and the pattern can be seen in any version. It can be seen in the English, or it can be seen in the Hebrew, and it involves textual relationships and the way that the texts are relating to one another. So you see this pattern, but at a very important juncture, the pattern breaks at the 10th generation. Noah is the son who breaks the pattern.

Noah’s name is Noach, and the author says, “This one (Noach) will give us relief (nicham) from our pain and our toil from the ground which the Lord cursed.” He refers back to Genesis 3 and the judgment pronounced upon man and woman and the curse upon the ground. But it’s this relationship between Noach and this verb nicham that becomes very important. Then in the ensuing verses, when we see Noah’s name mentioned again in Genesis 6, it says, “But Noah found grace in the eyes of God,” and grace is chen, the exact flipping of Noah’s name. So again, it’s a pun that really makes up a textual relationship. That’s just one kind of textual relationship. If you don’t know Hebrew, unfortunately, you miss that. This tells us the special case that Noah is; he’s going to reverse the curse. The curse on the ground is going to be reversed by Noah. I’m tempted not to tell you how he’s going to reverse it, but I’ll just give you the answer really quickly.

First of all, Noah’s seed, which ends up being Shem and then Abraham and then Isaac, then Jacob, then Judah, then eventually David, and eventually Jesus of Nazareth, is the one who is going to restore all things and reverse the curse. But there is another way that Noah reverses the curse.

When he gets off the ark, he offers a pleasing aroma. The word “pleasing” there is again another part of Noah’s name. It’s a nichoach, a sacrifice that the Lord is pleased with, and the Lord promises never to destroy the earth again, and that could even have implications for our view of what or where heaven and the restored cosmos will be. So you can see that these things are very theological. They’re very important, and I think most students, when they see that the Old Testament is about the days in which we live and about the church as God’s people, become very excited.