How the New Testament Reads the Old

On the afternoon of the resurrection, two disciples walking to Emmaus were joined by a stranger, and the anchor tells us what he did: 'And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, He explained to them what was written in all the Scriptures about Himself.' Later the same evening he told the gathered disciples that 'Everything must be fulfilled that is written about Me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms' (Luke 24:44), which many take as a way of naming the whole of Israel's scriptures by their parts. Then 'He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures' (24:45). The scriptures Jesus explained were the Hebrew scriptures, the books you have spent this track learning to read.

The apostles took up that work. The New Testament quotes the Old Testament hundreds of times and alludes to it far more often. The quotations come to us in Greek, because the New Testament was written in Greek, and often they follow the Septuagint, the Greek translation made before Christ, which was the Bible of many of their readers. But not always. Sometimes the New Testament follows the Hebrew where it differs from the Septuagint, sometimes it follows neither exactly, and sometimes it combines two verses into one quotation. A student who can open the Hebrew of the verse being quoted can see which of these is happening, and that is the skill this lesson teaches.

This lesson stands beside two others, and it does not repeat them. The Hermeneutics lessons How the New Testament Reads the Old and Typology and Its Limits set out the whole debate about apostolic interpretation, with its scholars and its hard cases, at length. If you have not read them, read them alongside this one. The lesson The Septuagint, in the module before this one, explained where the Greek Old Testament came from and worked Hebrews 10:5 and Psalm 40:6. What this lesson adds is the Hebrew: what you can see for yourself, with an interlinear and a free Septuagint, when a New Testament writer quotes the Old.

Here is a method you can use on any quotation. First, find the source. Most Bibles mark Old Testament quotations with a footnote or a cross reference, and Blue Letter Bible and STEP Bible show cross references for every verse. Second, read the Old Testament verse in its own chapter, in English, and write down what it meant in its own setting, before you think about the New Testament at all. Third, open the verse in the Hebrew interlinear and note the key words, their number, person and suffixes. Fourth, look at the Septuagint of the same verse; STEP Bible includes it, with links to a Greek lexicon. Fifth, compare all three: the Hebrew, the Septuagint, and the New Testament's Greek, which the Koine Greek track taught you to read. You do not need much Greek for this; you need to see whether the words match.

When you do this, you will find one of three things. Sometimes the New Testament follows the Hebrew against the Septuagint. Matthew 2:15 is the famous case, worked below. Sometimes the New Testament follows the Septuagint against the Hebrew. When Jesus answers the tempter in Matthew 4:4, 'Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God', he quotes Deuteronomy 8:3. The Hebrew has כָּל־מוֹצָא פִי־יְהוָה (kol-motsa fi-YHWH), literally everything that goes out of the mouth of the LORD. There is no separate word for word in the Hebrew phrase; the BSB supplies it in Deuteronomy, rightly, for sense. The Septuagint has both every word and God instead of the LORD, and Matthew's Greek follows the Septuagint. The meaning is the same; the wording is the Greek translation's.

And sometimes the New Testament combines verses or follows neither exactly. In Galatians 3:8 Paul quotes the promise to Abraham as 'All nations will be blessed through you.' Through you comes from Genesis 12:3; all nations comes from Genesis 18:18 or 22:18, where the Hebrew has nations rather than the families of 12:3. In Acts 3:25 Peter quotes it as 'Through your offspring all the families of the earth will be blessed', which takes offspring from Genesis 22:18 and families from 12:3. The apostles quote the promise as a whole, gathering its several statements in Genesis into one. That is not carelessness; it is a way of quoting that ancient readers knew, and seeing it helps you understand what they meant.

Doing this for yourself has a pastoral use. Members of your church will meet the claim that the New Testament misquotes the Old, and some will be troubled by it. A student who has compared the Hebrew, the Greek and the New Testament for himself can answer calmly: the apostles often quoted the Greek translation their readers used; sometimes they went back to the Hebrew; sometimes they combined passages; and in each case we can see what they were doing. That is a far better answer than pretending the differences are not there.

Now the hard case. Matthew tells how Joseph took the child and his mother to Egypt and stayed there until the death of Herod. 'This fulfilled what the Lord had spoken through the prophet: "Out of Egypt I called My Son."' (Matthew 2:15). The prophet is Hosea, and Hosea 11:1 in the BSB reads: 'When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called My son.' In its own setting, as the inquiry showed, the verse looks back to the exodus, and the next verse says that the more God called Israel, the farther they departed. Hosea's son is the nation, and the nation was unfaithful. Here is the Hebrew, and what it shows.

In the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC) the verse reads, in seven words: כִּי נַעַר יִשְׂרָאֵל (ki na'ar yisra'el, when Israel was a youth), then וָאֹהֲבֵהוּ (va'ohavehu, and I loved him), a Qal wayyiqtol, first person common singular, of אהב, to love, with a third person masculine singular suffix. Then וּמִמִּצְרַיִם (umimmitsrayim, and out of Egypt), the vav and the preposition min, from, joined to the name of Egypt, as Little Words Joined to Big Ones taught. Then קָרָאתִי (qarati, I called), a Qal perfect, first person common singular, of קרא. And last, לִבְנִי (livni, to my son), the preposition lamed with בֵּן (ben, son), masculine singular, with the first person singular suffix. With a verb of calling, the lamed marks the one called. The son is singular, and he is God's own: my son.

That singular has a history. When God first sent Moses to Pharaoh, he said 'Israel is My firstborn son' (Exodus 4:22). In the WLC that is בְּנִי בְכֹרִי (beni vekhori, my son, my firstborn), a whole nation spoken of as one son. Hosea echoes the exodus story's own language. But the Septuagint, the Greek translation that many of Matthew's readers would have known, does not keep the singular. It reads τὰ τέκνα αὐτοῦ (ta tekna autou, his children), plural and in the third person. That makes the verse unmistakably about the people. Matthew does not follow it. His Greek, τὸν υἱόν μου (ton huion mou, My son), matches the Hebrew. Whatever Matthew is doing, he is not inheriting a translation's slip. He has gone to the Hebrew, or to a Greek rendering close to it, and the singular is the whole point of his use.

Two more things in the Hebrew are worth noticing, and both are things you can check yourself. First, Hosea's chapter does not leave the exodus in the past. It threatens a return to Egypt (11:5), and it ends with a promise that the scattered people 'will come trembling like birds from Egypt and like doves from the land of Assyria. Then I will settle them in their homes, declares the LORD' (11:11). The exodus of verse 1 has become the shape of a deliverance still to come. Second, the language of being brought out of Egypt is used in the Balaam oracles both of the people and of a single figure. 'God brought them out of Egypt' (Numbers 23:22) has a plural suffix: מוֹצִיאָם (motsi'am), a Hiphil participle with them. 'God brought him out of Egypt' (Numbers 24:8) has a singular: מוֹצִיאוֹ (motsi'o), the same participle with him, and the nearest figure is 'His king' in 24:7. The Septuagint of Numbers 24:7 goes further and reads a man will come out of his seed. These are observations, not conclusions. What follows is the argument about what they mean.

Everyone agrees on the starting point: Hosea 11:1, in its own setting, speaks of Israel brought out of Egypt in the past, and it is not on its surface a prediction about the Messiah. Matthew says the return of Jesus from Egypt fulfilled it. What is Matthew doing? Christian scholars who hold a high view of scripture have given three main answers, and you should be able to state each in a form its own defenders would accept. Each is set out here with its texts, its strongest arguments and the objection its critics press.

The first answer is typology. On this view, Matthew is not claiming that Hosea predicted Jesus. He is claiming that the history of Israel, God's son, was a pattern that comes to its fullness in Jesus, the true Son, who in his own life repeats and completes Israel's story. Writers on this view often call it recapitulation, a word as old as Irenaeus; R. T. France set out this reading of Jesus as the true Israel in Jesus and the Old Testament (1971), and Leonhard Goppelt's study Typos (1939, in English 1982) described the New Testament's characteristic reading of the Old as a tracing of real historical correspondences that rise to their fulfilment in Christ. The texts its defenders cite are Matthew's own: Jesus, like Israel, comes out of Egypt (2:15), passes through water (3:13-17), and is tested in the wilderness, for forty days rather than forty years (4:1-2), answering each temptation from Deuteronomy, where Israel had failed. Greg Beale, in an article in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society in 2012, added that Hosea himself had already turned the exodus into a pattern of a future deliverance, as 11:10-11 shows, so that Matthew is following a direction the prophet set. John Sailhamer, in the Westminster Theological Journal in 2001, pressed further, arguing that Hosea was drawing on Numbers 24:8, where the one brought out of Egypt is a king, so that the verse already had a messianic edge in Hosea's own reading. The strength of the typological account is that it takes Hosea's meaning seriously and Matthew's seriously, and gives a reading method that can be taught and checked. Its critics reply that a correspondence does not by itself show that God intended it, and that the word fulfil is being stretched beyond its ordinary sense; Walter Kaiser, who argues for a single meaning intended by the human author, has pressed this point, and Sailhamer's reading of Numbers 24 is itself disputed. Kaiser's own answer, in The Uses of the Old Testament in the New (1985), is that the title son already bound Israel and the coming Messiah together in a corporate solidarity, so that Matthew draws out what Hosea's word meant rather than adding to it.

The second answer is a fuller sense, in Latin sensus plenior. On this view, God, the divine author of scripture, intended a meaning in Hosea's words that Hosea himself did not clearly intend, and that meaning became visible only in the light of later revelation, in this case the life of Jesus. The term goes back to the 1920s; the Roman Catholic scholar Raymond Brown gave it its standard form in a dissertation of 1955. Its defenders point to texts in which human speakers say more than they know. John 11:51 says of Caiaphas that he 'did not say this on his own. Instead, as high priest that year, he was prophesying that Jesus would die for the nation.' And 1 Peter 1:10-12 says that the prophets 'searched and investigated carefully' (1:10), 'trying to determine the time and setting to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing' (1:11), and that 'they were not serving themselves, but you' (1:12). The strength of the view is its honesty about Hosea: it does not pretend Hosea meant Jesus, and it locates the further meaning in God rather than in the reader's ingenuity. It also explains why the apostles' readings seem both surprising and right. Its critics, Kaiser again among them, reply that a meaning the author did not intend is not a meaning of the text at all but an addition to it, and that the view gives no way to tell a true fuller sense from an imagined one except the say-so of the New Testament. Its defenders accept the last point gladly: only inspired writers may declare a fuller sense, which is a restraint rather than a licence.

The third answer is that Matthew is reading as a Jewish interpreter of the Second Temple period read. On this view, the apostles used the interpretive methods of their own time and people, methods visible in the Dead Sea Scrolls and later in the rabbis. The commentary on Habakkuk found at Qumran, known as 1QpHab, applies the prophet's words line by line to the community's own leaders and enemies, introducing each with a formula that its interpretation concerns them. Krister Stendahl, in The School of St. Matthew (1954), compared Matthew's formula quotations with this kind of reading, and Richard Longenecker, in Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period (1975), argued that the apostles used the recognised techniques of their day. Peter Enns, in Inspiration and Incarnation (2005), argued that the apostles read the Old Testament in the light of its goal in Christ, a reading he called christotelic, so that their readings are conclusions drawn from the resurrection rather than procedures anyone could run forward from Hosea. The strength of this view is historical: it takes seriously that Matthew was a first-century Jew and reads him among his own people, and it explains why some apostolic readings feel strange to modern readers without calling them wrong. Its critics, Beale prominent among them, reply that if the apostles' method was invalid their conclusions are left without support, and that the apostles argue as if they expect to be followed. Longenecker's own answer was that Christians are bound to the apostles' faith and doctrine but not necessarily to their specific exegetical techniques, which leaves open whether a preacher today may read as Matthew read.

These three are not always rivals. Many scholars combine them: a typological reading of Israel's history, set within the reading habits of Matthew's world, and grounded in a conviction that God directed both the history and the text. The lines between them are drawn differently by different writers, and the volume Three Views on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (2008), edited by Kenneth Berding and Jonathan Lunde, lets Kaiser, Darrell Bock and Enns set out and answer one another's positions. The Hebrew alone will not choose among these views for you. What it does is rule out the two easy answers. It rules out the claim that Hosea 11:1 is a straightforward prediction, because the verb is a past tense in a chapter about Israel's unfaithfulness. And it rules out the claim that Matthew simply misread a Greek mistranslation, because Matthew's singular matches the Hebrew against the Septuagint.

Some things here are settled, and you can teach them with confidence. Hosea 11:1, in its own setting, speaks of Israel. Its word for son is singular and echoes Exodus 4:22, where the nation is God's firstborn son. The Septuagint makes it plural; Matthew keeps the Hebrew singular. Hosea 11 itself moves from the first exodus to a promised return from Egypt and Assyria. The New Testament writers read the Old Testament in the light of the resurrection and say so; Luke 24 presents their reading as taught by the risen Christ. And no major Christian doctrine rests on Matthew 2:15 alone.

What is not settled is the account of Matthew's method, and therefore the question of whether a preacher today may make the same kind of move. Defenders of typology answer that we may, carefully, following the patterns the New Testament itself establishes. Defenders of a fuller sense answer that only an inspired writer may declare one, and that we may teach what the apostles declared. Those who stress Second Temple exegesis answer that we should hold the apostles' conclusions and be modest about imitating their techniques. You should be able to state each in its own terms, and the Homiletics lesson Preaching the Old Testament shows how preachers in all three camps actually travel from an Old Testament text to Christ without allegory.

When you preach Matthew 2, you need not settle the debate to preach the passage faithfully. You can say: Hosea was speaking about Israel, God's son, whom God brought out of Egypt and who went on to be unfaithful. Matthew sees in Jesus the Son who comes out of Egypt as Israel did, and who goes on to be faithful where Israel was not. That much is common ground among all three accounts, and it is the heart of what Matthew is saying. If someone asks how Matthew could use Hosea that way, you can show them Hosea 11:10-11, Exodus 4:22 and the singular son, and tell them honestly that Christians explain Matthew's method in more than one way.

Your practical step this week. Work one New Testament quotation through the five steps of section 2. Use Matthew 4:4 and Deuteronomy 8:3 if you have no other. Write the Old Testament verse's meaning in its own chapter first. Then copy the key Hebrew words from the interlinear, with their parsing, and note what the Septuagint and the New Testament have at the same points. Write a line saying which of the three outcomes you found: following the Hebrew, following the Greek, or combining or following neither. Finally, write two sentences you could say to a member of your church who has been told that the New Testament misquotes the Old, using what you found.