WORD STUDY – DON’T FENCE ME IN

Micah 2:12-13: “I will surely assemble, O Jacob, all of thee; I will surely gather the remnant of Israel; I will put them together as the sheep of Bozrah, as the flock in the midst of their fold: they shall make a great noise by reason of the multitude of men. The breaker is come up before them: they have broken up, and have passed through the gate, and are gone out by it: and their king shall pass before them, and the Lord on the head of them.”

These two verses are very rich in Hebrew imagery. Jewish Oral Tradition explains that this is a picture of a shepherd penning up his sheep for the night. He quickly builds a barrier by throwing up a makeshift rock fence against the side of a hill. The next morning in order to let the sheep out he will make a hole (a break) by tossing some of the stones aside. He steps through the gate with the sheep following close behind. The sheep have been penned up all night in cramped quarters. They will push and shove trying to get through at once and thus will break the gate further in their eagerness to get out and into green pastures. Finally they break through out into the open and rush after the shepherd.

Now when we look at this passage the breaker and the king are one and the same. However, in rabbinic interpretation the breaker is interpreted to be Elijah, and their king is the Messiah.

Keeping this in mind, let us jump to the New Testament. I have always been troubled by the verse in Matthew 11:12: “And from the days of John the Baptist until the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.”

You see a common rabbinic teaching on this passage in Micah 2 is that Elijah would come first as the breaker, the one who would make the first hole in the rock. He goes before the Messiah to prepare the way for Him. The Messiah is the king who follows Elijah and leads the sheep through the gate to the kingdom of God. The ones following the Messiah will be so anxious to pass through the gate that they will deliberately widen the gate like the sheep anxious to get out of their pen and to green pastures.

The word violent in the Matthew passage in the Greek is biastes which carries the idea of breaking forth. In the Aramaic the word used is qetira which has the idea of breaking away from a restraint. In its Semitic origin it has the idea of a circle. Later carrying the idea of being encircled like by a fence. Curiously, I found the word used in Jewish literature to take it further to being fenced into the law and breaking away from the law.

As this teaching in Micah was a common teaching in Oral Tradition, it is very possible that Jesus was alluding to this passage in the Old Testament when He spoke of taking the kingdom of God by breaking out or removing any restraints of the Law. The rendering of the Greek word biastes or the Aramaic word qetira as violent is unfortunate and misleading as it gives the idea of a negative aggression rather than the idea of an anxiousness to move away from the Law and embrace the Messiah who came to fulfill the Law.

In other words, John the Baptist is the breaker. He makes the breach in the rock gate and goes forth. He has opened the way. He is the Elijah the sages suggest in the Micah 2. Jesus now as the King leads the people through only they are so anxious to enter the kingdom, like the sheep they break through the gate leaving behind the Law and rushing to the Messiah and eternal life through Him, the one to whom the Law of God pointed to.

Jesus does not directly refer to Himself as the Shepherd, but any Jew listening will know who He is referring to.

So, if Jesus is referring to the teaching in Oral Tradition, then He is not talking about taking the kingdom by violence, but is alluding to this Old Testament imagery which every Jew knew, that the people or the sheep will be so anxious to break out of their old traditions to follow the Messiah and enter the kingdom of Heaven that they will biastes or qetira, that is they will break down the narrow gate and widen it so that more and more can rush through.

Oh well it does make me feel a little better about this passage in Matthew, but soft, I am claiming no expertise on the New Testament.

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