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Using the Four Senses of Scripture to Interpret the Exodus

This Rock Volume 16, Number 4   April 2005     Frontispiece By Karl Keating   Letters   What Is Biblical Criticism—and Should We Trust It? By Fr. Peter Funk, O.S.B.   Questions Biblical Criticism Strives to Answer   Using the Four Senses of Scripture to Interpret the Exodus   What Is the Documentary Hypothesis?   Do You Have a Vocation? By Russell Shaw   That Rock By John Pacheco   Evangelizing Your Library By Nancy Carpentier Brown   Shhhh! Insider Tips   Does Your Library Have These?   Who Was Nicholas V?   Step by Step Does Christ’s Church Have Apostolic Succession? By Kenneth J. Howell   Fathers Know Best Peter’s Successors   Brass Tacks Why I Am Not Eastern Orthodox By Jimmy Akin   Damascus Road An Islamic Story By Aghi Clovis with Joanna Bogle   Reviews   Quick Questions    Subscribe    Permissions

Literal (or historical): We better understand salvation history by knowing the story itself and the historical details about the chosen people. In the story of the Exodus, the literal sense is the actual crossing of the Red Sea by the Israelites and the drowning of the forces of Pharaoh.

Christological (or allegorical): We better understand Christ’s death and resurrection by relating it to the literal sense. Luke uses the christological sense when he tells us that Moses and Elijah spoke with Jesus about his "exodus" during the Transfiguration (cf. Luke 9:31). As God freed Israel from Egypt at the Red Sea and honored them as the chosen people, he freed Christ from the bonds of death and raised him to glory.

Moral (or tropological): We better understand God’s will in our lives by relating the literal sense to our lives in Christ. In baptism, Christ "drowns" original sin in the waters.

Anagogical: We better understand the hope of eternal life to which we are called. In our own deaths, we hope to be freed definitively from sin and mortality and raised up in glory. The destruction of death and Hades in the lake of fire (Rev. 20:14–15) is an anagogical reference to the Exodus.

For a good introduction to the four senses, see Making Senses Out of Scripture: Reading the Bible as the First Christians Did by Mark P. Shea (Basilica Press, 1999).

Catholic spiritual writers often have meant their own writings to be read in this way, as Dante said of his own Divine Comedy and St. John of the Cross illustrates in commentaries on his own poetry.