"Stretch out Your Hand!" Echo and Metalepsis in Mark's Sabbath Healing Controversy

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) (1) And he went in again into the synagogue. And a man was there having the hand withered. (2) And they were watching him, whether on the Sabbaths he would heal him, so that they might accuse him. (3) And he says to the man with the withered hand, "Arise into the midst." (4) And he says to them, "Is it authorized on the Sabbaths to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?" But they were silent. (5) And looking around at them with anger, co-aggrieved ... at the hardness of their heart, he says to the man, "Stretch out your hand." And he stretched it out, and his hand was restored. (6) And going out the Pharisees immediately gave counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him. (Mark 3:1-6; my literal translation)1 Traditional preaching typically presents Mark 3:1-6-probably the first extant Sabbath healing controversy story-as articulating conflict between a new religion of grace and freedom (Christianity) and an old religion of hide-bound legalisms (proto-Judaism). Modern critical scholarship largely treats it in a similarly antinomian and supersessionist fashion, leaving unresolved a host of exegetical issues, including (a) the meaning of the withered hand; (b) the insistence on healing an ostensibly chronic, nonlethal affliction on the Sabbath; (c) the escalation, in Jesus' central challenge, of the classic choice between "life and death" (cf. Deut 30:15-19) to one between "saving life and killing" (especially perplexing in view of the ailment ostensibly at issue), and of that between "good and evil" to one between "doing good or doing evil" (especially provocative in a Sabbath context, where choices are conventionally framed in terms of "doing" versus "not doing"); (d) the adveraries' silent response to a provocation that is so clearly open to counterattack (see, e.g., Luke 13:14); and (e) numerous peculiarities in Mark's Greek usage not easily explainable as Semitism, Latinism or other interlanguage phenomena-especially the odd reference to Jesus as a "co-aggrieved" party. A study of the passage's intertextuality provides cogent answers to all these questions. It reveals two distinct but interwoven strands of allusion to the Septuagint (LXX) version of Hebrew Scripture. The "healing" narrative's echoes of Exodus 14 suggest that it is to be read as a haggadic midrash (or narrative "riff ") on the story of the Reed Sea crossing, with the extended hand evoking the parting and subsequent restoration of the sea's waters. Depending on their response to this challenge, participants (and listeners) align themselves typologically either as Israelites, moving toward liberation, or as Pharaonic retainers, fighting to maintain an oppressive status quo. An explanation for this typology emerges from a second strand of echoic allusions, woven into the "controversy" portion of the story. Referencing halakic (legalparenetic) material in the book of Deuteronomy, these allusions imply a choice for or against covenant fidelity, cast as a decision "to save life or to kill." The story's Sabbath controversy theme points toward Deuteronomy's Sabbath-year release provisions (15:1-15) as the key issue. The withered hand embodies covenant curses invoked against those refusing to "open [their] hands" in liberal lending, instead killing the poor by freezing credit in view of an impending sabbatical debt amnesty. Conversely, the command to stretch out the hand challenges addressees to act so as to reclaim the blessings promised to those who practice covenantal justice. Unlike conventional anti-Judaic or antinomian interpretations, this reading shows Mark's Jesus advocating comparatively stringent observance of Jewish sabbatarian halakah-at least where provisions meant to vouchsafe the life-and-death economic interests of the poor are concerned. I shall argue that Mark's techniques for elaborating these themes involve the sorts of echoic intertextuality identified in the Pauline corpus by Richard B. …