Dad Jokes and Hermeneutics

"Dad, I'm thirsty!" "Hi Thirsty, I'm Dad." I'm not sure why men love to tell these silly jokes, but the dad joke is a universal genre of humor, with the universal reaction of sighs and eye-rolls. Not to break it down too much (as if it needs it) but the joke's premise is to take the literal meaning of the words and draw the wrong inferences from them. "Dad, I need $20 for a haircut." And the joke follows, "For $20, I'd get all of them cut, not just one." The child can't say, "I didn't say that," but they have to say, "that's not what I meant."

I saw a book titled Get You Unto the Great Men, that urges people to follow in the steps of the spiritual giants of the past and walk in the ways of the "great men," as stated in Jeremiah 5:5. The author wants you to have the right heroes, so get to the great men. Jeremiah said, "I will get me unto the great men…" but is that what he meant? Is Jeremiah telling you to go to the great preachers of the past and follow them? What if we could travel back in time and ask? "Hey Jeremiah, I was reading where you said we ought to go to the great men and follow their example, pretty good stuff. That'll preach!" Jeremiah might say, "First of all, I never said that. Secondly, I said that I would go to the great men (not you), and by great, I didn't mean wonderful but powerful, the leaders of the people. Still, I wasn't following their examples and certainly don't want you to. I was talking about God's judgment and Jerusalem's capture and destruction. Judah was evil, from the poor men to the great men. No one knew God's word, and they were foolish, even the "great men" who should have known better. Who told you that I was telling you to follow those guys?" You might clear your throat, "I, uh, read it in a book, and a preacher wrote that's what you said." Jeremiah might get a little upset and say, "That was part of what I said, but that's the opposite of what I meant. If you read the whole sermon, not just half a sentence, you'd see that easy enough. That's just a lie, putting words in my mouth, and actually part of what I was driving at here in Jerusalem."

The Bible is a unique book. No other book is God-breathed, and inspired or one that has its power. But it is a book, and that's how God chose to communicate to His people, in the simple and ordinary use of language. That doesn't mean the meaning is always easy to find, but we can’t know how to apply it if we don’t know what it means. The example above might have a Biblical principle (Proverbs 13:20), but drawing implications from a misunderstanding could be disastrous.

Step one is understanding the author's meaning when he said it. That's not the last step, but you shouldn't go a step forward unless you know what the author meant. Knowing what the words mean isn't understanding the meaning of the message. You can't consider the implications nor give an application from a text you outright misunderstand from the start. If I overhear my doctor talking about "free radicals," I shouldn't call the police to report that my doctor is trying to break a band of revolutionaries out of prison. I understood the words but didn't understand the meaning, so I made the wrong implications and applications.


I think it would be a reasonable thought to ask if Jeremiah were here, and I asked him if that's what he meant, would he agree with my assessment? You wouldn't want him to give you the dad joke eye-roll with your interpretation.