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Afterthoughts on Writing a Bible Commentary VIEWPOINT Afterthoughts on Writing a Bible Commentaryl by Jack M. Sasson Jack M. Sasson is Kenan Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is currently editing a three-volume reference set for Scribners', Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, due out in early 1994. -----------------You are urged therefore to read with good will and attention, and to be indulgent in cases where, despite our diligent labor in translating, we may seem to have rendered some phrases imperfectly. For what was originally expressed in Hebrew does not have the same sense when translated into another language. Not only this work, but even the law itself, the prophecies , and the rest of the books differ not only a little as originally expressed. From the "Prologue" to Sirach 61 Colleagues, Please look around you; let your eyes hover over this very room for a moment, and quickly empty it of people. Have you done this? Then let your mind conjure a scene matching the allegory I am about to give you. Don't fret; midway through my talk, I will turn this allegory into a parable. But to leave you with a decidedly personal fable about the choices facing 'This is the unaltered text of the "Keynote Address" to the National Association of Professors of Hebrew's 1991 International Conference on University Teaching of Hebrew Language and literature delivered on June 2, 1991, held at Emory University. I am grateful to the NAPH and to Professor Oded Borowski for extending to me many courtesies. 62 SHOFAR Fall 1992 Vol. 11, No. 1 biblical commentators, I will draw a moral as I conclude. Now then, here is the allegory, slightly contorted because I want to be gender sensitive: Think of a dance floor, with people milling on its edges. The band strikes a musical number and a person begins to dance around and about a partner who stands stationary in the center of the ballroom. Onlookers watch and think they are witnessing a seduction. Comes the next number and a second person draws the same partner toward the floor; but they do the opposite: this time it is the partner who dances around the second person. Onlookers frown and think of narcissism. A final musical number and a third person grabs that identical partner and they pirouette, twirl, and leap: around and at each other. Onlookers are shocked and bothered by the anarchy. This talk defends a cluster ofmethods I used when writing a commentary to Jonah. Oddly enough, I began to think of presenting such a defense only after my commentary to Jonah began to sell some six months or so ago. The immediate catalyst to this talk was Oded Borowski's invitation to address you that came just after I mailed a reply to Sib Towner of the Union Theological Seminary. in Richmond. Sib had invited Walter Brueggemann, James Umburg, and me to a future SBi symposium to assess the role of theological reflection when writing a commentary. I was aghast! First I could not figure out how anyone could avoid theological speculation when touching anything biblical. Second, I knew I must have strayed out of my specialty for anyone to place Walter and me on the same platform. I have never read theology and have little control of its speculative repertoire; in fact, as far as my memory could take me back, I could not even recall being a yeIiva ba1;nlr: boys raised in Arab countries rarely were, you know. I was aghast, but also intrigued enough to search the literature for clues. I discovered that a decade ago protestants hotly debated whether a theological exposition of Scripture compromised a "scientific" or "objective " assessment of its contents by retrojecting what is current on what should remain past. In fact, the issue still surfaces occasionally in such journals as Interpretation. let me backtrack a bit to develop this observation . The term Bible-Hebrew Scripture for our present purposes-applies to a compendium of different works, belonging to broad ranges of categories , some of them couched in a variety of prose styles, and others in a diversity...

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