Jung and the Interpretation of the Bible (review)

Book Reviews 155 . being engulfed, the rabbis prevented the non-Jews "from acquiring knowledge of what Jewish identity consisted of" (p. 220). Stern's discussion of tzeniut, often translated as modesty, decency, discretion, chastity (pp. 223-224), but which means self-concealment, ties his study together. Stern examines tzeniutwith reference to Torah learning and circumcision (pp. 228-232), concluding that tzeniut "is considered a distinctive quality ofIsrael" (p. 226). Tzeniut protects the essential features ofJewish identity from "the engulfing threat of the onlooking other" (p. 233). Tzeniut, which fits Pierre Bourdieu's definition of habitus, "underpins the performance of aU of the commandments" (p. 235) and is "fully embodied so as to become a pattern of body use" (p. 236). Even though women cannot participate in Torah learning or circumcision, tzeniut "is treated ... as intrinsically constitutive of the woman's identity as Israel" (p. 244), and it is the women's domesticity, closely related to tzeniut, which gives them their uniquely Jewish identity (p. 244). By choosing to stand at the end of late antiquity and look backwards, Stern uses the full spectrum of rabbinic texts as a coherent, seamless"pool of traditions." Therefore, his claims about the religious nature of Jewish self-identity or the rabbis' exclusive focus on avoda zara is true for that period. Whether or not they are true for all of the first millennium of the era has not been demonstrated to those of us who maintain that in fact each rabbinic text did reach closure at a more or less known period, so that a relative chronology can be established among the texts. Accordingly, each document may be examined on its own terms and in light of its own agenda. By examining the texts in this· manner one may discover a development or change in the criteria the rabbis used to develop their definition of Israel, a possibility which Stern rejects. Gary G. Porton Religious Studies Department University of Illinois Jung and the Interpretation of the Bible, edited by David Miller. New York: Continuum, 1995. 143 pp. $15.95. In his Introduction to this valuable collection of essays Wayne G. Rollins reviews the fate of psychological approaches to biblical interpretation through the last two centuries. He shows that the negative reaction to nineteenth-century psychological biblical hermeneutics effectively banned the practice until its revival in the declining decades of the 156 SHOFAR Fall 1996 Vol. 15, No. 1 twentieth. The thrust ofthis collection is to contribute to that revival using an explicitly Jungian henneneutic. A commendable task though this be, there is a need for caution lest Jung's psychology be reduced to a position compatible with the world views of either the Jewish or Christian Bibles. This tendency is most evident in Rollins' Introduction. He cites a text from Jung admitting the influence of Christianity on his life and describes Jung's "commitment" to the (Christian) Bible in tenns of a lifelong project to "vindicate" his father's religion. This kind of affinnation needs qualification. Rollins makes it in full awareness ofJung's youthful witnessing of his father's biblical faith destroying his life and blighting that of his son's. He makes it fully aware of Jung's persistent attack on the historicism, literalism, and rationalism in modern biblical and theological circles that deprives their practitioners ofthe symbolic sense oftheir material and thus of any significant religious appreciation of its meaning. In this context Jung's lifelong effort was to restore to his culture the symbolic sense, not a revivified Christianity whose theologians had done so much to destroy symbolic sensitivity and with it the energies for life. Rollins interprets some of Jung's later dream material in which his father appears on behalf ofJung's vocational contiguity with his minister father. He fails to mention that in this dream material Jung refuses to bow his forehead to the floor as did his father in homage to Uriah, a symbol of a man destroyed by his confidence in a biblical God. For Jung the dream reinforced his conviction developed over a lifetime that humanity was more conscious than divinity and that blind submission to the latter meant death in the unconsciousness of...