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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS When I began teaching a course on Jewish biblical interpretation at Vanderbilt University in 2001, I was met with a series of surprises. The first was the lack of available texts tracing Jewish commentary on biblical narrative and law from the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism, roughly two thousand years ago, until today. Even the small group of texts that did exist (in English) tended not to approach the subject in a manner appropriate for a university setting. At that point, I began to gather a wide variety of individual commentaries and compiled a reading packet for my students. My next surprise came in the form of sticker shock. Upon recovery, Torah Through Time was conceived. My students at Vanderbilt consisted primarily of Protestants with a tendency toward what they considered to be biblical literalism. These students believed that the King James translation of the Hebrew Bible somehow interpreted itself in a way that the meaning was unequivocal and transparent. That was my biggest surprise. For the previous 10 years, I had shuttled back and forth between Brandeis University, outside of Boston, and Jerusalem as I pursued my doctorate in Jewish thought and theology. During that period, I bumped into relatively few Southern Baptists. I was introduced to Jewish biblical interpretation while studying at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem in the early 1990s. My teachers, Walter Herzberg, Judy Klitsner, and Baruch Feldstern, presented the world of Torah commentary not as the literary analysis of a static text, but as the unfolding of Jewish thought through the matrix of the Torah. They taught using an approach that contemporary literary theorists call indeterminacy—that is, incorporating multiple interpretations without attempting to determine the “true” meaning. Indeed, the very existence of mutually exclusive and plausible interpretations points to the impossibility of determining one true interpretation . The faculty at Pardes disabused me of the naïve notion that any translation can be “objective.” All translators are constantly choosing among a field of options. Their choices, their interpretations, seal off large swaths of that xi original field—in this case, from the ancient Hebrew—while opening up new territory with previously unforeseen interpretive possibilities. Did Abraham take a knife or a hatchet to his son Isaac (Gen. 22:10)? Did Moses’ mother think the infant was beautiful or good natured (Ex. 2:2)? Did Moses’ siblings complain because Moses married a Cushite woman or on behalf of the Cushite woman he had married (Num. 12:1)? All translations are interpretations. While at Brandeis, I studied with Arthur Green, whose approach to the study of Jewish texts greatly influenced my own. In many ways, I structured my course at Vanderbilt on Professor Green’s course on midrash: after closely reading the biblical text, we would then delve into the history of commentary to understand how the issues of concern for the commentators changed over time. I was unprepared for my students’ persistent queries. Which interpretation is right? Which interpretation do Jews believe? What does the Hebrew really mean? I expected to teach a course in Jewish thought using the Torah as a familiar base text. The reality of the class was closer to literary theory. By using multiple translations and Jewish biblical commentary, the students saw that their familiar King James translation, while “authorized,” was not always authoritative. Thus, the beginning of my class was dedicated to challenging my students’ sense of security in their familiarity with The Book many considered to be the inerrant word of God. As we delved into the commentary on selected biblical episodes, it was clear that the earliest commentators, both Jewish and Christian, were reading the Torah beyond its plain sense. That is not to say they were misreading the Torah; rather, they were generating a “deep reading” of the Torah by connecting the Bible’s ancient words to the current reality of their own lives. The value of their deep readings is for the individual to judge, but intellectual honesty demands we acknowledge that many of their comments seem forced if we assume they were explaining the plain sense of Scripture as the initial authors had intended it to be understood. Only when we give these ancient commentators a sympathetic hearing can we understand that they read Scripture as religious literature. They read literarily, not literally. Since their interpretation of the Bible influenced how they wrote their commentaries, we have a responsibility to read their commentaries similarly as religious literature. A more sophisticated approach to religious...

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