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1. Reading as a Jew and as a Scholar
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1 Reading as a Jew and as a Scholar If “reading” is the act of making sense of a text, then each of us reads differently. Further, we each have a different conception of what the Bible is. Not surprisingly , then, we each interpret biblical texts in our own way. Of the many approaches, we can describe as a “method” only those that are rigorous and systematic. This book presents a method of reading the Bible. It is often called “the historical-critical approach.” By highlighting this method, I do not mean that it is the only way to read the Bible. Indeed, many Jews have viewed with suspicion this way of reading, rejecting it in favor of other methods. Yet I commend this approach to readers because I have found it illuminating. When the Bible is viewed in the light of this method, we see the text as meaningful, engaging, and multifaceted. Classical Interpretation For much of the postbiblical period, readers of the Bible have all tended to follow the same method. They have seen the Bible as a cryptic yet perfect book, of fundamental relevance to its community of interpreters. They have assumed that much of the Bible, if not all of it, came (to some extent) from God. Hence the Bible is a privileged text that should be interpreted using special rules. That is, it should not be interpreted like regular, nonbiblical texts.1 This method developed during the late biblical period. As we shall see in a later chapter, one passage in the Book of Daniel explains an earlier prophecy of Jeremiah, which turned on the phrase “seventy years.” Daniel interpreted this phrase to mean “seventy weeks of years,” or 490 years. Normally, when an ancient Jew promised to return a borrowed ox in seventy days, it meant just that— seventy days. Yet Daniel could understand Jeremiah’s “seventy” differently because the Book of Jeremiah is a biblical text, reflecting special, divine language. 1 Consider, too, the ancient Judean Desert community of Qumran, which thrived over a period of several centuries—from the second pre-Christian to the first post-Christian centuries. Their library—the part that is extant—is what we now call “The Dead Sea Scrolls.” Like the author of Daniel, they believed in interpreting biblical books in a special way. Thus they kept a rich interpretive literature . For example, their Pesher Habakkuk, a type of commentary on the prophetic book of Habakkuk, held that their community’s leader understood the true meaning of the book better than the prophet himself! The Pesher interpreted the text in relation to the interpreter’s own period, more than half a millennium after Habakkuk lived.2 Classical rabbinic interpretation also shared these working assumptions. Even for the Torah’s legal texts, it often subverted the plain sense of words for the sake of “harmonization.” That is, when texts (from divergent places and times) appeared to contradict each other, it “reconciled” them so that they would agree. For example, a slave law in Exodus 21:6 suggests that in certain circumstances a Hebrew slave serves the master “in perpetuity” (le-olam). This contradicts Leviticus 25:40, which states that masters must release all such slaves on the jubilee year (every fiftieth year). However, according to the basic assumptions , God’s word must be internally consistent. Therefore the rabbis insisted that the term “in perpetuity” in Exodus means “practically (but not literally) forever ”—that is, until the jubilee year.3 This type of interpretation is strange to the reader unused to classical Jewish (and to a large extent Christian) interpretation. But it is natural if we understand the Bible as a uniform, perfect, divine work, which may employ language in a cryptic fashion. This is not to say that every traditional, premodern interpreter of the Bible took every word of the text according to all of these principles. Yet the few exceptions prove the rule. For example, Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1164) suggested that someone other than Moses wrote a small number of verses in the Torah. Yet even as that commentator made sure to inform his readers of that unorthodox view, he was careful to condemn it.4 Likewise, Rabbi Samuel ben Meir (also known as “Rashbam”; 1080–1174) allowed that biblical language is not cryptic; rather, its words mean what they normally imply, even if this contradicts rabbinic tradition. Thus, he alone among the extant medieval Jewish exegetes did not find it necessary to “reconcile” Exodus...