20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs

Hermeneutics

Hernteneutics Michael Fishbane H ermeneutics refers to the principles, the presuppositions, and, in some cases, also to the rules that govern or condition the act of interpretation. As a philosophical area of inquiry, it is focused largely on texts; but in modern discussions the term hermeneutics is also used more broadly in connection with art, music, and even existence itself. When applied to texts, a distinction may be made between explicatio, whose avowed task is to explain the philological or historical content of an earlier document in its presumed historical setting, and interpretatio, which always involves a more far-reaching retrieval of the document by and for laler generations. Ideally, both explicatio and interpretatio presuppose that a temporal, linguistic, and ideational distance between a reader and a text can be closed; however, explicatio is prinCipally intent upon circumscribing the text within a specific historical horizon, whereas for interpretatio the horizon of the text is not temporally fixed, and it is read as a living document. Naturally enough, readers do not always perceive this distinction, and explicators often believe that their explications reveal the enduring meaning of the text, just as interpreters sometimes presume that 354 HERMENEUTICS their interpretations also disclose the original historical meaning of the text. The distinction is, nevertheless, of fundamental significance and reveals fundamentally different textual attitudes and presuppositions. In brief, the process of explicatio tends to lock a text into one historical period, to consider the linguistic content as something that can be understood once and for all given the right philological-historical tools, and to confine itself to a derivative ministering to a creative work. In contrast, interpretatio delivers the text from its original historical context, treating its linguistic content as powerfully multivalent-and so, in principle, resistant to reductive or final readings-while treating its own work of interpretation as a fundamental moment in the creative life of the text. Text-cultures are not free of either explicatio or interpretatio, and, in fact, some of their greatest readers purport to practice both. Nevertheless, it can be said that textcultures are such primarily because of the interpretatio that animates them and which, aside from the meanest paraphrase or linguistic annotation, quickly conquers explicatio and transforms it into its own image. This is true especially of religious text-cultures and of Judaism in particular. From its earliest classical periods, and to some extent even within the formative biblical period, Judaism has developed rules for interpreting the biblical text and thereby deriving from it not merely philological explications but legal rulings (halakhah) and theological-moral significations (Haggadah ). These rules developed in scholastic contexts and proliferated under different teachers, with succeeding generations focusing on different concerns . For example, certain tannaitic sages were concerned to establish their rulings in relation to the biblical text; many amoraic sages tried to show how certain mishnaic rulings are derived or derivable from Scripture. With time, the complexity and concerns of the hermeneutical enterprise developed and became specialized in a variety of areas. Incisive canons of practical legal reasoning and deduction emerged, along with theoretical exercises in hermeneutical pyrotechnics (pilpul). In other domains of Jewish life a wide range of allegorical, philosophical, and mystical modes of interpretation proliferated. To be sure, the nature of textual argument in the latter cases may occasionally have derived from Greek or Arabic rhetoric and logic, or have been keyed to a closed system of symbolic theosophy. Nevertheless, it would be correct to say that the explicit and implicit roots of all these interpretive systems lie in the Bible and that the starting point for understanding the nature of traditional Jewish hermeneutics in its vastness and detail is the realization that there is nothing , when all is said and done, that can be deemed-in principle and in fact-alien or alienable from Scripture, God's instruction. HERMENEUTICS 355 A Jewish hermeneutics of Scripture starts with the presupposition of its revealed, divine origin (in some sense)-this being the written Torah-and its necessary and hence paradoxical coordination with a religious tradition that clarifies, expands, and even delimits it-this being the oral Torah, or interpretive tradition. The relationship between these two categories has been fundamental to Judaism since classical times, although the precise nature of this relationship has varied considerably, each variation having a decisive bearing on what constitutes the hermeneutical task and the measures of its freedom and responsibility. To better understand the nature...