Exodus and Deuteronomy

Texts @ Contexts Series Preface

vii texts @ contexts sEriEs PrEfACE Myth cannot be defined but as an empty screen, a structure... A myth is but an empty screen for transference. Mieke Bal1 hrwtl Mynp My(b#$ The Torah has seventy faces. Medieval Jewish tradition2 The discipline of biblical studies emerges from a particular cultural context; it is profoundly influenced by the assumptions and values of the Western European and North Atlantic, male-dominated, and largely Protestant environment in which it was born. Yet, like the religions with which it is involved, the critical study of the Bible has traveled beyond its original context. Its presence in a diversity of academic settings around the globe has been experienced as both liberative and imperialist, sometimes simultaneously. Like many travelers , biblical scholars become aware of their own cultural rootedness only in contact with, and through the eyes of, people in other cultures. The way one closes a door in Philadelphia seems nothing at all remarkable , but in Chiang Mai, the same action seems overly loud and emphatic—so 1. Bal 1993: 347, 360. 2. This saying indicates, through its usage of the stereotypic number 70, that the Torah— and, by extension, the whole Bible—intrinsically has many meanings. It is therefore often used to indicate the multivalence and variability of biblical interpretation. The saying does not appear in this formulation in traditional Jewish biblical interpretation before the Middle Ages. Its earliest appearances are toward the end of the medieval commentator Ibn Ezra’s introduction to his commentary on the Torah, in midrash Numbers Rabbah (on 13:15-16), and in later Jewish mystical literature. viii Series Preface very typically American. In the same way, Western biblical interpretation did not seem tied to any specific context when only Westerners were reading and writing it. Since so much economic, military, and consequently cultural power has been vested in the West, the West has had the privilege of maintaining this cultural exclusivity for over two centuries. Those who engaged in biblical studies—even when they were women or men from Africa, Asia, and Latin America—nevertheless had to take on the Western context along with the discipline. But much of recent Bible scholarship has moved toward the recognition that considerations not only of the contexts of assumed, or implied, biblical authors but also the contexts of the interpreters are valid and legitimate in an inquiry into biblical literature. We use contexts here as an umbrella term covering a wide range of issues: on the one hand, social factors (such as location, economic situation, gender, age, class, ethnicity, color, and things pertaining to personal biography) and, on the other hand, ideological factors (such as faith, beliefs, practiced norms, and personal politics). Contextual readings of the Bible are an attempt to redress a previous longstanding and grave imbalance. This imbalance rests in the claim that says that there is a kind of “plain,” unaligned biblical criticism that is somehow normative and that there is another, distinct kind of biblical criticism aligned with some social location: the writing of Latina/o scholars advocating liberation, the writing of feminist scholars emphasizing gender as a cultural factor, the writings of African scholars pointing out the text’s and the readers’ imperialism, the writing of Jews and Muslims, and so on. The project of recognizing and emphasizing the role of context in reading freely admits that we all come from somewhere: no one is native to the biblical text, no one reads only in the interests of the text itself. North Atlantic and Western European scholarship has focused on the Bible’s characters as individuals, has read past its miracles and stories of spiritual manifestations or “translated” them into other categories, and has seen some aspects of the text in bold and other aspects not at all. These results of Euro-American contextual reading would be no problem if they were seen as such; but they have become a chain to be broken when they have been held up as the one and only “objective,” plain truth of the text itself. The biblical text, as we have come to understand in the postmodern world and as pre-Enlightenment interpreters perhaps understood more ix Series Preface clearly, does not speak in its own voice. It cannot read itself. We must read it, and in reading it, we must acknowledge that our own voice’s particular pitch and timbre and inflection affect the meaning that emerges. In...