Philology

The modern discipline of biblical studies was born when the Bible became the object of modern (as opposed to traditional) knowledge – that is, knowledge governed by the ideal of formalized science. True, certain premodern commentators had already expressed doubts about various traditional claims regarding the Bible's authorship. How likely is it, for example, that Moses – the author of the Torah (“the Five Books of Moses”) according to venerable tradition – wrote the account of his own death in Deuteronomy 34:1–8? But it was only after the advent of Renaissance Humanism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – the period that witnessed the rediscovery of classical Greek and Latin texts and the invention of the printing press – that the Bible, along with other ancient texts, began to be subjected to systematic scrutiny. Criticism, as the modern analysis of texts came to be called, attempted not only to establish critical editions of the Bible and other ancient works out of the welter of available manuscripts (lower or textual criticism) but also to determine those works’ provenance on the basis of various linguistic and literary criteria (higher criticism).

Common to both tasks is the desire for what Jean-Claude Milner refers to as “precision” – a symptom, Roland Barthes would have added, exhibited by those who “love,” are “obsessed by,” the text. Not coincidentally, criticism also came to be known as philology. Such were its accomplishments that Galileo himself, Milner reminds us, took it as his ideal: “In the eyes of Galileo, mathematics and measure were the means – some of the means, it will subsequently be revealed – that would permit humble physics to one day equal what prestigious philology, through the science of language (through grammar) and through the science of written documents, had long ago accomplished.” This “love of words” would eventually beget the first “exact science” of language – viz., comparative philology or historical linguistics – as well as the modern discipline of literary studies.

The topic of translation might seem an afterthought to any discussion of Genesis, a feature not of the Bible itself but rather of its “afterlife.” The book of Genesis, after all, is a record of beginnings; translations, by all appearances, come only later. But Genesis “itself” and its life in translation are not so easily separated. Our understanding of what the Bible is – as a whole and in its smallest details – has been profoundly shaped by translation, even as our experience and understanding of translation owe much to the Bible and its history.

“For Europe,” begins the opening essay in a recent collection on Translating Religious Texts, “the Bible has always been a translated book.” While such a statement mistakenly assumes the equivalence of Europe and Christendom, it remains the case that most of the Bible's readers – in Europe and outside of it, Jewish or Gentile – have known the Bible only in translation. The ramifications of this historical circumstance are hard to overstate. In being translated, the Bible also has been cast and recast, interpreted and rewritten: its obscurities “clarified,” its strangeness domesticated, its character transformed. Such transformations, I hasten to add, are inevitable. Even texts that remain in their own languages take on different colors in different contexts and eras as words acquire new meanings and lose old ones. In translation, this process is closer to the surface because two “equivalent” words in different languages rarely overlap precisely in their range of reference. From this perspective, the narrowest meaning of translation – as interlingual transfer or as the production of a linguistic equivalent – overlaps with the larger sense of translation as cultural transfer, which encompasses the full range of transformations that texts undergo in their movement from one cultural context to another.

What is theological interpretation?

Theological interpretation of the Bible is a contested concept. Even those who engage in the practice disagree among themselves as to what constitutes a theological reading. Many biblical scholars regard anything labeled “theological” as an enterprise of doubtful legitimacy in an academic context. Such skepticism is not without reason, but whether it is justified will depend, naturally enough, on the brand of theological interpretation that is proposed.

As New Testament scholar Richard Hays has recently argued, theological exegesis is not a “method” like, say, redaction criticism. Rather, he describes it as a practice, a way of approaching Scripture. Hays, like many theologically oriented exegetes, stands in a distinctly Protestant tradition inspired by Karl Barth's famous commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. Barth conceived of theological exegesis as making the text speak directly to the present:

Memory, wrote Augustine in his Confessions, is “the present of things past.” The past exists only in our present memories and is mediated by places, objects, texts, and customs. As individuals, our past selves and relationships persist only to the extent that we remember them. However, individual memories also can be of events that never happened or that did not happen in quite the way we remember them. Memories recall the past in a way that re-creates the past, foregrounding and embellishing certain parts and suppressing others. No one has total recall; our memories are always partial, meaning that they are both incomplete and biased, colored in various ways. Memory is unreliable, but it is also the foundation of our sense of self.

Cultures also have what we can call memories. Often, these are memories of the formative past when an ancestral group underwent crucial transitions. Children are initiated into cultural memories as part of the process of acculturation, and these shared memories comprise an essential ingredient and causal agent of group identity. The shared memories of a culture are subject to the same types of changes as individual memory. They are a blend of historical details and imaginative embellishments, blending and crystallizing differently according to the concerns and experiences of each generation.

Introduction

Inner-biblical interpretation is the light that one biblical text casts onto another – whether to solve a problem within the interpreted text or to adapt the interpreted text to the beliefs and ideas of the interpreter. The interpreting text may stand far from the interpreted text, or be next to it, or may even be incorporated within it. Not always does a text function solely as the interpreting or as the interpreted one: sometimes the two will mutually interpret one another. In this chapter, we look at the phenomenon of inner-biblical interpretation through the example of one story, Genesis 27, the tale of Jacob deceiving his father, Isaac, in order to receive the blessing that Isaac had intended for Esau, Jacob's brother and Isaac's firstborn – and the many interpretations of that story that we find inside the Hebrew Bible.

Before turning our attention to the story and its interpretations, let us consider more fully the phenomenon of inner-biblical interpretation. There are both overt and covert types of inner-biblical interpretation. Examples of overt interpretation, in which a text openly refers to another well-known text, are found – to name a few examples – in Chronicles’ paraphrase of the historiographic literature; in the way in which the writer of the historical psalm, Psalm 78, treats its Pentateuchal sources; and even in the way the law of the Hebrew slave in the Book of the Covenant (Exodus 21:2–11) is interpreted in Deuteronomy 15:12–18. The covert type of inner-biblical interpretation is more difficult to discern. To detect this type of interpretation, the reader must be alert and sensitive to allusions planted by writers, editors, compilers, and annotators who embedded a literary unit in a certain place or who placed it within or juxtaposed it to another unit in order to cast the latter in new light.

Literary approaches to the bible

Perceptions of the literary dimensions of the Hebrew Bible have a long prehistory, and they surely did not begin in America, England, Israel, and the Netherlands in the 1970s, as some have imagined. It is obviously true that the notion of Scripture as literal revelation, shared by Christians and Jews, to a large extent deflected interpreters over the centuries from explicitly considering the literary shaping of the biblical texts, which were characteristically viewed as sources of theological truth and moral or spiritual instruction. Nevertheless, these texts had some very good readers from Late Antiquity onward who were by no means blind to the literary richness of the narratives and the poetry. Thus, the framers of rabbinic Midrash more than a millennium and a half ago, of course did not speak of recurrent motifs or mirroring episodes as a modern literary critic might do. Yet, Genesis Rabbah picked up the motif of deception through a garment, in each case linked with a kid, and the recurring keyword recognize (haker), which tied in Genesis 38 with Genesis 37. They equally identified the story of Jacob's switched brides as a measure-for-measure response to the story of his stealing the paternal blessing.

A finely imaginative sensitivity to the literary articulations of the biblical texts is registered in thousands of instances of allusions to the Bible in medieval Hebrew poetry, especially in its greatest age in eleventh- and twelfth-century Spain. Poets such as Samuel Hanagid, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Moses ibn Ezra, and Judah Halevi, although they were believing Jews who presumably saw the Bible as divine revelation, clearly were also reading both the narratives and the poems as literature because their responsiveness to the imagery of the biblical poems and to the complexities of the biblical stories is strongly registered in their own poetry. A paradigmatic case in point is the beginning of a poem by Hanagid on the death of his beloved brother Yitzhak: “May God grant grace to you, my brother.” This is a precise quotation of Joseph's words to Benjamin when his younger brother is first brought to him in Egypt (Genesis 43:29), except that Joseph says “my son,” still concealing his true identity. Soon he will reveal himself and embrace his brother, weeping. Hanagid uses the term of true relationship that Joseph withholds, but he is keenly aware that in his case there can be no reunion with the brother now parted from him forever. His identification with the biblical figure is heightened by his awareness that he, too, is a Hebrew who has ascended to great power, as vizier of Granada. In all of this, he is brilliantly reading the narrative in Genesis as a moving story. At least in Hebrew tradition, the Bible maintained what I have called elsewhere a “double canonicity,” literary as well as doctrinal.

This book attempts to do something new and old in biblical interpretation. The new involves three moves: (1) charting methods of reading Genesis that have become vital in recent years, including literary criticism, cultural memory, the history of sexuality, and inner-biblical interpretation; (2) renewing the practice of several older methods that retain their vitality, including source criticism and theology; and (3) expanding the horizons of the study of Genesis to encompass the reception and transformation of Genesis in Western culture, including rabbinic and patristic interpretation, translation, and modern literature. The family of methods presented in this book focuses on ways of reading Genesis and on ways of reading influential past readings of Genesis. To put it differently, we are engaged in studying a text and its effects in Western culture. This combination of perspectives is relatively new in biblical studies and represents a proposal about how Genesis can be read (and reread) in the university and the modern world.

At the same time, this book is a throwback to an older era – let us call it a pre-postmodern era – when texts were believed to have meanings and when it was the task of the interpreter to discuss those meanings with intelligence and insight. Each contributor to this volume practices what Nietzsche called “the incomparable art of reading well,” which involves a commitment to the notion that texts and their interpretations are worth grappling with in our work and lives. This theoretical empiricism, which can have many flavors and intensities, necessarily includes an appreciation of the interdependence of various approaches to the text – including the historical, literary, philosophical, anthropological, and theological. It involves a pragmatic openness to multiple converging and diverging paths of study for the simple reason that, as Wittgenstein says, “[I]t is possible to be interested in a phenomenon in a variety of ways.” There is no single authoritative – or authoritarian – method of reading Genesis.

Generations of readers have thought of Genesis through Milton's Paradise Lost, Goethe's Faust, Melville's Moby-Dick, Kafka's parables, Mann's Joseph and His Brothers, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Shalev's Esau, and Morrison's Paradise; yet, literary exegesis has rarely been seen as an integral part of the exegetical history of this founding text. Whereas traditional Judeo–Christian commentary (whether the Midrash or St. Bernard's sermons) and biblical scholarship have held prominent positions in the exegetical canon, literature has been regarded – more often than not – as a separate realm, admirable in its aesthetic power but irrelevant for textual analysis, providing no guidance to deciphering the unformulated meanings and complex links of scriptural texts. Against such mappings of exegesis, I argue that the poetic license of writers does not make their exegetical reflections less earnest or pertinent. Quite the contrary: literary flights of the imagination – despite and, at times, because of their radical departures from the Bible – may entail interpretive insights available to no other exegetical mode. I would go so far as to suggest that the hermeneutic projects of writers are vital to the understanding of Genesis as well as to the exploration of its cultural roles in diverse historical settings.

Genesis is one of the key texts of literary exegesis. The possibility of touching on the beginning of all beginnings – of following the pivotal, primary questions about creation, humanity, language, culture, and life itself – is something few literary exegetes chose to ignore. Of the many writers who have sought to reinvent Genesis, I focus on Melville's Moby-Dick, a momentous landmark in the history of the literary reception of the text. To be sure, Melville wanted no less than to reinvent the Bible as a whole – indeed, Moby-Dick has acquired the status of a Bible of sorts in American culture and beyond – but Genesis is one of the privileged texts in his grand exegetical voyage through libraries and oceans.

Midrash and its precursors

Rabbinic interpretations of Scripture – unlike the creation of the world (at least according to some ancient exegetes) – were not a creation ex nihilo. They were preceded by a long and varied chain of tradition that, in turn, was adapted by the rabbis to suit their own cultural needs. To fully appreciate the rabbinic exegetical enterprise, we must pay attention to the legacy (at times hidden) that informed their practice and, at the same time, recognize the astonishing novelty of their project. The novelty lies not only in the thematic plan but also, as I argue, predominantly in the formal–rhetorical aspect of their writings. That is, what we see in rabbinic interpretation of Scripture is a new epistemology, one that situates the text itself as an explicit locus of knowledge. This epistemological shift is implicated in the self-reflexive character of rabbinic texts themselves, which in turn render the characters they embody – whether they are the projected biblical protagonists or the implied rabbinic subjects – self-reflective. Before addressing this epistemological shift, we must first turn to the beginning.

The book of Genesis begins with a seemingly simple, although grammatically awkward, statement: “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” Yet, already in Scripture itself we find that imagining the very moment of creation did not end (nor did it begin) in Genesis 1. When Wisdom, the speaker in Proverbs 8, announces, “The Lord made me the beginning of his course, the first of his acts of old” (8:22), it inscribes itself as a transformative force in the primordial moment. Here and elsewhere, the first traces of the retelling of the Genesis story are to be found within the Bible. Whether imagined in the conceptual framework of Sophia-Ḥokmah (as in Proverbs), or as God's battle with mythological beasts (as in Psalms or Job), or in the creation language of the building of the tabernacle (as in Exodus), these texts tell a different story than the one told in the opening chapter of the canon. Not only do mythological beasts – conspicuously absent from the Genesis Creation narrative (albeit etymologically alluded to in the name Tehom/Tiamat) – resurface in other texts, but also the universalistic paradigm that the Genesis story outlines is later linked to a particularistic trajectory concerning Israel and its redemption from Egypt. Competing or reworked traditions, and even exegesis of Genesis narratives, are contained within Scripture itself, attesting to the different schools and the long process that informed its formation until it reached the final stage of canonization sometime in the first century C.E.

In her groundbreaking study of gender, The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir evokes the story of the creation of woman in Genesis 2 as a primary text whose impact on Western perceptions of gender relations cannot be overlooked. Beauvoir writes:

Beauvoir's renowned claim that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” – the formulation that became the very base for the definition of “gender” as a social construct – turns out to be particularly relevant to the “birth” of the first woman. Eve's birth is by no means a natural event, innocent of cultural presuppositions regarding the role of woman. She is subjected to God and to Adam, shaped as the perfect Other whose very purpose is to serve as “dream incarnate,” to enable the first man to define himself as Subject within the realm of the essential.

What benefit might an interpreter of Genesis obtain from the text's reception by early Christian readers? One would scarcely turn to Christian readers in an effort to reconstitute an original audience of Genesis, given that they were intellectually informed by a Platonist worldview, socially constituted by diverse Gentile communities, and textually dependent on the Septuagint translation. At the same time, early Christian interpreters stand quite distant from the community of contemporary scholarship. As Hans Frei has detailed, almost all interpreters before the modern period understood themselves to participate within “a single cumulative and complex pattern of meaning” that rendered the reality of Scripture concrete and actual for the believer. This precritical stance, as Frei called it, alienates the ancient Christian readers as far from today's scholars as they were from the Jewish readers of Late Antiquity.

This chapter situates the call and migration of Abraham in early Christian interpretation within the horizon of reception criticism. Reception criticism proposes to make interpretive use of all reader experiences, even readers alienated by cultural and temporal distance from the original production of the work. The aim in doing so is to generate an interpretive dialogue that expands the potential range of meaning that a contemporary reader might obtain from a text. This mode of engaging texts bears significant implications for how concepts of text, of reader, and of interpretation might be conceived. Consequently, the effort to expand the interpretive dialogue necessitates reflection on the reading process and the agents involved in that activity.