There is no end to the manner and methods of Biblical interpretation. Literally -- no end.
Gaonic, Karaite, Early Spain, Grammatical, Aesthetic, Philosophical, Kabbalistic. Each reflecting on and refracting each other, each revealing and concealing, alluding and elucidating.
The towering figures in Jewish Biblical exegesis were rabbis, scholars, mystics, itinerant seers, and philosophers of the first order. They each mapped the terrain, building on what others before them had done, and -- most interestingly -- using Greek philosophy, and Christian and Muslim thought, to further refine their own.
I have plunged into this forest with no experience and no compass, but with a very knowledgeable guide. His method is to take us through this wilderness using secondary sources as our maps -- the historiography and the history of exegetical texts that reveal this landscape, rather than the original texts themselves.
There are whole histories of commentary not just on major characters or books in the Bible, but on particular verses -- particularly Isaiah 53, the famous verse whose "suffering servant" was seen by Christianity as a proof of Jesus' messianic pedigree. The reaction by Jewish exegetes in the early days of Christianity was muted; one scholarly article* notes "rabbinic emphasis on the Suffering Servant as representing the people of Israel." This article notes "that in the early centuries a Jewish framework is maintained by Christian interpretations, with examples taken from Justin Martyr and Aphrahat, but in later centuries the commentators wholly reject the idea that the divine nature of Christ could have suffered." So now there's renewed interest among Christian scholars in Jewish views of Jesus, and in texts (like Isaiah's) that have longed been seen only as predictive and not allegorical or symbolic.
I didn't think I'd be fascinated by this, but I am: it shows how Jewish thought and memory, interpretation and philosophy was not only shaping but being shaped by Christianity and Islam. The common wisdom is that Judaism, as the older religion, lent to but didn't borrow from it's younger cousins. Scholarship today suggests that isn't the case. Judaism reacted to Christianity and Islam not just in polemic, but by absorbing modes of thought and systems of philosophy that made their way into the highest realms of Jewish text study and folklore and philosophy. These systems of thought in turn began to transform the ways in which Jewish scholars read and interpreted the Bible, and how they saw themselves.
And it's relevant. Our religions fight for primacy, or denounce or vilify or go to war with each other, over ideas that all the religions helped develop. And in which they all have common roots. We hold and propagate ideas about the origins of our own faiths, our ideas, our identities -- and more often than not, the truth is more complex than we can begin to fathom.
That's all I know, for the moment.
I'll send up occasional flares, in case I lose my way.
--T.A.
* The Journal of Theological Studies 2007 58(2):597-598
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