This essay is offered for those interested in critical theory and the interpretation of the Bible. It was written as an accompanying essay for David H. Aaron’s articles on parashah study of the Book of Genesis, appearing under the banner of Reform Voices of Torah (URJ, 2008). The essay is freestanding. While it will likely enhance one’s understanding of Professor Aaron’s approach, a reading of this essay is not necessary for understanding the various parashah essays.

Understanding “Interpretive Strategies”

Every time we pick up a text—whether it is a newspaper or a novel or the assembly directions for a bicycle—we engage an interpretive strategy. This is also true of every speech act we are part of, whether it be as passive listeners or active participants. Most of the time, that “strategy” functions in the background, just like the operating system or programs on our computers. If we click on a JPEG file, we expect our computers to open up a program that will allow us to view or edit graphic images. That program, if you will, is our computer’s strategy for viewing the file. If the computer’s operating system were to try to open up our bank records with that same graphics editor, we’d immediately recognize that it had chosen the wrong interpretive strategy for that document.

We move seamlessly from using a word processor to an Internet Web browser without paying any attention to the different “assumptions” those programs make about how they will best accomplish their tasks. In effect, the computer is structured so as to perceive certain cues in a file’s format that will enable it to “choose” the best strategy for a given endeavor. Our own brains work very much this way; or perhaps I should say that computer programming very much reflects the thinking process of its human creators and users. So by way of analogy, we understand that an interpretive strategy is like a computer program, and that allows us to also say the following: just as no single program will allow us to achieve all of our purposes, no single interpretive strategy will allow us to successfully interpret each and every text or utterance we come across in life.

The person who finds the comment “You will need a screwdriver and scissors” among the assembly instructions for a piece of furniture is not expected to seek out deep, ironic meanings. That would clearly be a mistaken strategy. When talking with small children, our strategies for understanding their meanings and for speaking with them in a comprehendible manner are quite different from those strategies we engage when talking with a peer, or with colleagues at work, or with friends casually over a glass of wine.

I started by saying that most of the time we engage a reading strategy “in the background.” By that I meant: most of the time we pick up signals from any given context as to which strategy will be optimal without having to make conscious decisions. These signals are often subtle and we perceive them on the basis of years of acculturated practice. The signals themselves are part of a broader system of characteristics that are often called “genre constraints.” A genre is simply a term that designates a type of literature (or art, or music, etc.) or even a kind of speech act. So, for instance, a formal lecture is a genre that entails certain characteristics that are quite different from those of a comic strip; a text message over one’s wireless phone engages certain uses of language that would be both annoying and unsatisfactorily ambiguous were they to be engaged in the essay you are now reading. Genre constraints entail everything from the character of one’s language usage to plot expectations. One might think of them as the encoded rules that the author and reader, or two people in conversation, tacitly agree upon so as to be able to understand one another.

Learning to Navigate Ever-Shifting Genres

From childhood onward, we are acculturated into a world of genres and their constraints. When a child hears the words “Once upon a time,” she immediately knows a certain kind of story is about to unfold. She also learns to relate to that story in a certain “make-believe” way. Some of these understandings are taught to her, but others she learns over time on the basis of her own powers of induction and by emulating the interpretive acts of older children and adults. With time, we expect her to choose the right strategy for responding to the phrase “Once upon a time” (it’s make-believe) and we expect her to understand that the strategy she uses for that phrase will not be appropriate for the phrase “It’s bedtime now” (as in “We mean it!”).

There is little purpose in trying to define rigidly those characteristics that form a genre or that contribute to its detection. We can speak of a murder mystery, a romance, a university lecture, a Creation story in the Bible, or a thank-you note as all being formed on the basis of genre constraints, but none of these genres (or any other, for that matter) entails a finite set of fixed characteristics or rules. Rather, we discern genres on the basis of typical characteristics or conditions that we come to learn (and expect) over time through experience or through direct instruction, as when we take a literature or art history course. Like culture in general, genres are constantly shifting, or to express that more technically: over time, a genre’s typical characteristics change. Some of those changes will be stylistic, others will be more substantive. Most of the time, genre (and cultural) change is slow and gradual, and this is what allows us to feel comfortable reading works that were written before our own lifetimes. For instance, detective novels from the early nineteenth century exclusively had male protagonists. Suddenly there appeared “Mrs. Gladden” in the first-person narrative of The Female Detective (1864) and a new genre was born.¹ However, this genre underwent its most serious transformation by women writers during the 1970s. That is to say, at a given moment in the genre’s history, female detectives first appeared; and yet it took quite a while for the genre to reach its most developed stages in the hands of women writers themselves.² While this change was incorporated into the genre, most of the other typical characteristics remained stable. We learn to adapt to the shifting characteristics of genre unconsciously, just as we learn to interpret new idioms that a friend or colleague might use casually in conversation.

Thinking about Accommodating More Significant Genre Shifts

But now let’s complicate things a bit more. Let’s consider a novel written in 2008 that we would readily recognize as a romance. Surely it will share a great many characteristics in common with a romance written just five years earlier. What happens when we compare that 2008 work with a book written in 1850? In order for us to relate to them both as romances, they must share enough characteristics in common for them to be recognizable as such. We might decide, for instance, that a romance must involve a sense of destiny; that lovers must have life events that constitute obstacles to the fulfillment of that destiny. We might decide that the main characters have a certain appearance or that antagonists behave a certain way, etc. Just how much two works must share in common so as to fit your genre expectations at any given moment is a subjective matter. One person may feel that a romance that ends unhappily violates the most important element of this particular genre (pushing it toward “tragedy”), while another person may feel that the condition of a happy ending is not necessary for a work to still constitute a “romance.”

While this may be a subjective concern, it obviously has implications as to which interpretive strategy these two people will consider engaging for their respective reading experiences. And if their reading strategies differ, then their understandings of the novel will be quite different. You can begin to see why this might prove important to our own engagement with biblical literature. If we begin this series of comments on the parashiyot of Genesis believing different things about the genre constraints at work, then we are going to end up with very different interpretations of the material before us. Some people will look at a given passage as an allegory; others will consider it a literal history. For instance, is the story about Joseph as second-in-command in Egypt to be taken as literal history, or does this conform to a common “fantasy” literature of the era? Is Jacob’s wrestling match at Jabbok literally a confrontation with a divine being, or is the whole thing symbolic? Obviously we use very different interpretive tools to understand an allegory and historiography, but there needs to be some basis for establishing our interpretive strategy so that our interpretations might prove meaningful and plausible.

At one level, much of literary criticism is about debating over the best reading strategy for any given work. But that is not our task in this context. I want it to be clear from the onset what assumptions are at work in my comments, primarily so that they will make sense to you, the reader, but also so that they might prove useable by you as you read other passages in the Torah and beyond. I am never concerned to convince you that my reading strategy is intrinsically superior to any other reading strategy. All I want to have clear is that my strategy involves conscious choices and that these choices are focused on providing a rich reading of the material before us.

Antiquity, Translations, and the Historical-Critical Method

I noted above that sometimes we need to consciously learn some things about a genre or a literary work specifically in order to make sense of it. This is especially true when we are dealing with documents that derive from cultures other than our own or from different eras. For instance, few of us are able to pick up and read successfully a play by Shakespeare without having acquired some additional training. Both the language and the forms of the dramas themselves are outside of our contemporary cultural repertoire. I think it is a fair assumption that the amount of formal training required to master a new genre has a great deal to do with how different it is from those genres already in our personal repertoires. A work deriving from the distant past may no longer share very much with what we find in our own cultural repertoire, even if our particular culture is, genealogically speaking, a descendant of that distant past. Add to this the likelihood that ancient cultures used languages different from our own vernacular, and the degree of unfamiliarity only increases.

When children meet a new genre for the first time, they quite automatically engage whatever interpretive tools are at their disposal and plunge ahead. For the most part, they are not disturbed by the types of indeterminacies that disturb us as adults. In fact, they may not even identify those things that are at odds with their understanding level as everything gets folded into their imaginative worldview. This is the magic of childhood. Over time, we want them to master ever more sophisticated interpretive strategies in order to understand more of our world. In order to do that, they must constantly accrue new interpretive strategies. We teach them, for instance, that there is a difference between a “make-believe” story and a story that tells us the history of something. They come to expect that Harry Potter doesn’t really attend Hogwarts, but that the writer of these comments does actually teach at the Hebrew Union College. They come to understand that imaginative play is different from playing a game where set rules must be mastered.

As adult readers confronted with a new genre, our first reaction is to engage whatever interpretive tools are in our toolbox of strategies. In some contexts, we adapt what’s available and end up navigating new scenarios just fine. In other contexts, we sense that the tools we have at our disposal are not quite up to the task. We may become frustrated by our inability to make sense of what we are reading or seeing. On the other hand, sometimes we are fooled into believing that our tools are adequate for a given interpretive process even when they are, in fact, quite inadequate. A false sense of confidence is particularly common when we read ancient literatures in translation. By their very nature, translations are designed to transfer the sense of a text as the translator understands it. Once we hold a book in translation in our hands we quickly come to feel as if we are reading a narrative that emerged from our own language and in our culture. That, of course, is the translator’s goal. But this sense of security can induce an interpretive confidence that will result in an impoverished reading experience. Is this a bad thing? Well, it depends upon your goals. If you wish to read something just for fun, then I guess it doesn’t matter very much. But if you are engaging a book for the sake of seeking out life-meanings, wisdom, a perspective on your people’s history of ideas, et al., then I would think your goal would be to achieve as rich a reading as possible.

I don’t want to get into a long excursus on the theory of translation in this context. Nor would I be ready to quantify in the case of any given Hebrew passage I myself have translated just how much of the text’s meanings and resonances I was able to capture and how much had to be left behind only for readers of the original to grasp. But I do want it to be clear that the literature we will be reading together—biblical literature—is both from a distant world and penned in a language that is not our vernacular (and this would be no less true for an Israeli, whose mother-tongue is Modern Hebrew rather than biblical Hebrew). I readily admit that I am a believer in the possibility of successful translation. I have no doubt whatsoever that among contemporary languages, we can capture a large portion of the meanings intended by the author. That said, I also readily admit that some kinds of expressions, especially among ancient languages, entail various types of complexity than are difficult to decode with the passage of time. Let me give you one example. In biblical narrative, if someone is walking along and happens to see something, the phrase we will expect to find is vayisa einav. In the King James English translation of 1611, this was rendered literally as “he lifted up his eyes.” Because of the cultural prowess of that translation, we’ve actually become acclimated to hearing this phrase, but clearly it should simply have been translated “he looked up” or even “he came upon.” Idiomatic phrases do not use words according to their literal meanings. When we say, “Pay attention!” we do not hear the word “pay” as having anything to do with a monetary transaction. In Modern Hebrew, to say “pay attention,” you literally say, “place [your] heart.” Were someone to translate the Modern Hebrew sim lev into English as “place [your] heart,” we would call it a mistaken translation. And I sense that “he lifted up his eyes” is as mistaken as “place [your] heart” is for pay attention.

Of course, we cannot be certain whether the biblical Hebrew “native” heard something in particular with any given idiom, and this is part of the problem we face in trying to reconstruct meanings in ancient languages. Confounding this issue of semantics even further is the layer of meaning or resonance acquired through literary artistry. There is a difference between translating a common conversation or simple prose and works of literature. What distinguishes common prose from “literature” is nothing more than the manner of expression we find in the latter. In literature we expect that attention has been paid to stylized language; we expect a writer to engage various literary techniques (such as foreshadowing or allegory); we expect syntactic variation, assonance (how phrases sound), and a general concern with aesthetic elements that won’t find their way into the instructions for assembling a bicycle. Just how much of a text’s “meaning” is conveyed by the sounds of the words chosen by the author, or the particular idiom, or the relationship between various words in languages that use strong root systems is extremely difficult (if not impossible) to quantify. Moreover, while some of the elements that inspire us to classify a work of writing as “literature” can be adequately executed in translations (especially the more structural elements, such as allegory or foreshadowing), those that are more language based—such as idiomatic expressions, assonance, wordplay—are virtually impossible to render in a foreign tongue. Because we sense that language usage in literature is more self-conscious than other kinds of language usage, we can readily understand why a more schooled interpretive strategy may be required to produce a rich and appreciative reading.

Even when we think we can understand every word in a sentence, the worldview of the Bible’s target audience was so different from our own that interpretive confidence is hard to muster. Of course, one of the scholar’s primary tasks is to research, to the greatest extent possible, the cultural perspectives that were part of the original author’s world. Generally we believe that the more we can understand about the author’s world, the greater our chances are of offering sound interpretations of his work.

My goal here is not to discourage anyone from reading a book in translation or to undermine our ability to excavate the meanings of ancient texts. We can only be expected to give it our best effort on the basis of the most informed platform we can acquire. But that is exactly the point. I started this series of comments by noting that we all engage an interpretive strategy at every single moment that we are called upon to interpret something. I’ve now introduced complicating factors, such as a text that was originally written in a foreign language or in the distant past. Both of these factors imply that the cultural repertoire at the author’s disposal was quite different from our own. These are precisely the contexts in which we may assume that our standard tools of interpretation will yield compromised results, therefore leading us to conclude that additional training may be required to make the reading experience more satisfying.

This is not an uncontroversial statement when it comes to our Hebrew Bible. There are many people who believe that the Bible was written in such a way as to embrace eternal truths and messages that are unchanging and readily accessible throughout the ages. The Torah and other biblical books were translated into Greek early in the third century b.c.e., within 250 years of its completion, and into Aramaic (in multiple versions) not long thereafter. During the Roman era, additional Greek renderings would appear, and Scriptures were translated into Latin. By the eighth century c.e., the Bible had multiple translations in Aramaic and even Arabic. This was not the case in Christian Europe. The Catholic Church, which advocated exclusively on behalf of its official Latin rendition, refused to allow the Bible to be translated into the vernacular languages of Europe so that it could enjoy a monopoly on its exposition. Common Christians, unlearned in Latin, would have no direct access to the biblical text except through Church-designated mediators of the text (priests). To undermine this stronghold on the text, Martin Luther translated the Bible into German (1534), with the primary intent being the proliferation of Bible readings among common folk. Soon thereafter English and other vernacular renderings appeared in Europe.

Luther’s bold act of translation itself fostered a rebellious reading strategy. It did not take long before people related to their translations as the authentic text of the Bible itself. And since people feel quite comfortable with their vernacular, there appeared to be no interpretive barriers between the average literate person and the meanings of biblical literature. It is still frequently the case that people who are habitual readers of the Bible do not recognize that the original version of the Torah was written in Hebrew or that the original version of Christian Scriptures (New Testament) appeared first in Greek. And without that recognition, there is no reason to sense that the literature is either “foreign” or culturally at odds with our own times.

Jews have long related to the Hebrew text of the Tanach (an acronym standing for the three divisions of the Hebrew Bible: Torah, Prophets, Writings) through translations and commentaries. So the fact that we will study Torah together through an English translation has historical precedents dating back to the Hellenistic era. Indeed, the first extensive exposition of Torah written by a Jew was composed in Greek by Philo Judaeus (20 b.c.e.–50 c.e.), who knew no Hebrew. But my reason for highlighting the problems with reading a text from the ancient world and in translation is to put in place a very particular strategy for interpreting Torah over these coming months. I want it to be clear from the start that, despite the comfort we may feel when the Torah is in our hands in a familiar English rendering, the text is of an ancient and foreign origin. Part of my intention is to emphasize the strangeness of the text, so as to break stereotypical readings and to push us toward more insightful considerations of the underlying messages of various passages.

For those who believe that the Torah is the word of God, the only “intent” that is important to them is God’s own. If God is the author, then the messages of Torah must be not only eternal, but also accessible, for God would have wanted there to be translations. It should be clear by now that this is not an attitude that will inform the comments I will offer on the various divisions of the Book of Genesis. Humans write texts, not gods. There is nothing divine about the Torah except as it relates to the mythology that was ascribed to the text. Rather, the Torah is a highly charged political, ethnic, and religious document, and part of our goal will be to explore how the ancients understood the role of literature in developing ethnic identity, shoring up political power, and establishing religious practice. I consider these aspects to be the most exhilarating aspects of the Torah, for it is by elucidating the various purposes of Torah that we are forced to think though our own engagement with the issues of today.

Authorial intent is what we are after when we first approach a text. I accept that a text can have meanings that an author did not intend. But that is simply to acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of engagements with language (speech and written) are imperfect and entail indeterminacies. Many ambiguities are irresolvable; others can be worked through. Despite acknowledging those indeterminacies, I still find the endeavor of engaging a text from antiquity worthwhile, even as I readily acknowledge that no interpretive strategy will bring me to a “perfect reading.” In fact, there is no such thing as a perfect reading. There are bad readings and there are good readings. Some good readings are better than others, and some bad readings are worse than others. We can measure the merits of readings against one another, but we have no way to retrieve our ancient authors to verify just how close our readings are to their intentions.

So what will our shared strategies be in this context? The first step in the consideration of each passage will be to establish a base informed reading. By “an informed reading” I mean an explanation of a passage that emerges on the basis of every language- and literature-related scholarly tool of potential relevance. Once that is in place, we can begin to build a sustained discussion of what our Torah authors were endeavoring to create through their literature.

The second goal in these contexts will be to consider the ideological worldview behind the various passages we will study. And once that is accomplished, we will ask ourselves how we as Reform Jews might relate to the yield of our interpretive exercise. This last goal is unabashedly ideological in character. I am writing for Reform Jews, and I take this to mean that we will start with certain basic critical assumptions about the text and that we are looking to integrate the text into our Jewish lives today.

¹See Kathleen Klein’s The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995).

²See Priscilla L. Walton and Manina Jones, Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition (Berkeley: University of California, 1999).

David H. Aaronreceived his doctorate from Brandeis University and ordination from the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati. He is professor of Hebrew Bible and History of Interpretation at HUC-JIR, CIncinnati. His most recent book is Etched in Stone: The Emergence of the Decalogue (T & T Clark, 2006).

©2008 David H. Aaron