4.0196 Interpretation and Ordering of Biblical Texts (3/108)

Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Mon, 18 Jun 90 17:53:19 EDT

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 4, No. 0196. Monday, 18 Jun 1990.


(1) Date: Fri, 15 Jun 90 18:27:51 EDT (49 lines)
From: Steve Mason <SHLOMO@YORKVM1>
Subject: Back to the Bible

(2) Date: Sun, 17 Jun 90 21:37 EDT (43 lines)
From: ACOOPER@UCBEH
Subject: Re: 4.0193 Technology and Bible Translations

(3) Date: Sat, 16 Jun 90 13:19 EST (15 lines)
From: "Peter D. Junger" <JUNGER@CWRU>
Subject: Effect of surviving traditions on the interpretation of

(1) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 90 18:27:51 EDT
From: Steve Mason <SHLOMO@YORKVM1>
Subject: Back to the Bible

I'm a great fan of Bob Kraft's, so if HUMANIST will tolerate a brief
rejoinder to his remarks on Bible translations, I hope that it will be
understood to be free of ad hominem. Bob argues, in part, that
canonical order is not a key criterion for selecting Bible translations
and that, in any case, the "proper order" of the biblical text is
problematic.

First, two clarifications: (a) I agree that order is not the most
important criterion -- didn't mean to say that it was; (b) I was
thinking of macro-order -- Torah, Prophets, and Writings, not of
arrangements within the last of these categories.

Now the polemical point. It is not at all clear that the question of
order only became significant with the development of the codex, in the
second to fourth centuries. Indeed, the crucial shift, surely, is not
from scroll to codex but from oral culture to written. Scrolls and
codices were, it seems to me, merely symptoms of these larger conditions.
Scrolls, with all the difficulties that they posed for reading, worked
tolerably well in oral culture because they weren't read all that often:
they functioned more as textual repositories that could be consulted for
clarification, but that were not read on a routine basis. When it became
important to consult the written text more often (for proof-texting among
other things), necessity invented the codex.

My point: all of our evidence (Ben Sira, Paul, Matthew, Luke, Josephus -
1 cent CE) attests that the order Torah, Prophets, and Writings, was
deeply ingrained in the consciousness of both Jews and early Christians,
long before the appearance of the codex. Jews did not get this schema
from physically consulting the scrolls; it was a traditional category
that reflected the descending order of importance of these texts,
corresponding to the order in which each section of the Bible was
"closed". This powerful construct seems even to have overridden the
physical fact of the Septuagint's different arrangement. It would be
difficult to maintain, I think, that this matter of order was not
important to pre-codex Jews and Christians. And if it was important to
them, it should be important to their interpreters, on the Enlightenment
principle of recovering the first readers' situations, nu?

Anyway, what I meant to say was that the JPS Tanakh, in preserving the
traditional order (of both Jews and first-century Christians), has a
certain shock value that might prove pedagogically advantageous -- that
in addition to its other virtues.

Steve Mason
Humanities, York U.
(2) --------------------------------------------------------------54----
Date: Sun, 17 Jun 90 21:37 EDT
From: ACOOPER@UCBEH
Subject: Re: 4.0193 Technology and Bible Translations (1/48)

Dr. Kraft's interesting reply to Steve Mason goes far beyond the
original query (about which English translation of the Bible is "best"),
and gets to a fundamental problem of Bible instruction in the secular
university. Mason had suggested (and I agreed) that one of the virtues
of the Jewish Publication Society Tanakh is that it does not presuppose
the unity of the Old and New Testaments, and thus stimulates students to
reflect on the integrity of the Hebrew/Jewish Bible in its own right.
To that suggestion, Kraft replied that "simply by avoiding one trajectory
('Christian') one does not automatically move into territory that is
free of analogous interests (in this instance, 'Jewish')." Kraft
appends some well-taken cautionary remarks against assuming the
integrity of any collection of biblical books, since such collections
were the products of complex historical processes. I do not think,
however, that the discussion ought to focus on which ordering of
biblical books is more or less authentic. Surely Mason's point was not
that re-describing "Old Testament" as "Tanakh" would replace a
value-laden, anachronistic designation with one that was value-free, or
more correct from an historical point of view.

The idea, rather, is to promote good teaching by defamiliarizing a text
that is, in our society, unreflectively taken to be the "Old Testament,"
with the theological underpinnings of that label simply taken for granted
(even by many non-Christian students, in my experience). Now
historical-critical, literary-critical, and social-scientific approaches
to the Bible--no more value-free in my view than the theological
ones--are also good ways of defamiliarizing, and of getting students to
question their presuppositions. (Is the problem uniquely acute for
teachers of Bible?) In the first instance, however, I think that Kraft
is absolutely right when he says that we need to "alert [our] students
to the influence, both overt and more subtle, that the surviving
traditions continue to have on how we look at these matters." A good
way of doing that, even before immersing students in the more overtly
"secular" methodologies, is to confront the "Old Testament" with the
"Tanakh." It helps, of course, that the JPS translation is such a fine
piece of work from a purely philological standpoint.

Alan Cooper <ACOOPER@UCBEH>
Hebrew Union College

(3) --------------------------------------------------------------22----
Date: Sat, 16 Jun 90 13:19 EST
From: "Peter D. Junger" <JUNGER@CWRU>
Subject: Effect of surviving traditions on the interpretation of

Bob Kraft mentioned in the context of biblical translations that one
should be alert "to the influences, both overt and more subtle, that the
surviving traditions continue to have on how we look at these matters."
I believe that I am confronted by a similar problem--the influence of
current legal interpretations on our reading of texts from the
thirteenth or the sixteenth or the seventeenth centuries. I would be
very interested in any references to works by biblical or historical
scholars in how one can spot and counteract such influences on one's own
readings of the earlier texts.

Peter D. Junger--Case Western Reserve University Law School--Cleveland, OH