A Matter of Interpretation
September 6, 2005, Fall 2005 Convocation Address
By Dr. Carol Newsom, C. H. Candler Professor of Old Testament
Scripture: Nehemiah 7:73b-8:8
The scripture from Nehemiah 8 is probably not one of your favorite passages from the Bible, but it is one of mine. And I should explain why. It is the earliest description in the Bible of the reading and interpretation of a text. It is, if you will, the primal scene of what I do for a living–interpreting texts, specifically the text of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible. And this is what many of you will also do for a living in one way or another–to interpret scripture for a community. But the passage also describes that broader activity (the act of interpretation itself) that characterizes a great deal of what we do here in the School of Theology and in the rest of the university. We are awash in texts of all sorts that ask to be read and interpreted. Indeed, you have just shelled out hundreds and hundreds of dollars at the bookstore to equip yourself with texts for the semester; the library is quite literally overflowing with texts; and there is an infinity of texts on the World Wide Web. But texts are not the only things that we interpret. Historians use texts, artefacts, and other things to interpret historical events and movements. Anthropologists interpret cultures. Sociologists interpret organizations, social movements. Judges interpret laws and the Constitution. Psychologists and counselors interpret persons and aid them in the work of self-understanding, of self-interpretation. Indeed, one of the classic works in the theory of pastoral care and counseling, which was written by Candler professor Chuck Gerkin, was entitled The Living Human Document: Revisioning Pastoral Counseling in a Hermeneutical Mode. Moreover, the theoretical reflection on what it means to interpret, that is, the study of hermeneutics, had its birth and formative development in the field of theology. Hermeneutics is, one might rightly say, one of theology’s intellectual gifts to the university.
Now it is not because I have special expertise in hermeneutic theory that I choose this topic for the address. Indeed, I stand here in considerable embarrassment, for there are many on this faculty far more knowledgeable than I about the history and theory of hermeneutics. Nor do I claim to have anything that is particularly new to say. But I chose this topic because interpretation is so deeply interwoven with so much that we do–indeed is so deeply a part of the fabric of who we are–that it seemed to me that the beginning of the academic year was a particularly good time to encourage us to be self-conscious about what it means to interpret anything. Now in 20 minutes about all I can hope to do is to “infect” you with some questions and enigmas that so intrigue me and that I hope will continue to engage you this year. So just consider me as a “carrier.”
First, I want to look again at the passage from Nehemiah. The setting is approximately eighty years after the end of the Babylonian exile. But the community in Judah continued to face problems with reconstituting itself as a community. According to the book of Ezra, the Persian king had commissioned Ezra to–among other things–“teach the laws of the God of heaven to those who do not know them” (Ezra 7:25), the laws that were to form something like the constitution of the community. And on New Year’s day the people ask Ezra to read “the book of the law of Moses” to them. Now the description of that scene is intentionally crafted to echo the description that the book of Deuteronomy gives of the people first receiving the torah at Sinai. But there is one difference I find intriguing. Deuteronomy presents the torah as easy to understand. All you’ve got to do is just pay attention and not forget it. “It is not too hard for you or too far away....No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe” (Deut 30:11, 14). But in the scene in Nehemiah that’s not the case. It isn’t enough for Ezra just to read the text to the people. Even though the assembled people are described as all “those who could understand,” it’s not seen as that simple. The text isn’t transparent but has to be interpreted, which is what the Levites are called upon to do. “So they read from the book, from the torah of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading” (Neh 8:8).
Both Deuteronomy and Nehemiah suggest something interesting about interpretation. On the one hand, as Deuteronomy suggests, interpretation is something that we often do so effortlessly, that it doesn’t feel like doing anything at all. As the philosopher Martin Heidegger has famously observed, to walk through a doorway is to perform an act of interpretation. We have looked at the architectural feature, figured out what it is for, and acted upon that interpretation. Interpretation, seen in that way, is not so much a self-conscious project as it is a basic condition of existence. But at other times, as Nehemiah suggests, interpretation isn’t just automatic. Instead, we are faced with a text or a context that eludes us, puzzles us, seems strange or alien to us.
This is what I think makes interpretation not just an interesting intellectual issue but also a profound philosophical and theological one. This is what gives the act of interpretation moral significance: that interpretation is fundamentally about the encounter with the other, with the stranger. While this encounter with the other is even part of that automatic interpretation we do all the time, we become much more aware of it when we are faced with something that seems strange. Indeed, some of the most profound moments in interpretation occur precisely when a text that we had taken for granted as already “in our mouths and in our hearts” suddenly reveals itself to be deeply strange, radically other.
To describe interpretation as an encounter with the other already suggests that interpretation might include an ethical dimension. But the relationships are more complex than that binary relationship (self/other) might suggest. Think again about the passage from Nehemiah. There are three parties in this encounter. There are the people, the community that asks for the reading of the torah. There is the text, which Ezra makes present through his reading. And there are the Levites, the interpreters of the text for the people. Much of the interpretation we are engaged in has this three-sided character.
So if we were to frame the situation of interpretation in ethical terms, to whom or to what is one answerable in the act of interpretation? To the text, presumably. But that is actually a rather conflicted issue in hermeneutics. Some would argue that a text is nothing more than black marks on a page or pixels on a screen and that one cannot have an ethical responsibility to pixels. Now to be sure, one could say that texts of sacred scripture are different because of their role as scripture. But I also want to know about texts in general. Am I answerable to a text? And I don’t just mean answerable in the technical sense of checking whether my proffered interpretation is adequate or inadequate. I mean ethically answerable. I suppose we could say, well, it’s not the text to which you are accountable but to the author of the text. That might do for communications addressed specifically to me (Dear Carol...., Sincerely, Susan), but I don’t think it works for all texts, for texts that are addressed to others or to no one in particular. That model too closely conflates text and person. And texts, once they are written, separate themselves more and more from their authors. When I read Paul’s Letter to the Romans or Erazim Kohak’s The Embers and the Stars, it is not to the long dead apostle Paul himself or to the very much alive Prof. Kohak that I feel a sense of responsibility. No, it feels like a responsibility to the text itself. But does that make any sense at all? I continue to struggle with the question. What I think–at least as of Tuesday, September 6–is this. Texts are not persons; but they are human. Texts are made of words. And words themselves are incarnations of the human spirit. And so the act of interpreting them is fraught with moral significance. Texts are not persons. Texts are not their authors. But because they are made of words they are and remain human communications. We often say of a text not “She means this” but “it means this.” And in that combination of words “it” and “means” lies the mystery of the text as inanimate object (“it”) and yet profoundly human (“means”). And I think that accounts for my wishing to say that the relation between text and interpreter has an ethical dimension.
If the interpreter-text relationship is one axis of accountability, another is the interpreter-community axis. The act of interpretation is always situated in community, even the interpretation we do seated alone at our desks. Sometimes interpretation is done collaboratively (as we do in class). But a particularly interesting aspect of interpretation is that which is done explicitly for a community (as for instance, in sermons, commentaries, and other public interpretation, such as the Levites perform in the passage from Nehemiah). The whole reason for interpretation is that communities have interests in, need for, questions about a meaningful text or about issues upon which the text may shed light. And the interpreter who undertakes such work on behalf of the community is answerable to the community and its concerns. But note also that in doing this kind of work the interpreter is not only interpreting the text but is also interpreting the community, “reading” the community in order to discern what its questions, concerns, needs, and interests are. It is precisely this double act of interpretation that makes the sermon one of the most remarkable acts of hermeneutical activity–and one of the most challenging.
Now I am honestly not certain whether I want to say that the interpreter also has a responsibility to him or herself. Maybe that’s not quite the right way to put it, but we can start there. One of the important recognitions of hermeneutics in the twentieth century is that interpretation is a disciplined act but not an objective one. If we say of a text, “it means this” that is actually something of an illusion. The meaning that emerges in the act of interpretation is an act of collaboration between the text and the interpreter. The meaning emerges in the space between the text and the interpreter. And this is one reason why rich texts can be interpreted in a variety of different ways–because meaning emerges from the disciplined collaboration between the text and differently situated readers. Although in one sense, we cannot not be present in the act of interpretation, to bring the fullness of one’s particularity to the task of interpretation is a choice. Certainly the richest and most meaningful interpretation takes place when an interpreter brings his or her whole being to the task, and so to fail to do so is to shortchange oneself, if not to fail in a responsibility to oneself.
Now I know from my own experience how difficult it can be to negotiate these three sets of responsibilities. For about ten years I worked on interpreting the book of Job. This is a notoriously difficult text to interpret, and no part of it more so than the divine speeches from the whirlwind. They are so strange, so seemingly unconnected with what Job has been asking. You know the text: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38:4), and so on, with seemingly endless descriptions of the cosmos, of wild animals, ending most strangely of all with extended descriptions of the monstrous Behemoth and Leviathan. The question that interpreters wrestle with is in what way, if at all, these speeches provide an answer to Job’s anguished plea. What is this text saying? One of my first attempts to interpret this passage was in the context of a lecture at Princeton School of Theology. I had come up with a clever interpretation, if I do say so myself. I attempted to show that while the divine speeches certainly dismantled Job’s old notion that retributive justice was built into the very structures of creation and God’s rule, that they didn’t simply leave him helpless on his ashheap. Rather, if one looked past the surface content of the rhetorical questions and descriptions and focused on the recurrent metaphors, tropes, and figures of speech one could discern the building blocks of a new moral imagination more adequate to the nature of reality. And I even teased out a few of its features and implications for rebuilding structures of meaning, value, and ethics. The lecture was enthusiastically received.
But I went away uneasy. Something didn’t feel right. And it wasn’t just a matter of thinking that I hadn’t in fact completely solved the enigma of the divine speeches. It was my conscience that was troubling me. I had a sense that I had betrayed some ethical responsibility of interpretation. As I had worked on that lecture, I had been so aware of the community to whom it was addressed –seminarians who wanted a “usable” interpretation of that troubling text (as I did myself). And while I apparently succeeded in providing one, I had an uneasy feeling that I had ended up “domesticating” the divine speeches. I had failed in my responsibility to the text. But I had also failed in my responsibility to the audience. I had patronized them, treating them as though they somehow needed to be protected from what I sensed might be the more radical nature of the text. Bad interpretation may not rank up there with ethical lapses such as murder or child abuse, but it does have ethical significance.
I got a second chance when I did the commentary for the New Interpreter’s Bible, and my interpretation there was much better, but still not entirely free of my temptation to render the text in a way that I thought would be useful and acceptable to its readers, even at the expense of down-playing certain disturbing things in the text. Only on my third try in yet another book did I feel that I had been fully answerable to the text and to its readers, and my interpretation there is that the divine speeches in fact articulate–as philosopher Paul Ricoeur had argued many decades ago–a tragic vision of the human place in the world. And though this may not be what my reading community and I wanted to find there, I think ultimately it is what we need to encounter there. But the whole experience brought home to me the realization that one of the great temptations for all of us who mediate the encounter of a community with a difficult text is that we often know what we want or need from a text. And we have the skills to produce plausible but “blunted” interpretations that will tell us what we want to hear. And so we risk missing the fullness of the encounter with the other that the act of interpretation offers.
Now you might think that the moral of this story is that in the ethics of interpretation the negotiation of the three vectors of responsibility to text, community, and self is hard but ultimately doable, and that we’re all the better for it. But I think things are a bit more complicated than that. And this brings me past the ethics of interpretation to what I would call the pathos of interpretation. One of the writers who has taught me the most about interpretation is Gerald Bruns, a professor of English at Notre Dame. In an book entitled Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern Bruns makes the claim that “all interpretation is...allegorical” (202). Allegory, of course, has for a long time had a bad reputation as a kind of interpretation that rides roughshod over the manifest meanings and intentions expressed in the text. It is often seen as an imposition onto the text of what the interpreter thinks that the text ought to be talking about. Although the allegorical method was widely (and actually very subtly) used in early Christian interpretation of scripture, it was particularly useful in dealing with those aspects of the text which, by a literal interpretation, were morally offensive to the interpreter. Allegory was thus one means of removing the offense, making the text useful and acceptable to the community, turning it into a text that readers were more comfortable with. And that would seem to be a practice of questionable ethical status as I described things earlier. But here is Bruns telling us that all interpretation is allegorical, that the allegorical process is fundamental to the act of interpretation itself. What does that mean? When the ancient allegorists interpreted the quarrel between Cain and Abel, for instance, as the ancient quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy or the contrast between self love and love of God, they translated one set of categories (Cain/Abel) into another (rhetoric/philosophy or self love/love of God). The allegorical process in general, as Bruns describes it, is “a conversion of the strange into the familiar, or of the different into the same” (202-3) So when Bruns says that all interpretation is allegorical, he is saying that in the act of understanding, the interpreter always establishes a correlation of categories. “Ah, when you say X, I recognize that what you are talking about is what I call Y.” “Ah, when the Job poet has God answer Job out of the whirlwind, I recognize that what he is talking about is what I would call the tragic vision. Now I get it.” On the one hand this approach to the text is generous and charitable. It starts with the assumption that the text in all its strangeness and otherness is not speaking nonsense but is saying something important, if only I can grasp what it is. And yet, here is the irony. In order to understand, I have to diminish its very otherness, have the text come to me on my terms. There is no way out of this or around it. It is inherent in the finitude, in the historical nature of what it is to be human. And this is what I mean by the pathos of interpretation. If the wondrous joy of interpretation is that two human beings, even those separated by chasms of time and space and culture can communicate about matters of common concern, the pathos of interpretation is that no matter how carefully we do our work, we necessarily diminish the otherness before us as we appropriate it in our own terms. What Bruns is describing is similar to the famous saying by the philosopher of hermeneutics Hans Georg Gadamer, “We understand differently if we understand at all.”
As important as this recognition is, it is only part of the picture. Texts also can turn the tables, breaking down the defenses of our allegorical process. Bruns describes this as the text’s capacity for satire and subversion. The otherness of the text survives and resists being fully allegorized. What happens in this relationship of understanding, he says, is that “one encounters the other in its otherness...as that which resists the grasp of my knowledge or which requires me to loosen my hold or open my fist...I...experience the refusal of the other to be contained in the conceptual apparatus that I have prepared for it....” (180). Indeed, this is what makes interpretation not just a joyful meeting with an other, but potentially a risky business as well. To interpret is to put yourself and your familiar conceptual world at risk. This is an insight that has its roots in Martin Luther’s notion that in seeking to understand scripture the interpreter becomes the interpreted. That is, we find ourselves appropriated by the text and understood in its terms. It is in this moment that one may come to recognize that it is not the text that is strange or alien but suddenly ourselves. But however much that self-estrangement can be a disconcerting experience, it also opens up new possibilities of freedom and transformation.
Well, there is so much more that could be said, but it is time to close. As we embark on this academic year, I want to suggest that we consider the acts of interpretation that we will be daily performing to be a context in which we can practice the moral virtues: humility, as we recognize that all interpretations are partial, and hence our mutual need of the interpretations offered by others differently situated; generosity, in beginning with the assumption that a text has something significant to say, even if I may eventually disagree with it; honesty and integrity, for negotiating the axes of responsibility to text, community, and self; courage, to put oneself at risk in the act of interpretation; and gratitude, for the gift of the encounter with otherness that is at the heart of every act of interpretation. And for that reason, perhaps even more than seeing interpretation as an occasion for practicing virtue we should also consider it as something very like a sacrament. In the act of interpretation we are in the presence of the mystery of what it means to be human creatures: finite, historical beings and so always separate one from another, often misunderstanding or at best “seeing through a glass darkly,” knowing only in part. But also in the act of interpretation we reach out with passion and joyous astonishment at the many ways we can understand one another across different times and places and cultures and languages. In the act of interpretation we experience the foretaste of that time when we will “know fully even as we have been fully known,” when we will understand fully even as we have been fully understood. When someone says, “well, it’s a matter of interpretation,” perhaps we should reply that if that’s the case, it’s best that we take off our shoes, because we’re standing on holy ground.