God's Word in Written Form
The
quote from the Talmud was obviously designed to serve as an authoritative
justification for the heavy reliance that the orthodox brand of Judaism
puts on the interpretations of the great Rabbis. However, I found it to
serve as an ironic expression of something I have come to realize: no text
stands without the reader, and no reading is 100% clear. A text is nothing
without the reader that brings it to life.
However,
while the text needs the reader to give it meaning, it must also be noted
that the reader imposes himself on the text, thus altering its state. No
comment on a text is ever innocent. Every act of exegesis or even of ostensibly
simple glossing is a means of intervening in the text, asserting power
over it and over those who would use it.
If
you read a text and then try to tell either yourself or others what it
says, you merely express what you think it says, or what you want
it to say, but not what it actually says. While the implication here is
that no interpretation of the text is the "right" one, this does not mean
that every, or any, reading is necessarily the wrong one. The point is
simply that there is a wholly arbitrary nature to language.
What
is a piece of writing other than a finite number of markings? It is us
who assigns an arbitrary value to those markings. As was the case with
Hillel and the "heathen," we are told what the letters mean, what the letter
combinations (words) mean, and what the string of letter combinations (sentences)
mean. Commenting on the above-cited verse from the Talmud, Rabbi Epstein
writes: "There must be a certain reliance upon authority before anything
can be learnt."[2]
While
this might create the illusion of a consensus, the reality is that the
form of symbol-manipulation we call "language" is actually riddled with
a bothersome amount of vagueness. Many may believe that "God is not the
author of confusion," but I have come to the conclusion that once "God's
word" is put into writing, it is subject to various understandings. No
piece of writing can fully capture an event, thus there is a need for embellishment,
interpretation, meta-interpretation, et cetera.
Indeed
just stating these sentiments will not make for a very convincing argument
(and furthermore, if they are in fact true the reader may be gleaning something
rather different from what the author intended). Examples must be given
that can be considered a form of corroborating evidence for this hypothesis.
What
better source is there to ponder than religion? In line with the Talmudic
tradition of debate many Jews will note the popular story about how when
you have two Jews you get three opinions. In the Christian world there
is the understanding that if you want to start an argument, just open the
Bible. God is not the author of confusion, but the texts that are passed
off as his word often find themselves at the center of heated debate.
To
put forth an example, consider that the Torah begins with the letters bet-reysh-aleph-shin-yod-tav (
), yet what this means in light of the words that follow is not immediately
clear. Some have treated the opening chapter of Genesis as having a verse
order that parallels the chronological order of creation (that is, what
happens in verse one happened first, what happened in verse two happened
second, et cetera). However, other translations present the text
that has verse three describing the very first act of creation.
The
King James translation presents Genesis 1:1-3 as follows: In the beginning
God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and
void; and the darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of
God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light:
and there was light.
The
most recent translation of the Jewish Publication Society (as
well as the translation of Everett Fox) presents a different view: When
God began to create heaven and earth - the earth being unformed and void,
with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping
over the water - God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light.
With
the exception of the perplexing mentioning of "water," the modern Jewish
translations suddenly fall rather neatly in line with the Big Bang theory.
Some of us may be tempted to cry foul and term this a Bucaille-esque[3]
miracle of reinterpretation, but many Hebrew speakers have argued quite
strongly that such a translation is perfectly reasonable (though I would
object that this diversion from a word-for-word run-down ignores the fact
that each verse begins with vav, "and," lending more weight to the
KJV version).
If
disagreements arise over the first three verses of the Bible, one can imagine
what sort of rough terrain we will be traversing when we confront the rest
of the text. For example, what exactly is being put forth in the second
and third chapters of Genesis? One scholar of the Hebrew Bible made note
of the chaos surrounding the variant hermeneutical approaches taken to
these two chapters and commented as follows:
In
addition to traditional investigations of sources and symbols of the story,
we have seen attempts to read Genesis 2-3 as a diachronic record of the
redactional history of the Pentateuch, as J's comment upon the politics
of his contemporaries, as a reflection of Hebrew wisdom traditions, of
king ideology, land ideology or temple ideology. We have read new religio-historical,
social, psychoanalytical and feminist approaches, and several 'structuralist
and semiotic approaches.[4]
Despite this host of attempts at answers, the question is far from closed,
which is of course partly due to the richness of the story - and to the
astounding reception it has experienced throughout the Jewish and Christian
ages. [Derek Beattie] pointed out an important additional reason for the
diversity of interpretation when [...] he argued that there has been too
much derash and too little peshat in modern interpretation
of Genesis 2-3.[5]
The
mentioning of derash and peshat is in reference to the dichotomy
in Jewish circles between midrash (from the root derash),
which is an attempt to derive interpretations that are not immediately
obvious, and a literal reading of the text (peshat). With midrash
in mind, one should make note of the irony in the passage from the Talmud[6]
that compares midrashic exposition to the hammer which awakens the
slumbering sparks in a rock. Indeed, it is not unusual for Orthodox Jews
(and all believers in general) to beat an interpretation out of their text
that is tenuous to say the least.
Robert
Alter described the methods for deriving midrash quite accurately:
"small pieces of the text become the foundations of elaborate homiletical
structures that have only an intermittent relation to the integral story
told by the text."[7]
If this is one of the major tools for gleaning an understanding of the
text, one gets the impression that there is no set logic to hermeneutics.
While the exegetical anarchy that results may be deafening, other forms
of interpretation aren't much different according to some:
Every
age creates its own criticism, and reads the Bible as it will. I certainly
would not equate the assumptions of midrash with the biblical "literary
competence," but this hardly constitutes grounds for condemning it. Indeed
the analogy is illuminating: today's literary criticism of the Bible is,
for better or worse, something like the present age's "midrash"[.][8]
To
put this in layman's terms, while we may think that other hermeneutical
structures may churn out more reliable exegetes than what one might find
in a midrashic build, the reality is that many such methods are
not very far from midrash in terms of the arbitrary adducing of
what this "really" means. So many scholars are anxious to tell us what
the author of a text was thinking, but as Kugel rightly asked, "should
one not scrupulously avoid the so-called Intentional Fallacy and such imponderables
as the author's intended meaning or an original audience's expectations?"[9]
Whenever
one tries to make a statement about a text, they are actually imposing
their will upon the text. This is why no written text can ever be said
to be the precise word of God. A written text on its own is dead, and a
text that is read is merely an arbitrary interpretation of the symbols.
Surely modern Christians cannot consider the Bible an exact word of God
when many contemporary theologians describe it as "God's perfect word cloaked
in imperfect human language" (an obvious analogy for the trinitarian Jesus,
God's perfect spirit cloaked in imperfect human flesh).
Does
one actually believe that God communicates in human languages like Hebrew
or Arabic? Does one believe that inspired writing involves a precise character-for-character
copying (imagine God whispering to Matthew: "okay, now write a comma")?
If the answer is no, there is no point to the endless bickering that takes
place in religious debates. Furthermore, this aforementioned "bickering"
is even more absurd when the verbal-combatants engage in a heated debate
over specific words in a translation of the text. Surely one cannot claim
that an interpretation of an interpretation (and indeed every translation
is merely an interpretation) can pass for what is "really" meant.
To
further demonstrate the limitations of language, I would invite anyone
to try and put an important moment of their life into writing. The difficulty
in capturing any event in written form is always apparent. What actually
happened was the author experiencing many different sense-related stimuli
(sounds, smells, sights, feelings, et cetera), and only a fraction
of that can be described with human language. Thus whatever the text may
claim happened, no matter how accurate some may claim it to be, it is still
only a fragmentary account.
This
sort of extreme skepticism regarding written sources, particularly those
that attempt to put forth a religious historiography, was embodied in the
writings of one, and only one, scholar of Islam: Dr. John Wansbrough. The
undisputed learning of Dr. Wansbrough was always evident in his sophisticated
arguments, but the turgid nature of his writing style made it difficult
to elucidate what it was that he was trying to say. One scholar described
his writing as having a "ferociously opaque style which bristles with unexplained
technical terms in many languages, obscure allusions, and Teutonic grammar,"
and further noted that "a definitive evaluation of Wansbrough's work will
not be possible for a long time."[10]
While
it is indeed ironic that we are trying to understand Wansbrough's writings
in order to grasp his argument that writing does not capture what is really
being said, it still serves as a great explanation. The aforementioned
difficulty in grasping Wansbrough's precise point aside, there is one rather
succinct summarization of his Res Ipsa Loquitor: History and Mimesis:
A
written source -any written source - cannot tell us "what really happened,"
but only what the author(s) thought had happened or wanted to
believe had happened or wanted others to believe had happened.
[...] Only an eyewitness "knows" what he writes (and even this knowledge
is subject to conscious and unconscious interpretation which attempts to
fit into his preexisting knowledge). [...] [T]he very act of writing distorts
"what really happened" by reducing it to a series of words, thus imposing
on it an order, linearity, and sequentiality which the events described
may not have had. [...] The conclusion from the above points is that written
sources are deceptive in promising us an account of "what really happened";
they cannot, by their very nature, provide "hard facts" but only the
writer's view of what he knows of those facts - i.e. they are literature.
The study of them is not history, but literary criticism.[11]
Of
course, the scholars who put forth this summary of Dr. Wansbrough's approach
tried to line it with arguments about how one can gain a better understanding
of the text in light of archeological evidence. This is absolutely untrue
in that the evidence itself is wholly open to arbitrary interpretation.
For example, if one finds two stone tablets with ten Hebrew commandments
inscribed on them, is this evidence of the actual ten commandments allegedly
given to Moses, or is this merely evidence of two stone tablets with Hebrew
commandments inscribed on them?
In
the end one must agree that no mere string of words can be an accurate
depiction of an actual event, thus written or spoken descriptions are wholly
fallible. Whether God exists or not, any form of writing that allegedly
expresses God's word fails to be precise and unambiguous by virtue of the
fact that it is communicated via the crude grunts of human language. This
is why, despite movements that attempt to remove extracanonical traditions
in every religion[12],
the alleged word of God must always be understood in light of the word
of man. New interpretations are employed to make the text fit new situations,
meta-interpretations are built upon the foundation of those initial interpretations,
meta-meta-interpretations build upon the secondary interpretations, and
the chain continues ad infinitum.