Genesis Ideology

Essays on the Uses and Meanings of Stories

Aaron

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781532609466
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Genesis Ideology explores the purpose of stories in the book of Genesis as building blocks for ancient Israelite culture. This book exposes the intersection of the author's ideological agenda and the contemporary reader's interpretive practice. This volume, written for a general readership, is informed by contemporary scholarly approaches to biblical literature as well as questions of contemporary relevance.

1

Thoughts on Method and Biblical Interpretation

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 and secondary 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 clues in a file’s format that will enable it to choose the best strategy for interpreting its “meanings.” 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 can say that an interpretive strategy is something like a computer program. And this analogy permits us to also say the following: just as no single computer 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 screw driver and wrench” among the assembly instructions for a bicycle is not expected to seek out deep, ironic meanings. That would clearly be a mistaken strategy. When talking with small children, our strategy for understanding their meanings and for speaking with them comprehensibly is quite different from the strategy we engage when talking with colleagues at work or with friends over dinner at a restaurant.

I started by saying that most of the time we engage a listening or reading strategy in the background. By that I meant we know automatically which strategy to use in well-rehearsed social or professional contexts. In a sense, these strategies are habitually engaged; as such, the “choice” is a matter of habit. When we are in unrehearsed or unfamiliar situations, we pick up signals as to which strategy will work best 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 type of literature (or art, or music, or even a kind of speech act) that consists of certain characteristics that are associated by convention. A formal lecture is a genre that entails certain characteristics that are quite different from those of a comic strip. Similarly, a text message sent from one’s smartphone engages certain language features that would be both annoying and unsatisfactorily ambiguous if they were to be employed in the essay you are now reading. The characteristics that typify a genre function as constraints over what can be done or said within a given context. In a work of literature, one might think of those constraints as the encoded rules which the author and reader tacitly agree upon, so as to be able to communicate through writing.

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, and others she learns over time on the basis of her own powers of induction and deduction, and also 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!” (where the comment is usually meant literally).

There is little purpose in trying to rigidly define 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, over time, we come to learn (and expect) through experience or direct instruction. In effect, we discern genres on the basis of a preponderance of characteristics. 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, as when they are related to plot or to character and gender depictions.

Most of the time, genre shifts (like cultural change) are slow and gradual, or involve small aspects of a genre, 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 had exclusively male protagonists. Then there appeared “Mrs. Gladden,” the first-person narrator of The Female Detective (1864) and a new genre was born.2 However, this genre did not undergo its most serious transformation until the 1970s, in books by (mostly) women novelists. That is to say, at an early 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 stage, during the “second wave” of feminism.3 Although Mrs. Gladden first appeared in 1864, most of the other typical characteristics of this genre remained stable for quite some time.

Someone reading today might not be aware of how unusual the appearance of a female detective would have seemed to certain generations of readers. That’s because we only rarely read with a sense of a genre’s history intact. Rather, we learn to adapt to the shifting characteristics of genre unconsciously, just as we interpret new idioms that a friend or colleague might use casually in conversation. Over time, we accept shifts in genre constraints as readily as we accept new idioms in colloquial speech. After a very short time, those new idioms are no longer “new,” and the same is true of ever-changing genre constraints. The innovative approach of one author may become a standard practice within a brief generation of writers and readers.

Thinking about Accommodating More Significant Genre Shifts

Now let’s complicate things a bit more. Let’s consider, say, a novel written in 2016 that we would readily recognize as a romance. Surely it will share a great many characteristics 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 have enough characteristics in common to be recognizable as such. We might decide, for instance, that a romance must involve a sense of destiny; that lovers must encounter obstacles to the fulfillment of that destiny. We might decide that the main characters have a certain appearance or that antagonists behave and look a certain way. Just how much two works must have in common so as to fit our 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 a happy ending is not a necessary condition for a work to constitute a romance. And then there are works of literature we might view as “genre-hybrids,” where the characteristics of two (or perhaps even more) genres coalesce in a single, extended narrative.

While this may be a subjective judgment, it obviously has implications as to which interpretive strategy people will consider engaging for their respective reading experiences. If two people have radically different strategies for reading a single work, then their understandings of that work will differ significantly. You can begin to see why this might prove important to our own engagement with biblical literature. If you and I begin this series of essays on Genesis believing radically different things about the genre constraints at work in this literature, then we are not likely to communicate very well regarding the potential meanings of this biblical book. Yet decisions regarding genre are going to be required at every turn of the reading experience. Consider the conflicting interpretations that would result if one interpreter viewed a given passage as allegorical and another viewed it as a literal history. For instance, is the story of Joseph as second-in-command in Egypt to be taken as a historically accurate portrayal of actual events, or was this story composed according to the constraints of what we might now call a “fantasy” genre? Is Jacob’s wrestling match at Jabbok literally a confrontation with a divine being, or is the entire episode symbolic? Obviously, the tools engaged to interpret an allegory are quite distinct from those that work well for understanding historiography. 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 entails debating which reading strategy will best suit a given work. Resolving this debate with regard to biblical literature is not our task in this context. However, 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 biblical passages. While I believe my reading strategy offers a rich yield, I am not offering a critique of other strategies, some of which might prove equally valuable. That critique would require a survey of scholarly engagements with the history of interpretation rather than an interpretation of Torah itself.

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 or eras other than our own. 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 the common contemporary cultural repertoire. 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 narrative deriving from the distant past is not likely to have very much in common with contemporary literary forms. This can even be the case when our culture is, genealogically speaking, a remote descendant of the cultural context that gave birth to a text we consider our own. Moreover, anything from the distant past was written in a language quite different from our vernacular, and this serves to increase the degree of unfamiliarity.

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 bothered by the types of indeterminacies that disturb us as adults. In fact, they may not even identify those elements 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 children to master ever more sophisticated interpretive strategies in order to understand more about 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 a real-life school in the United States. 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, not unlike children. We are acculturated to force even the unfamiliar into familiar rubrics. In some contexts, we adapt what’s available and end up navigating new scenarios just fine because the amount of dissimilarity is easily accommodated. In other contexts, however, we sense that the tools we have at our disposal are inadequate for a particular interpretive task. We may become frustrated by our inability to make sense of what we are reading or seeing.

In some contexts, we are fooled into believing that our tools are adequate for a given interpretive process even when they are, in fact, quite inadequate. I dare say, this is as true of the scholar as it is the common reader. 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 interprets its meanings. 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 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 believe that a translator can adequately capture the meanings of a text in a foreign language, then you might not think twice about engaging a translation. However, those who know more than one language readily appreciate just how difficult it can be to translate certain expressions or to capture poetic imagery both concisely and truthfully. Moreover, if you are seeking life-meanings, or guidelines for setting up a community, or simply a perspective on your people’s history as reflected in an ancient book, then achieving as rich a reading as possible is probably a high priority. Such readings will require comi...

Table of contents

• Title page
• Preface
• Introduction: The Book of Genesis
• Chapter 1: Thoughts on Method and Biblical Interpretation
• Chapter 2: Immortality Missed
• Chapter 3: Family Trees, Branches, and Identity
• Chapter 4: Understanding Origins
• Chapter 5: The Ethics of Our Stories
• Chapter 6: On the Permanence of Graves
• Chapter 7: Recognizing Torah Voices
• Chapter 8: Our (More Or Less) Four Matriarchs
• Chapter 9: A People by Any Other Name
• Chapter 10: Lost Literature
• Chapter 11: Absolute Exile
• Chapter 12: Fantasy, Ancient Jewish Style
• Chapter 13: Ideological History
• Chapter 14: Entering Exodus
• Epilogue
• Afterword