Text and Time. Ten Propositions on Early Rabbinic Hermeneutic

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ALEXANDER SAMELY

TEXT AND TIME: TEN PROPOSITIONS ON

EARLY RABBINIC HERMENEUTICS

ABSTRACT. In the first part of the paper, I present ten propositions on the nature of

early rabbinic hermeneutics. These propositions focus on the fact that the rabbis treat

the meaning of a text from the past as unfolding in the present. Specifically, rabbinic

hermeneutics ties biblical meaning to human action, the horizon of which is the present and

the projected future. The fixed verbal structures of the biblical text are contextualised in

that action-oriented rabbinic present, somewhat akin to the “fulfilment” in a present which

give prophecy or proverb their full meaning. Also, the institution of a weekly reading of

Scripture must have created random hermeneutic contextualisations of the biblical text

through the reader’s present. The rabbinic homily, however, does not contextualise thebiblical text through a rabbinic present but through a biblical past, albeit an exemplary one.

This amounts to an articulation of the rabbinic present through the language of Scripture.

The biblical text thus was on the one hand the unquestionable language through which the

salient features of the present were constituted (and their perception limited); and on the

other hand, it was the target of an objectification which problematised linguistic meaning.

In the second part of the paper, I attempt to identify some of the modern concepts which

underpin the ten propositions, concentrating largely on twentieth-century philosophy.

A. PROPOSITIONS

1. Early rabbinic hermeneutics as found in the Mishnah and the tannaitic

Midrashim is, to a large extent, “legal” or halakhic in a sense of the word

yet to be properly determined by modern interpreters.1 It is embedded in

a discourse on normative (ideal) action, that is, a discourse which projects

the future.2 Thus the rabbinic construal of biblical meaning is embedded

Senior Lecturer in Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Department of Middle Eastern Studies,

University of Manchester.1 The rabbinic terms halakhah and aggadah in their conventional modern interpretation

are not precise enough for articulating what is actually a very important dichotomy in the

rabbinic material. The distinction explicated in what follows here is related to this pair of

terms, but lies oblique to them. It differentiates the thematisation of normative action in the

present and anticipated imminent future from the thematisation of the present through an

exemplary or “historical”, narrated, past.2 The ideal nature of rabbinic halakhah is tied to its normative intent, but also to the

fact that it is “discourse”, i.e. thematises through language. This thematisation takes the

form of a network of recurrent categories operative in hypothetical (i.e. schematic, ideal)

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law

Revue Internationale de S ´ emiotique Juridique 14: 143–160, 2001.

© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.



144 ALEXANDER SAMELY

explicitly in the projection of rabbinic action. This is, from the point of

view of at least some modern theory, very significant. A good case can

be made for saying that the horizon of the present must always provide

the horizon of meaning (linguistic and otherwise); furthermore, that thehorizon of the present contains an element of future projection. If this

is so, a theory of hermeneutics must ultimately be tied to a theory of

human action. The fullest account of rabbinic hermeneutics can be given

by an approach which neither separates the construal of human action from

the investment of action with meaning (both “objective” and normative

orientation in a world ), nor separates the construal of meaning (including

linguistic meaning) from the embeddedness of the interpreter in an activity

called “life”.

Early rabbinic hermeneutics should be understood within the

framework of (and might contribute to) a theory of human action as

presupposing and creating meaning.

2. The characteristic and preferred format in which the rabbinic norma-

tive discourse thematises action, namely as hypothetical discrete act

(“case”), corresponds to a hermeneutic refraction of the biblical text into

small segments (typically of sentence-size and smaller).3 A large number

of specific hypothetical situations defined in terms of human acts thus

cases of law. It has been characterised as “philosophy” by J. Neusner, Judaism as Philos-

ophy. The Method and Message of the Mishnah (Columbia, South Carolina: University of

South California Press, 1991). Participants in the rabbinic discourse seem to have felt the

need to make a distinction between the theoretical activity of determining law on the one

hand, and practical decisions on concrete instances on the other hand. For evidence of this

distinction surfacing within the discourse of the Rabbis (see e.g. Mishnah Sanhedrin 11:2),cf. E.E. Urbach, The Sages. Their Concepts and Beliefs, trans. I. Abrahams (Cambridge,

MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1979), 616f.; idem, The Halakhah. Its Sources

and Development , trans. R. Posner (Tel-Aviv: Yad la-Talmud, 1996), 127–130; 388f.,

note 49. Cf. also J.B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, trans. L. Kaplan (Philadelphia: Jewish

Publication Society of America, 1983), 24ff.; 64f.3 The action presenting the “case” is schematic (not unique and singular). A “casu-

istic” format is present already in biblical texts, yet there are profound differences between

biblical legal texts on the one hand, and the sustained and large-scale integration of legal

case schemata into a rabbinic discourse presented in the Mishnah on the other. For the

legal case as format, see J. Neusner, The Memorized Torah. The Mnemonic System of the

Mishnah (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985); A. Samely, “From Case to Case. Notes on the

Discourse Logic of the Mishnah”, in G.R. Hawting, J. Mojaddedi, and A. Samely (eds.),

Studies in Islamic and Middle Eastern Texts and Traditions in Memory of Norman Calder

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, Journal of Semitic Studies Supplement 12), 233–

270; idem, “Scripture’s Segments and Topicality in Rabbinic Discourse and the Pentateuch

Targum”, Journal for the Aramaic Bible 1 (1999), 87–124.



TEXT AND TIME 145

provide the horizon in which Scripture is read, not a small number of

comprehensive principles. Where comprehensive principles are articulated

(at least, in the Mishnah) they tend to be subordinate to the schematic

cases. Scripture is therefore taken to provide the rabbinic reader with alarge number of non-redundant textual points of relevant and concrete

guidance for action.4 The absence or weakness of general legal principles

finds its counterpart in the absence of comprehensive theological prin-

ciples or generalisations (and a preference for small narrative forms, see

proposition 9).

The rabbinic thematisation of numerous discrete actions corresponds

to a rabbinic segmentation of the biblical text into many discrete

points of information.

3. The normative projection of human action presupposes commitment.

In the act of interpretation the projection of an action comes togetherwith a construal of biblical meaning. This is how the rabbinic interpreter

is committed to the words of Scripture. In rabbinic hermeneutics the

commitment to the interpretation typically becomes indistinguishable from

a (self-)commitment of the rabbinic voice to present and future action, or

to values guiding action.5 In this respect, the difference between rabbinic

reading and the ideals of modern historical-critical reading (of the same

text, namely Bible) is informative. The latter is committed to not being

committed; what is at stake is the validity of the interpretation, not the

validity of the biblical words as construed by the interpretation. Early on in

the emergence of a historical-critical method, Spinoza called for this atti-

tude. He conceptualised it as the separation of the expectation of truth from

the construal of meaning.6 Rabbinic reading is well-described as following

an opposite approach. Meaning is construed under the assumption that it

will tie in with what the reader knows as true and relevant. Furthermore,

the actions of a rabbinic life make the text of Scripture true.

4 Cf. A. Samely, Rabbinic Interpretation of Scripture in the Mishnah (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, forthcoming 2001), ch. 4 (technique Topic2). There is an important link

between first, the level of detail on which an action is thematised in the discourse; second,

the size and nature of the biblical segments with which it is connected; and third, the

depth of penetration of “prescriptiveness” in rabbinic Judaism. The more details of life are

“under the Law”, the more of life is thematised. It seems that thematisation (as expression

in language) is a precondition of what the Rabbis called the “sanctification” of life.5 See Samely, Rabbinic Interpretation of Scripture in the Mishnah, supra n. 4, at ch. 12.6 B. Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, trans. S. Shirley (Leiden: Brill, 1989),

143, 147f., 210; cp. A. Samely, Spinozas Theorie der Religion (Würzburg: Königshausen

& Neumann, 1993), 38; see also note 51 below.




Rabbinic commitment to the interpretation of Scripture is not separate

from rabbinic commitment to the accuracy or validity of the biblical

meaning so identified, nor from rabbinic commitment to the action

prescribed by it.

4. The Rabbis read Scripture in the horizon of their present. The

projection of future and ideal practice and the text from the past meet in

the present of the Rabbis. The context of the present thus becomes the

horizon of the text’s meaning. There is a de facto unity of the occasion

at which the biblical text “sends” its message and the occasion at which

the reader “receives” it; no hermeneutic role is assigned to the difference

between the two contexts, that of composition and that of reading. There

are important general indications to suggest that meaning construction is in

principle tied to the horizon of the present. And influential current theories

of reading take the inescapability of the horizon of the present as theirstarting point. However, evidence for the fact that the present provides

the horizon of rabbinic interpretation is quite cogent even if such theories

are not subscribed to, and its deliberately “updating” tendency has long

been recognised.7 Rabbinic reading thus endows the written biblical text

with the fluidity of orality and dialogue.8 There are hermeneutic strategies

which it makes sense to describe as the rabbinic reader uttering the biblical

text in the present, i.e. the reader becoming something like an author of the

text (see proposition 6).9 More generally, the background assumptions of

rabbinic interpretation are similar to those of face-to-face conversation, i.e.

those of speech uttered by persons who are in each other’s presence, share a

time and place.10 Any written text provides room for manifest hermeneutic

7 See in particular R. Bloch, “Methodological Note for the Study of Rabbinic Liter-

ature”, in W.S. Green (ed.), Approaches to Ancient Judaism. Theory and Practice

(Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1978), Vol. 1, pp. 51–75 (original 1955) and Bloch,

“Midrash”, in op. cit ., pp. 29–50 (original 1957).8 For the “liminality” of dialogue, see for example C. Jan Swearingen, “Dialogue and

Dialectic: The Logic of Conversation and the Interpretation of Logic”, in T. Maranhão

(ed.), The Interpretation of Dialogue (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,

1990), 47–71.9 Cf. Rabbinic Interpretation of Scripture in the Mishnah, supra n. 4, at ch. 5.

10 For the analysis of conversation in modern pragmatics, see the extremely influential

paper by H.P. Grice, “Logic and Conversation”, in P. Cole and J.L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax

and Semantics: Speech Acts (New York: Academic Press, 1975), Vol. 3, pp. 41–58 (now in

Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989)). The

parallels with rabbinic hermeneutics are identified in A. Samely, “Scripture’s Implicature:

The Midrashic Assumptions of Relevance and Consistency”, Journal of Semitic Studies 37

(1992), 167–205.




The prophetic prediction of future events is characterised by a shift

of meaning determination away from the context of past production

to the context of present reception. A similar shift of meaning

determination towards the context of application is assumed by therabbinic reader for the whole of the Bible.

6. The proverbial utterance poses a similar hermeneutic task. Its user

decides in which present context a fixed verbal structure from the past

can be spoken, thereby fulfilling itself, becoming true, and receiving its

“topic”.14 Many biblical verses are proverbs in this sense. Again, the

hermeneutic competence consists in recognising the fit between a fixed

verbal structure from a past, and a situational context in the present (albeit

more than one context can be found, as the proverb is meant to apply to

more than one situation). From this vantage point rabbinic hermeneutics

may be described as seeing potentially any part of Scripture as capable of proverbial application and thus fulfilment. Was the hermeneutic compe-

tence necessary for using proverbs transferred from biblical proverbs to

other parts of Scripture in the time of the Rabbis?

For the Rabbis, Scriptural segments are fixed verbal structures in

search of that present rabbinic concern, action or topic which gives

them the fullness of their meaning, similar to a proverb to be uttered

in an appropriate situation.

7. There are also random yet unique pairings of a biblical text with a

rabbinic context. These are created by the rabbinic obligation of liturgical

or private readings of designated parts of the Bible. They assign a portion

of text automatically to a time (week, day) in the present of the reader.

These blind dates of text and reader situation need not have turned into

occasions for hermeneutic reflection, but offered the opportunity for it (see

next proposition). In contrast to the matching of text and context required

by “prophecy” or “proverb”, there is no active selection on the side of the

interpreter. Rather, text and situation are paired by a mechanism external

or prior to any constructions of meaning. It is irrelevant what the exact

shape of the reading cycle is, or if it is only one reading of the whole

text drawn out and apportioned over a reader’s life (a purely theoretical

14 Harvey Sacks suggests that proverbs are “atopical”. See his Lectures on Conversation

(Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995, 2 vols.), Vol. 1, p. 109 (and see p. 105). Cf.

also G. Hasan-Rokem, Proverbs in Israeli Folk Narratives: A Structural Semantic Analysis

(Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1982, FF Communications, No. 232).




of that week must have been very common. The biblical text was, by

being read, re-uttered in the present situation of the reader or congregation.

Where the reader understood the words (whether in Hebrew or translation),

the performance of the text would have been “heard” as a re-utterance,i.e. as meant for that situation.16 The ever-changing interplay between text

and context could have stimulated hermeneutic sensitivity among many,

and active hermeneutic creativity in some. Thus the institution of a weekly

reading could have had a profound educational effect, priming a large lay

population towards openness for the updated meaning possibilities of the

biblical text (and indeed any text). Any sustained practice of preaching

might have reinforced this, although it is also possible that, on the contrary,

it could have stifled individual hermeneutic activity (and see proposition

10).

The cumulative effect of the regular liturgical pairing of a text and a

horizon of the present may have contributed to the forging of a culturein which broadly based hermeneutic engagement with texts from the

past was a central and routine activity.17

9. One finds a very important rabbinic alternative to the direct contex-

tualisation of biblical formulations in the present or anticipated future.

This may come chronologically later than the phenomena addressed above

(and thus not represent early rabbinic hermeneutics). It consists in the

contextualisation of a biblical text in a biblical past .18 It goes hand in hand

with the near-absence of a hermeneutic evaluation of the Rabbis’ present

situation in its factual constitution, of current affairs. (This despite the fact

that the weekly reading cycle must have constituted an emphatic invitation

to such construal, see preceding proposition.) The relocation of biblical

texts (and some schematic features of the present situation of the rabbinic

reader) in the biblical past finds a number of manifestations, prominent

16 Cf. the fact that the Targums, when rendering biblical curses in the second person, may

modify the formulation – apparently in order to avoid uttering a curse in the present tense,

as explained by A. Shinan, “Live Translations: On the Nature of the Aramaic Targums to

the Pentateuch”, Prooftexts 3 (1983), 41–49; and his The Aggadah in the Aramaic Targums

to the Pentateuch (Heb.) (Jerusalem: Makor, 1979, 2 vols.), Vol. II, 197ff.17 The formulation here intentionally becomes applicable both to Jewish culture in

antiquity and modern European culture, which has been shaped by similar institutions of

reading through the influence of Christianity.18 This is the past as represented in the Bible, not the past of the biblical text, e.g. not a

context of its composition.



TEXT AND TIME 151

among them the most characteristic form of the rabbinic homily,19 the

Petih. ah.20 The Petih. ah typically endows a biblical verse of general (and

non-normative) import with full meaning by applying it to an episode

from Israel’s past reported in another verse.

21

In other words, a versewhose non-narrative subject matter would allow direct application to the

present (such as a proverb) is used for a different purpose. The horizon

of the present of the reader still provides the fulcrum of the hermen-

eutic movement, but it becomes invisible in the act of presenting two

biblical segments as speaking to each other .22 Another manifestation of the

employment of the biblical past as context is the fact that, where features

of the present situation of the Rabbis are identified and linked to Scripture,

they are often alluded to in terms of biblical narrative. Biblical “types”,

such as Edom, Amalek, Ishmael or Haman, are used to refer directly to

the present situation (thereby not singling out specific details). What the

names of Israel’s enemies actually (i.e. currently) are, is hermeneutically

insignificant. Scripture’s narrative is used as a code in which to thematisethe present,23 while the distinctive features of the present find no direct,

separate, expression in the language of the present.24 This might be linked

to the rise of a concept of (permanent) exile in rabbinic thought. Being

willing and able to tell a story (“history”) about the present could have

been a precondition for contextualising non-normative biblical themes in

19 For the themes and characteristics of a typical rabbinic collection of homilies, see

the introduction of W.G. Braude and I.J. Kapstein, Pesikta de-Rab Kahana. R. Kahana’s

Compilation of Discourses for Sabbaths and Festal Days (London: Routledge and Kegan

Paul, 1975, Littman Library of Jewish Civilization).20 See in particular A. Goldberg’s articles on homiletic forms in Rabbinische Texte

(supra note 11); D. Lenhard, Die Rabbinische Homilie. Ein formanalytischer Index (Frank-

furt: Gesellschaft zur Förderung Judaistischer Studien, 1998, Frankfurter Judaistische

Studien, Bd 10), 22–29.21 There are inner-biblical parallels to this in the Psalm superscriptions and some other

devices; cf. for example M. Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1985), 403ff.; also 55; E. Slomovic, “Toward an Understanding of the

Formation of the Historical Titles in the Book of Psalms”, Zeitschrift für Alttestamentliche

Wissenschaft 91 (1979), 350–380.22 See ch. 5 of Rabbinic Interpretation of Scripture in the Mishnah, supra n. 4. See also

the next proposition.23 Part of a larger hermeneutic phenomenon which can be described as Scriptural parole

providing rabbinic langue (cf. Rabbinic Interpretation of Scripture in the Mishnah, supra

n. 4, ch. 2 and passim).24 For the occasional absence of a “doubling” of the biblical message in rabbinic terms

in the Mishnah, see Rabbinic Interpretation in the Mishnah, supra n. 4, at chs. 4–5.




the present of the reader.25 Between the biblical past and the messianic

future,26 the Jewish present becomes visible mainly as one thing: the study

of Torah itself. And in this (actually, normative) feature, no Jewish present

is distinguished from any other until the Messiah comes. The study andapplication of Torah is a prominent theme in rabbinic homilies (as well as

the homily itself being a manifestation of the study of Torah); and this, too,

is frequently contextualised through the biblical past.27

As a rule, the factual features of the rabbinic present are not thematised

to provide the context of Scriptural words. Instead, descriptive general

statements in Scripture are routinely contextualised by the biblical

past.28 The rabbinic interpreters’ hermeneutic interventions as well

as their present situation thus become, hermeneutically speaking,

invisible.

10. The contextualisation of Scriptural text by a biblical past would nothave removed its link to the present, or its application to current affairs.

For the Rabbis conceive of the biblical past not as merely historical (i.e.

unique), but also as exemplary. Yet the links to the present situation are not

expressed , so any details or analogues between the present and the biblical

narrative are left implicit. The task of (tacitly?) placing the biblical words

into the concrete fullness of the present is ultimately left to the audience

of the homily and, as a result, the rabbinic homily as fixed text becomes

25 The rabbinic refusal or failure to construct a grand narrative which includes the actual

events of the rabbinic age itself extends to the eschatological future (i.e. end of exile). In

Qumran and Christianity the story of the Messiah is conceived as a large-scale narrative.

In rabbinic literature, there are no central and large-scale (and thus also “historical”) treat-ments of the idea of Messiah. But there is memory of an important failed attempt to link the

rabbinic present with messianic events: R. Aqiva’s hope for Bar Kochba (e.g., Jerusalem

Talmud Taanit 4:5/68d).26 A standard theme of the rabbinic homily, enshrined in one of its formal parts, the

H . atimah. See the works quoted supra n. 20.27 As when biblical figures are routinely presented as fulfilling rabbinic halakhah or

studying Torah.28 There are other aspects to this rabbinic rendition of rabbinic times as ahistorical. It

is manifest also in the loss or destruction of context for the emergence of central works

of rabbinic literature. A. Goldberg has interpreted this absence of context as creating

the condition of a canonisation of these works. See his “Die Zerstörung von Kontext

als Voraussetzung für die Kanonisierung religiöser Texte im rabbinischen Judentum”, in

A. Assmann and J. Assmann (eds.), Kanon und Zensur. Archäologie der literarischen

Kommunikation II (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1987), 201–211; now in Goldberg, Mystik

und Theologie des rabbinischen Judentums. Gesammelte Studien I , ed. M. Schlüter and P.

Schäfer (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997), 413–425.



TEXT AND TIME 153

as timeless as Scripture itself.29 Insofar as the hermeneutic updating is

suppressed in rabbinic homilies (or exported from the explicit hermeneutic

text to the context of use), they do not date,30 partaking instead of the

timeless validity which they themselves confer on the biblical narrative.But giving no expression to the features of the present situation also has

another effect. If rabbinic homilies without explicit application of biblical

texts to the present should ever have dominated weekly preaching, they

could have circumscribed the effects of a weekly reading mentioned in

proposition 8. Their effect could have been to render private or indeed

unexpressed the constant exercise of a hermeneutic imagination oriented

towards the present. In leaving it unexpressed but stimulated, rabbinic

hermeneutics would encourage a habit of perceiving the present through

the eyes of the biblical text. Features of the present which could not easily

be expressed by biblical words and stories might have become difficult to

perceive. Conversely, the link between the biblical text and the construc-

tion of reality would have required no hermeneutic mediation at all, thebiblical text would have been the language of the present (i.e. defined the

present). On the other hand, explicit study of Scripture was promoted or

prescribed, requiring an attitude which distances its language from the

language of the reader by making it an object.31 So a reader steeped in

rabbinic hermeneutic practice would have experienced, and learned to

negotiate, shifts between the biblical text as the target of an objectifying

attitude and the same biblical text as the language through which reality

is construed. In this process, the relationship between language and world

construction could have become profoundly problematic.32 For on the one

hand biblical language was like the language of the present, i.e. a medium

29 This is confirmed by one very prominent hermeneutic device, the rabbinic parable

(mashal). As a self-contained, brief and fictional narrative form, it can be seen as mediating

between the present of the reader and the biblical story, but without reference to any unique

features of the present. Instead it replicates the exemplary nature of biblical events in an

explicitly non-historic narrative. It is not directed at the life of the readers, but points into

the biblical story. Cf. on the hermeneutic mashal, A. Goldberg, “Das schriftauslegende

Gleichnis im Midrasch”, Frankfurter Judaistische Beiträge 9 (1981), 1–90 (now in Rabbin-

ische Texte, supra n. 11); D. Stern, Parables in Midrash. Narrative and Exegesis in

Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1991); D.

Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington and Indianapolis:

Indiana University Press, 1990).30 Compare the position of A. Goldberg referred to in note 28 above.31 See Rabbinic Interpretation of Scripture in the Mishnah, supra n. 4, ch. 4.32 Perhaps some of the rabbinic accounts of the role of language ( qua Torah) in creation,

i.e. “world construction” in a manner of speaking, are a non-philosophical manifestation

of this problematisation?




of meaningful life; on the other hand, it could be objectified in activities

of questioning and scrutiny in a manner in which only a written, fixed text

from the past could ever be.

The general absence of an independent articulation of the presentsituation in rabbinic hermeneutics could have encouraged a habit of

making the biblical text a direct medium of the perception of the

present. Calling at the same time for an objectifying attitude towards

biblical text and meaning, rabbinic hermeneutics could have nurtured

a problematising attitude to all language.

B. RABBINIC HERMENEUTICS OUT OF THE SOURCES OF

MODERNITY

In the following, I shall quote some theory-laden terms and phrases frompart A and comment on their sources in modernity, as I see them at

the moment. As they underpin my historical reconstruction of rabbinic

hermeneutics, they precede the (my) act of understanding the Rabbis. But

they succeed the Rabbis historically, and thus the historical reconstruction

may become part of a process of anamnesis which leads back to the

present.33

Horizon of the present (propositions 1 and 4). Modern philosophical

discourse has both articulated and undermined the conceptual resources

of historical understanding.34 One might reduce the operative tension

to the following opposition: on the one hand, an acknowledgement that

33 Learning for the present is of course not absent from the practice (not even from

the programme) of historical scholarship in earlier times, in particular where the study of

the “classics” was involved. However, the manner in which the results of historical study

are linked to the present of the historian was not considered to be part of its methodol-

ogy, i.e. not perceived as a problem. The link seems to have been based on the mostly

tacit assumption of a common, context-independent humanity (“the humanities”). Some

such assumption may still be necessary, even for what is called anamnesis above. Cf.

the discussion, in the context of German Geisteswissenschaft and Humboldt’s ideal of a

university, in W. Frühwald, et al. (eds.), Geisteswissenschaften heute. Eine Denkschrift

(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), in particular the section “Wissenschaft als Bildung”, at 99–

111. Note also the claim to the word “humanism” in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas,

e.g. in Difficult Freedom. Essays on Judaism, trans. S. Hand (London: Athlone Press, 1990,

original 1963), 26 (and cf. note 53 infra).34 Cf., for instance, J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Twelve

Lectures, trans. F. Lawrence (Cambridge/Oxford: Polity Press/Basil Blackwell, 1987); Der

philosophische Diskurs der Moderne, 4th edn. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993).



TEXT AND TIME 155

the historian and philosopher can draw meaning only from within the

limits of their time and historical situation; on the other, that both of

these, and probably any language user or discourse participant, presup-

pose some timeless categories, which in turn allow for real insight into anearlier time and historical situation. The first part of the opposition just

expressed is itself an example of the tension described: not even a denial

of timelessness can be articulated without drawing on the generalising,

a-temporal gesture of language (“can draw meaning only from”).35 Yet

this apparent impossibility alone, namely of explicitly denying objectivity

without self-contradiction, does not settle the issue in favour of the possi-

bility of time-independent objectivity, and thus of objective historical

understanding.36 Discourse devices for avoiding “logocentric” claims of

any sort have been developed by academics writing books, and a culture

of “unsaying”37 has developed in which conceptual consistency is under-

mined in the service of another kind of consistency which is not that of

historical scholarship.

Construal of meaning located in an activity called “life” (proposition

1). The discourse to which I make reference here seems to constitute

a thread linking certain modes of 20th century philosophy, sociology,

ethnology, linguistics and the history of science, among others. A major

influence or anticipator is, to my mind, Edmund Husserl, in particular

his Logical Investigations. His account of meaning and ideality as tied to

(or underlying) everyday experience of cognitions (“Erlebnis”), and his

35 Husserl argues that we cannot even utter a “therefore” (German also) without

abstracting stable and ideal unities of meaning from single “psychological” acts of meaning, and thus without assuming time-independent meaning: Logical Investigations

(note 38 infra), Vol. 1, p. 333; Logische Untersuchungen, Unters. I, sect. 34, p. 109.36 It is, however, a critical argument for some philosophers in the discourse about

objectivity and rationality. See K.-O. Apel, Transformation der Philosophie, Vol. 2 (Frank-

furt: Suhrkamp, 1976); Towards a Transformation of Philosophy (London: Routledge and

Kegan Paul, 1980). Cf. also Gadamer, Truth and Method , 2nd edn. (London: Sheed and

Ward, 1979), 483.37 The term is that of E. Levinas, cf. Ethics and Infinity. Conversations with Philippe

Nemo, trans. R.A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duqesne University Press, 1985, original 1982),

107f. His later books provide some of the most subtle and elegant examples of “unsaying”,

coupled with a philosophical account of why it is the most appropriate way of saying (see

the works cited in note 47 infra). The other master of unsaying is Jacques Derrida, see

e.g. Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (New York, London, etc.: Harvester Wheat-

sheaf, 1982); Glas, trans. J.P. Levey, Jr. and R. Rand (Lincoln and London: University of

Nebraska Press, 1986). Both receive important impulses from Heidegger’s later work in

this.




later concept of “Lebenswelt”, seem to prefigure important elements in the

philosophies of both Heidegger and Wittgenstein.38 “Ordinary language”

philosophy can be described as a similar reunification of “doing” (i.e.

changing a world) and “saying” (qua making a truth-claim about howworld is).39 The notion of a unity between perceiving and interacting

with “objects” in a “world” on the one hand, and having “meaning”

in language on the other, is fully developed in Heidegger’s work. His

“hermeneutics” of existence is (re-)applied to the hermeneutics of texts

in the work of Gadamer, who comes to the conclusion that there can be

no rigid connection between “truth” and “method” in historical under-

standing.40 Gadamer, far from seeing them as poor relations of the modern

historical-critical method, identifies the “applied” hermeneutics of religion

and of law as its true ancestors, from whose shadow it has not escaped and

cannot/need not escape. Almost at the same time as Gadamer, and also

developing Husserl and Heidegger among others, Derrida begins to articu-

late his own brand of critique of metaphysical “logocentrism”, includingthe unmasking of enlightenment rationality as historically and culturally

limited.41 Still in that period (the early sixties), Thomas Kuhn strikes at

the heart of the modern concept of objective knowledge by identifying

contextual limitations of apparently universal terms of the sciences.42

38 Logical Investigations, trans. J.N. Findlay (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,

1970); Logische Untersuchungen (Gesammelte Schriften, Vols. 2–4 (Hamburg: Felix

Meiner, 1992)).39 Apart from the work of the later Wittgenstein and Grice (see note 10 supra), this

is represented in the work of J.L. Austin ( How to Do Things with Words. The William

James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955, 2nd edn. (Oxford and New York:

Oxford University Press, 1980)) and Searle. Searle explicitly draws the further philosoph-ical consequence that the “ought” and the “is” cannot be wholly separate from each other:

Speech Acts. An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1969), ch. 8. For a recent technical rethinking of these issues, see R.B. Brandom,

Making it Explicit. Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA

and London: Harvard University Press, 1994).40 Truth and Method , supra n. 36; see in particular “Foreword to the second edition”,

p. xviff., on the “universality of the hermeneutic aspect” (xix; also pp. 431ff.); Wahrheit

und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik , 6th edn. (Tübingen: Mohr,

1990), 478ff.41 See for example, J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G.Ch. Spivak (Baltimore/

London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass

(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979).42

T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970, original 1962). See also H. Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt

(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981). His account includes a treatment of the metaphor of the

“book of nature” (of critical importance for Spinoza’s hermeneutics), and extends to the

“genetic code”. The first published formulation of Blumenberg’s investigation of the power



TEXT AND TIME 157

In sociology and ethnology the standpoint of an observer “outside” the

societies which she/he wishes to describe became problematic for similar

reasons.43 Other contributions come from certain strands of (evolutionary)

biology and medicine, as in the idea of a “unity of perceiving and moving”in the work of Victor von Weizsäcker.44 This is generalised to include the

sciences, quantum mechanics and logic in the work of Carl Friedrich von

Weizsäcker.45

From an early point in the emergence of a philosophical discourse

which ties truth to action, thinkers with Jewish knowledge drew out its

conceptual connections with biblical and post-biblical Judaism. The new

philosophical view, which takes time as well as language seriously, and

which denies the epistemological priority of a subject-object distinction, is

developed among others by Franz Rosenzweig46 and Martin Buber. They

make explicit some of its Jewish resonances. Their work is continued and

radicalised, after Husserl and Heidegger, by Emmanuel Levinas.47 In these

of metaphors in the emergence of modern sciences also goes back to the 1960s (in Archiv

für Begriffsgeschichte, 1960, now as Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie (Frankfurt:

Suhrkamp, 1998)).43 Philosophical accounts of this can be found in Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of

Communicative Action, trans. T. McCarthy (Oxford: Polity Press, 1986, 2 vols.): original:

Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988, 2 vols.); P. Winch, The

Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (London and Atlantic Highlands,

N.J.: Routledge & Kegan Paul and Humanities Press, 1958); L. Wittgenstein, Philo-

sophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, 3rd edn. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968),

original: Philosophische Untersuchungen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982); cf. also B.R.

Wilson (ed.), Rationality (Key Concepts in the Social Sciences) (Oxford and Cambridge,

Mass.: Blackwell, 1970).

44 Der Gestaltkreis. Theorie der Einheit von Wahrnehmen und Bewegen (GesammelteSchriften 4), 1st edn., 1940 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1997). He makes explicit reference to

Sartre’s Being and Nothingness in the preface to the third edition (ibid ., p. 83).45 Zeit und Wissen (Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser, 1992), 203ff. (contextualised

assertions about the present are taken to state “the present conditions of possible actions”,

one of several time-sensitive structures of logic, p. 203; “Was der Sprechend in seinen

Sätzen vorstellt, sind nach unserer Analyse letztlich Handlungsschemata”, p. 213); also

pp. 394ff., 931ff.46 The Star of Redemption, trans. by W.W. Hallo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,

1970), original: Der Stern der Erlösung (introduction by R. Mayer, eulogy by G. Scholem)

(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988). Rosenzweig mentions the work of Victor von Weizsäcker

as part of the “new thinking” of which he considers himself a representative: “Das Neue

Denken”, in Kleinere Schriften (Berlin: Schocken, 1937), 139–161, here at 152 (trans.

in N.N. Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig. His Life and Thought (Indianapolis and Cambridge:

Hackett, 1989), 200).47 Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA.: Dusquenes Univer-

sity Press, 1998); idem, Otherwise than being, or, Beyond essence, trans. A. Lingis (The

Hague/London: Nijhoff, 1981).




writers,48 there is no clear distinction between thinking modernity out of

the sources of Judaism49 on the one hand, and tracing a historical influence

of biblical and post-biblical tradition in the discourse of modernity on the

other. As a result, they can be read as treating the process of historicalappropriation and updating of a Jewish past also as a process of the

anamnesis of modernity.

Separation of the expectation of truth from the construal of meaning

(proposition 3). The idea that a moment of “application” is inherent in

all interpretation, including scholarly methods which aim to exclude

all material links to the present of the interpreter as “anachronisms”,

is forcefully proposed by Gadamer. It has been summed up as: “Every

understanding of a text represents an actualising appropriation of the

meaning of the text by the interpreter with a view to possible situations

in his world.”50 Gadamer thus provides an exact point of opposition to

Spinoza’s separation of truth and meaning.51 To say that the moment of application is intrinsic to all interpretation is to say that even the scholarly

interpreter must find some personal-communal interest, that is, some

living link between the past (or text) and the present. And the possibility

of such a link is created in the reception history of the text which reaches

into and affects the present, and which has perhaps helped to shape the

very fields of scholarship which the scholar has chosen (chosen!). One

48 Derrida and Walter Benjamin too make oblique reference to Judaism in their work

but, compared with the other three, their references are coy and non-committal. Cf. on

such writers R. Alter, Necessary Angels. Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin

and Scholem (Cambridge, MA and Cincinnati: Harvard University Press and Hebrew

Union College, 1991). Cf. also J. Valentin and S. Wendel (eds.), Jüdische Tradition in der Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2000).

49 Hermann Cohen’s book to which I allude here ( Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen

des Judentums (Wiesbaden: Fourier, 1995; first published in 1919); Religion of Reason out

of the Sources of Judaism, trans. S. Kaplan (New York: F. Ungar Publishing Co., 1972)) is

considered an important breakthrough by Rosenzweig and others. The inversion which its

title provides for Kant’s Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft (1793)

has taken on a programmatic meaning for the attempt of contextualising enlightenment

rationality which I outline here.50 D. Böhler, “Philosophische Hermeneutik und hermeneutische Methode”, in H.

Hartung, W. Heistermann and P.M. Stephan (eds.), Fruchtblätter. Veröffentlichung der

Philosophischen Hochschule Berlin, 1977, 15f., quoted in Habermas, The Theory of

Communicative Action, supra n. 43, at 135. Gadamer gives a concrete example (under-

standing the Aristotelian notion of friendship today) in Truth and Method , supra n. 36, at

485f. (“Hermeneutics and Historicism”).51 Interestingly, such a separation is often not in evidence when Spinoza uses concrete

biblical quotations; see M. Salihoglu, “Spinoza’s Use of the Bible in the Tractatus

Theologico-Politicus” (PhD thesis, Manchester University, 2001).



TEXT AND TIME 159

might put the link between truth and meaning in the following way:

meaningful to me are assertions from the past which have sufficient

embeddedness in the present to elicit a commitment from some of my

contemporaries (thus potentially challenging me to agree or disagreewith them). Habermas addresses the value-free or commitment-free

descriptions of cultures sought by sociologists or anthropologists of

recent generations, and asks: “Can questions of meaning explication be

divorced in the final analysis from questions arising in a reflection on

validity?”52 The reversal of Spinoza’s position is also clearly represented

in the thought of Rosenzweig; for him, the idea of truth is something

that requires verification in the sense not so much of making sure but of

making come true.53 This philosophical position on the nature of truth,

language and time seems a precondition for Rosenzweig’s ability to

integrate biblical and rabbinic tradition into his discourse; and something

similar goes for the striking synthesis achieved in the work of Levinas.

Reading as dialogue (proposition 4). Gadamer’s position is of particular

interest here. He presents a very deliberate account of reading in terms

of dialogue, and takes this a step further by examining the dialogical

nature of language as such.54 He sums this up as: “The way in which

tradition is understood and is constantly expressed anew in language is,

as we have seen, an event (Geschehen) that is just as genuine as living

conversation.”55 Here too, Habermas provides a translation into the termi-

nology of social interaction: “The interpreter can elucidate the meaning

of a symbolic expression only as a virtual participant in the process of

52 The Theory of Communicative Action, supra n. 43, at Vol. 1, p. 131 (Theorie des

kommunikativen Handelns, Vol. 1, 189).53 Although the philosophical foundations are clearly different, hermeneutic philos-

ophy has some striking continuities with pre-Cartesian thought (as evinced by Gadamer’s

frequent references to the mediaeval Christian tradition in Truth and Method ).

Rosenzweig’s “verification” of truth is not so very far away from Erasmus of Rotterdam’s

call for a theologian “who expresses what he professes through his life rather than through

syllogisms” (“theologum, qui quod profitetur malit exprimere vita quam syllogismis”),

Ratio seu compendium verae theologiae/Theologische Methodenlehre ( Ausgewählte

Schriften, 3rd edn. W. Welzig, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995), 468

(the Latin text follows the edition of H. Holborn, Ausgewählte Werke (Munich: C. H.

Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1933)).54 Truth and Method , supra n. 36, at 337 (German 380ff.).55 Ibid ., p. 428; German p. 474f.; or, “The apparently thetic beginning of interpretation

is, in fact, a response and, like every response, the sense of an interpretation is determined

by the question asked” (p. 429; German, p. 476).




reaching understanding among those immediately involved.”56 In other

words, the hermeneutic process is being compared to the immediacy of a

shared time and context (and interest ), whose paradigm case is face-to-face

conversation.

University of Manchester

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Manchester M13 9PL

UK

E-mail: [email protected]

56 The Theory of Communicative Action, supra n. 43, at Vol. 1, p. 135 (Theorie des

kommunikativen Handelns, Vol. 1, p. 194).

Text and Time. Ten Propositions on Early Rabbinic Hermeneutic

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