Category: How To Do Exegesis

I’m beginning to think I’m just an incorrigible old crank, a conclusion that many people surely reached a long time ago. Still, as long as I have responsibility for teaching and evaluating students, I’m going to stick with this one. I’ll add it to the “How To Exegesis?” series somewhere, but for now I can’t contain my impatience (‘My heart was hot within me; while I pondered, the fire burst into flame; I spoke out with my tongue’).

If you want to make a positive impression on me in my role as a scholar, show me that you understand the concept of an ‘argument’. Indicate that you have a point, to which you want to win my assent or at least my respect; structure your presentation, or your essay, or your manuscript-submitted-for-refereeing, or your book, or whatever, with a view to establishing that point. Don’t burden my already-complicated life with copious distracting information that doesn’t pertain clearly to the point you’re discussing. Don’t leave it up to me to guess what you want to demonstrate; that’s not my job, it’s your job to make your point unmistakably clear (‘that he who runs may read it’). You may want to summarise other scholars’ work to support your point; fine, well done, but there’s no need to cover their entire oeuvre. Epitomise the relevant part of their scholarship, make explicit the relevance you propose for it, and move on. Imagine you’re in a courtroom, with a grumpy, bewigged QC scolding you for wasting the court’s time, or with an eager opposing advocate who persistently interrupts with cries of ‘Relevance!’ You may know and admire another scholar’s work, or you may have put in laborious hours of study and note-taking for which you want some benefit, but unless the summarisation actually contributes to establishing your point, I don’t want to read about it, and I will take a less favourable view of your position (extraneous summarisation suggests that you yourself don’t know the difference between what’s pertinent and what isn’t).

You’re 100% entitled to not care what I think — plenty of people share that sentiment! But if you want to win my approval, it serves your own interests to show me a genuine argument: a specific claim, supporting evidence, and sound reasoning. I may agree or disagree in the end, but I always admire a strong argument — and I am always disappointed by poor argumentation, even when I think it aims at a conclusion I deem correct.

Just noted, for now — I anticipate gathering up all my ‘How To Do exegesis’ posts and compiling them into a PDF that I’ll make freely available. I expect that elements of that compendium will eventually grow into a published book about exegesis, partly into the more technical volume on Exegetical Method and more, probably, into a pedagogical guide to committing successful exegesis. In the latter case I’d go over the whole thing to smooth out wrinkles, harmonise divergences, and so on — but I expect to leave the blogged musings up indefinitely (after all, they’re all there anyway in the individual blog posts).
 

I don’t remember where I left off in the “How To Do Exegesis” series, but this afternoon I’m provoked to write about a phenomenon that puzzles me as a scholar, frustrates me as a colleague, and depresses me as a teacher. This is the phenomenon of which I’m thinking: Sometimes a reputable scholar responds to reasoned challenges by noting some of the sources on which the challenge draws, and calling into question other points that these scholars make. That’s too abstract. What I mean is that sometimes Lester (let’s say) will cite points that Kirk, Hays, and Bulkeley, make relative to a critique of Adam. Lester may say, ‘Kirk has shown an alternative interpretation of Rom 3:1-8, which makes the grounds for Adam’s assertion that “Paul understands the Old Testament as a collection of oracles such as a chresmologos would consult” conflicts with Hays’s and Bulkeley’s treatments of prophetic oracles’. OK so far? Lester thinks I’m wrong, and he draws on Kirk, Hays, and Bulkeley to make his point.
 
This is where the irritating part comes in. In this hypothetical case, Adam sometimes responds, ‘Of course, Kirk reads Romans as apologetic literature, a long-discredited analysis. As such, he would be attracted to such counterintuitive proposals as Hays’s misreading of Isaiah, and Bulkeley’s postmodern skewering of Amos. Lester here is simply barking up the wrong tree’.
 
Do you see what I just did? Nothing in the whole response addresses the substance of Kirk’s claim, or Hays’s, or Bulkeley’s. When Lester identifies Kirk’s treatment of Rom 3:1-8, he calls me to respond to that issue, not whether I think Kirk is right about Romans as apologetic. Kirk may be 100% correct about Rom 3:1-8 even if Romans is better read as epideictic, or ambassadorial, or a thank-you note to his auntie. Neither does my riposte above rebut Kirk’s reference to Hays or Bulkeley; characterising these scholars doesn’t amount to demonstrating that their arguments don’t hold water.
 
When we aspire to critical interpretation, we volunteer to meet the standard of the best plausible explanation. The best plausible explanation may not be the one we like the most, or the one that our denominational authorities insist is correct, or that comforts us on our sickbed, or that supports arguments that we espouse for other reasons. There’s noting intrinsically wrong with preference, denominational loyalty, consolation, or our other convictions. They just don’t warrant our critical exegetical arguments.
 
So we may opt to stick with our favourite reading of Romans 3:1-8, even though we know that Stack-Nelson has made a convincing argument that leads to a different conclusion. That’s OK, it’s a preference, not a reasoned, critical conclusion. We may be loyal, obedient representatives of our Calvo-pisco-ptist Evangelische Humanist Association (or whatever), so long as we don’t try to represent our fidelity to CEHA doctrine as critical interpretation of Romans 3:1-8. We may pray ‘Let God be true, though everyone else a liar’ while tossing and turning in bed with a feverish flu (why one would do so is a separate question). We may think of circumcision as a form of child abuse, even if we agree that Romans 3:1f insists that circumcision is very beneficial in every way. All OK, so long as one distinguishes what one thinks on other grounds from what one affirms as a critical reader.
 
But if, in the give-and-take of critical discussion, Lester cites Stack-Nelson’s interpretation of Rom 3:1-8 as evidence against my argument, it’s my obligation to address that claim one of several ways. I may show the reasons that I find Stack-Nelson’s claim unconvincing. Or I may allow that she has propounded a convincing interpretation, but that it doesn’t necessarily undermine my own. Or I may give a reason that her argument doesn’t count as evidence (perhaps she made it in the context of a discussion of the relative merits of punk rock bands, rather than Greek-language analysis of Pauline epistles).
 
If instead of addressing Stack-Nelson’s claim against me, I slough it off by disputing a different aspect of her argument, or by questioning her judgment in general, or by suggesting interpretive guilt by negative association (‘she’s a heretic’, ‘she’s a fundamentalist’), by throwing out a red herring (‘She obviously hasn’t read Carey’s recent monograph’ without explaining how Carey’s monograph affects Stack-Nelson’s proposal), by appealing to my reputation (‘How many keynotes has she given? How many books has she written?’), or by ignoring her, I’m no longer speaking with the authority of critical scholarship. Anyone can dodge a question; meeting a challenge, allowing its full force, and explaining your position relative to that challenge, that’s what a critical scholar is called to do.
 
So, sometimes ‘criticism’ isn’t critical, in the sense that we don’t really need critical exegesis for the need at hand (when I’m lying a bed with the flu, I want someone to make me feel better, not to parse Greek participles) (though now that I mention it, participles are a lot of fun, and might make a diverting relief from neuralgia and overheating). And sometimes criticism isn’t ‘critical’ in the sense that the arguments from ostensibly responsible scholars neglect actually to address the issue in question honestly and analytically.
 
Our jobs in conducting exegetical research require us to put forward what seems the best explanation of the evidence before us, to give reasons that this proposal better fits the evidence than does our neighbour’s, to join up as strong as case as we can think up, and to be aware that sensible interlocutors will still have good reasons to reach other conclusions. We may not enjoy admitting that Judy Stack-Nelson has a very strong case for her opposing theory, or that Tim Bulkeley’s recondite postmodernism actually does laudable work with the Hebrew text, or that we just never remember which Iron Age level Chris Hays’s reconstruction of Isaiah belongs to (or even whether it was Bronze Age or Some Other Metal Age), or that Brooke Lester remembered aspects of ancient oracle-mongering that we hadn’t taken into account, or that Daniel Kirk’s broader exposition of Romans makes his particular reading of 3:1-8 more likely than ours (which doesn’t fit tidily into any overall reading of the epistle).
 
(This goes with my series on ‘How To Do Exegesis’, which may turn into a book someday, but which aims to spell out some of the aspects of interpretive labour that my colleagues sometimes think of as self-evident. The first post is here, second here, third here, fourth here, fifth here, sixth here, a relevant but non-serial post here, and some miscellaneous notes and quotations elsewhere in the ‘How To’ category. If you want to use some of these for your teaching, by all means help yourself, unless you charge for them or take credit for having prepared them. I did not consult the actual scholarly positions of any of the friends I invoke here; they’re all smart, wise, critical, profound, and correct, except when they depart from what I think.)
 

[Part Six of a series on “what makes exegesis difficult?” that otherwise includes parts one, two, three, four, and five.]

Although one could go on indefinitely citing the sources of frustration and confusion for students who are beginning the study of exegesis, I’ll conclude my survey here by describing a structural problem with the exercise: that is, that beginning students face an incoherent diversity of claims about proper critical interpretation. The incoherence doesn’t derive from the scholarly sources themselves (usually), but from the absence of any overarching explanation of whence the teeming variety of interpretive possibilities arises, and what relation each alternative bears to others. Since a beginning interpreter doesn’t have the benefit of extensive experience dealing with the players and their positions, the hyperabundance of interpretive options challenges students to make interpretive decisions without the rich understanding of the discourse that they might gain after years of attentive study. As a result, many students hew to a safer, or more comfortable standard. They either adopt and defend a consistent factional position (upholding a doctrinal, or ideological, or local, or conspiratorial, or whatever sort of standard), or latch onto interpretations because they “like” them.
 
In defense of teaching scholars, I will affirm that we do talk about criteria and authorities, and we typically assign exercises aimed at cultivating a student’s fluency in deploying criteria and weighing various authorities. Such exercises frequently work out fine for people who will eventually become scholars themselves, so it’s more difficult for us to recognize how baffling they seem to many students. If a reader approaches the field of biblical criticism without being attuned to the intricacies of judgment in the discipline, though, they’re likely to make initial assessments that depart seriously from the normative target zone of academic criticism; and, having made a divergent initial assessment, the reader is likely to draw questionable conclusions, and frame arguments that wobble unsteadily away from the goal for which the instructor is aiming. If a popular author claims that Jesus spoke classical Hebrew in his daily comings and goings, and a student reader accepts this claim, the student will embark on a series of inferences and evaluations that take an exegetical essay onto precarious ground — but a beginning exegete doesn’t necessarily have the standing to evaluate an assertion made by a prominent interpreter, especially when the claim in question tends to confirm the student’s initial inclinations. When an instructor hands back a paper with comments that suggest the trajectory and scale of the beginning exegete’s error, the student-writer has reason to feel discouraged, perplexed, and somewhat resentful of the teacher (“Who is Prof. Vexillus to question Popular Author?” “Prof. Vexillus is grading me unfairly just because he doesn’t agree with so-and-so” or “because she’s a heretic” or “because he’s a fundamentalist.” ). {To an extent, I think this repeats claims I’ve advanced earlier, but it’s been a while since I read the previous entries in the series.}
 
The confusing conflict of criteria arises in part from genuine, unresolved conflicts within the interpretive fields. Archaeologists who concentrate on material culture have been known to derogate their colleagues who endeavor to reconcile textual material with material evidence, and vice versa. Interpreters who invoke social-scientific approaches have been known to belittle interpreters who operate primarily with grammatical and comparative-literary criteria. Literary-critical interpreters scorn scholars who (allegedly) neglect matters of plot, character, and narrative technique. Interpreters who bring to the foreground the interests of non-dominant groups question the integrity of “mainstream” dominant-group interpreters. And, of course, critical academic interpreters deride readers who take less erudite, more populist approaches. The list could go on indefinitely, and it matters not because someone is right and someone else is wrong, nor even because people ought to be more charitable about their colleagues, but because beginning interpreters don’t have a sufficient acquaintance with these disciplinary streams to assess the weight of one over against another; they have to just take sides, perhaps with the first rhetorical powerhouse they encounter, perhaps with the interpreter who most forcefully confirms the student’s pre-existing biases, perhaps with the scholar who seems to debunk the follies of the student’s home community, frequently with interpreters who resonate with the sermons or Bible studies that drew the student toward formal study of the Bible in the first place. Students have a built-in incentive to conform to their teachers’ apparent predisposition, and teachers have a tremendous advantage in presenting a persuasive case for their perspective (and a flimsy case for “the other side”), though sometimes a contrarian student adopts an opposing position in the hope of confuting a professor. All of these exemplify very common classroom phenomena, and none of them involve making a well-informed, balanced discernment. If students don’t mind a false start or two, or if they’re exceptionally quick at picking up the rhetorical dynamics of a discourse, they’ll manage fine. Many students, however, assimilate the rhetoric and etiquette of a discourse relatively slowly, and many lose interest quickly if they are not evaluated favorably from the outset. If we want to teach exegesis to a whole class, we have to keep in view the interests not just of the apt learners (the ones like us), but of the less rapid learners who are apt to lose heart when their efforts garner lukewarm (or negative) feedback.
 
The same sorts of conflicts among criteria arise from divisions among disciplinary currents arise also among the various authoritative sources to which an exegete might appeal. Very obviously, different schools and teachers rely on different textbooks, different reference texts, and so on. Further, though, the range (and credibility) of sources that a student might find in the library will vary by institution and teacher. And although online databases lead to staggeringly vast repositories of interpretive judgments, these sources do not come with obvious identifying markers that guide the interpreter toward (or away from) arguments discordant from their interpretive academic habitat. Again, some students will pick up very quickly that certain journals are welcome reference sources here, unwelcome there — and the quicker students will notice patterns of bibliographic citation and commendation (or omission and deprecation) — but more nearly average students won’t notice these patterns as quickly, if at all. Students who struggle with the whole enterprise may not recognize institutional/professorial approbation at all, and some students will operate on the premise that anything that appears in the library’s collection (and increasingly, anything that they find online) bears an imprimatur of sound authority.
 
Students who face this welter of conflicting criteria and authorities confront a two-fold assignment. Not only do they have to compose a well-reasoned, adequately-written exegetical exercise, but they also have to assess, interrogate, affirm, dispute, and arrange the criteria and authorities on which they draw. This is as it must be: even if we try to direct students’ attention to the text itself, apart from secondary interpretive guidance, we ourselves are functioning as an interpretive filter for their deliberation. We permit them to use certain translations and discourage others, we assign certain textbooks and ignore others, we present certain information in lectures and disregard other information. All of this doesn’t mean that there’s no point in concentrating on the text — it just means that even this emphasis doesn’t equal “unmediated” or “the plain sense of the text.” (If it were so very unmediated or plain, students wouldn’t need our guidance in the exercise.)
 
It won’t do to try to suppress the social, political, theological, and institutional aspects of exegesis — unless, of course, one honestly believes that one has escaped the influence of social, political, theological, and institutional effects on one’s interpretive practice (and one expects that one’s students can likewise hope to attain such interpretive purity). I have no word from the Lord on this, but I suggest making explicit some of these factors, and explaining that they are not simply whimsical, but are integrally related to the sound practice of exegesis as “we” (Methodists, secular critics, liberals, orthodox, Chicago grads, white males, Karen Christians, whatever) have critically received and perpetuated those practices. If one grants that “we” are who we are for good reasons, those same reasons ground our affirmation of the social, political, theological, and institutional flavors of our exegetical practice.
 
Some of our students (and colleagues) may well want to query these premises. That’s OK, too, so long as they have sound reasons for their criticism. There’s no magic wand that’ll compel our interlocutors to accept our premises. The best we can do is to practice our exegesis with integrity and consistency, and to make explicit as many of the good reasons for our premises and our interpretations as time permits.
 
We ought also point to the reasons that our interpretive heroes should be respected, and the reasons our misguided interlocutors have gone astray. Moreover, we should acknowledge the weaker parts of our heroes’ positions, and the strongest case for our adversaries’ positions. Otherwise, we’re inculcating a catalog of correct answers — not teaching exegetical reasoning.  
This will frustrate students who hanker after right answers for confuting the heretic, thwarting the fundy, putting ideological interpreters in their place, unveiling the plain, objective truth that only people like you recognize. It may cause a degree of stress if your colleague(s) adhere to one of the various partis pris that deem themselves the beleaguered bastions of untrammeled good sense. Still, I can’t think of a way to draw students into exercising the kind of resourceful, self-reliant, prudent, long-run exegetical judgment that enhances essays, sermons, and instruction.
 
[Next — when I get to it — I’ll begin describing the practice of exegesis as scholars practice it among themselves, in terms that open up to the very different situation of a beginning student venturing to compose an interpretive argument under the evaluative judgment of a pedagogical authority figure. This portion will try to articulate the characteristics that distinguish critical exegetical deliberation and persuasion (on one hand) from cheerleading, brainwashing, partisanship, incorrigible idiosyncrasy, and blind guessing (on the other). After that, I anticipate sketching the specific qualities that belong to the diverse interpretive “methods.”]

[Part Five of this series: one, two, three, four]
 
Granted, then, that the practice of exegesis is complicated by confusions concerning what the term itself names, concerning the expectations that readers bring to exegesis, concerning the genres in which to express interpretive proposals, and concerning language and what we do with it — granted all those complications, exegesis also involves complications from its involvement with research. Biblical scholars frequently overlook this point, since (in order to become biblical scholars) they often have an insatiable appetite for research; but more typical individuals find research daunting, confusing, sometimes frustrating, sometimes quite unpleasant. Some simply do not have a temperament suited to biblical research, and others might be inclined to pursue research but don’t have an aptitude for the various aspects of research. Sometimes barriers to access to reference materials impede students’ research, and sometimes deadlines (and poor planning) limit the amount of research someone can accomplish. Usually, students undertake exegetical research mainly to satisfy other people’s requirements and expectations, rather than out of a vivid desire to learn; that renders the whole exercise less engaging, more mechanical, than pursuits that draw learners into voluntary commitment to inquiry. Few people have devoted much time to the kinds of activity that exegesis requires; the very unfamiliarity of exegetical research renders the whole activity less satisfying. So one of the fundamental elements of exegesis — research into possible appropriate interpretations — calls for students to operate with underdeveloped skills, in unfamiliar environments, with limited time, at purposes they don’t care for, regardless of their disposition and personal strengths (or weaknesses).
 
There’s not much we can do about temperament and aptitudes at the start, but it helps us who teach biblical studies to recall that we have been selected as the sort of people who wouldn’t have much trouble with exegetical research, whereas our students include a varied spectrum of learners. Even among those who ardently want to know more about Jesus (or Isaiah, or the Holy Spirit, or whomever), not everyone wants to learn by looking through a stack of books, searching a database for relevant articles, reading, note-taking, comparing, and so on. When we add the consideration that some of these students have already received discouraging feedback on exegetical research (often for reasons they don’t fully understand), their reluctance to throw themselves into detailed investigation of the scholarly interpretations of a given point seems eminently justified.
 
Beginning exegetes will find further pitfalls in the very topics they’re assigned to study. The topics of exegetical assignments often seem utterly fascinating to scholars, but remote and baffling to students. Perhaps the assignment touches on a nuance that beginners can’t imagine caring a whole lot about, or perhaps the assignment invites attention to a puzzle that only stands out to an observer who already knows the material well, or perhaps the assignment addresses a plainly puzzling or controversial passage that defies explanation at a beginning level. Perhaps the assignment is left open to the students’ choice, leaving them up in the air about what might constitute an appropriate topic. For all these reasons and more, students may feel unmotivated to pursue their research with much energy.
 
Any lack of motivation will certainly aggravate the fact that research materials are not universally available for handy perusal. Many students don’t live conveniently nearby a research library (and ordinary public libraries typically hold relatively few useful reference works in biblical studies). Even when one can get to a research library, it takes effort to shuttle from databases and catalogs to the shelves that hold books, and sometimes books are misshelved, and sometimes libraries distribute their volumes in confusing ways. When I went to seminary, the library operated collections with three different cataloging systems. The desired books may be circulating, or on reserve, or they may not be in a particular library’s collection. Exegetes who conduct their research online may encounter obstacles gaining access to copyrighted material, if they aren’t associated with a subscribing institution, or if their institution’s privileges do not include off-site browsing. And all this is aggravated by the likelihood that good exegetical research will require multiple trips to the library, refining and adding and abandoning and reviewing various lines of interpretive inquiry. (I will not even describe the user interfaces of some prominent catalog-search software systems, which seem to have been desgned by Mordac, The Preventer of Information Services.) Even if students only perceive themselves to have limited access (see: “lack of motivation” above), the effort of conducting research will diminish the productivity of their research sessions and the likelihood that they will conduct follow-up research to check and enhance their first results.
 
Finally, the bibliographic problem-solving behavior that characterizes biblical researchers calls for activities at which most people don’t spend much time. Even when I have walked students through exegetical research, showing where I looked for preliminary information, where I looked for further clues, where I would look on library shelves for resources, which periodicals would be more likely to provide helpful articles than others, how to compare two rival interpretive arguments, and so on — even when I demonstrated all the various steps that I typically undertake (with an accompanying handout), students would find it difficult to do what they had just seen me do; that which they had to re-enact on the basis of instruction and demonstration was still awkward and counterintuitive. Unfamiliarity breeds resistance.
 
[Next: conflicting authorities and criteria]

[Previously on this topic: One, Two, Three.]
 
Many of the confusions that arise in exegetical inquiry come from the extrinsic factors we’ve been discussing: the ambiguous technical terms, the unstated expectations, the literary genres in which students write, and the multifarious contexts that pertain to interpretive reflection. At the same time, a great deal of the complexity in learning exegesis arises from the fact that we’re working with language. Language sometimes seems so simple that readers pursue their interpretations of the Bible with vigorous reliance on plain common sense. At other times, even casual readers detect intricacies that defy convenient resolution. Moreover, different readers will identify different texts as “transparent” or “opaque”; the text itself provides no marker that indicates “The following bits will be hard to figure out,” or “This last part should have been immediately intelligible to you.” The unpredictably intermittent clarity or murkiness of linguistic expression makes exegesis that much more complicated.
 
The interpretation of linguistic texts poses even greater challenges to readers whose fluency in a language, even their own native language, may not include the capacity for rigorous critical reflection on the syntax and semantics of the text in question. Many students, for instance, have difficulty learning additional languages because they have not learned the internal mechanics of their own language, and that difficulty may be amplified for students who know a non-standard dialect of their indigenous language better than they know the standard version. Few people write particularly well, and most resist refining the deeply-ingrained compositional habits they acquired as early as grade school. If students do not communicate with critical fluency in their native language, they will probably write that much less clearly and comprehend the texts they read less satisfactorily. Thus, language in itself entails one of the problematic dimensions of exegesis.
 
The problem of language intensifies, however, as we consider the role of multiple languages in exegesis. Students reading and writing exclusively in one language nonetheless rely on translations and multilingual scholarship produced by others. The monolingual interpreter then faces the enigma of how to adopt one particular translation (or to weigh various translations) without even minimal fluency in the source language. Monolingual interpreters may rely on trusted scholarly authorities, but when scholarly authorities disagree, the monolingual interpreter must take a guess as to which figure to rely on. Yet not all scholarly authorities attain the same degree of fluency in any given language, and the Hebraist of superb refinement may read Greek inexpertly; or, more commonly, qualified working scholars may simply read other languages with competence, but without subtlety or grace (and “subtlety” and “grace” are notoriously difficult to teach or to pin down in evaluation). The monolingual reader must cope with problems of interpretation and expression in one language, while also allowing for even greater problems of interpretation and expression in unknown languages.
 
The importance of translation for biblical interpretation engenders one further fillip of complication. Translators generally work under the obligation of producing a representation in a target language of what they take the source text to express — fair enough. But In many cases, the source text involves ambiguities, allusions, and connotations that cannot be represented equally in any one translated phrase. The greater problem, though, is not the deficiency of any single translation; the greater problem is the latent proclivity to treat translation as a normative activity for interpreters of the Bible, such that the lurking obligation of arriving at one correct definitive translation shapes the work, the deliberation, and rhetoric of biblical interpreters. Since a translation must, in the end, adopt one representation of each expressive unit; and since the tradition of biblical interpretation has emphatically promoted the Bible’s availability in translation (as opposed, for instance, to the Qu’ranic tradition); and since theological argumentation typically puts a very high value on biblical warrants; hence, the interpretive activity of translating has held center stage for biblical scholars, the disciplinary discourse of biblical scholarship gravitates toward a univocity that fits the requirements of translation and polemics.
 
Scholars may argue about extent to which textual “meaning” is determinate and univocal — I doubt both characterizations — but regardless of the philosophical status of textual univocity, that axiom not only fuels academic and ecclesiastical controversy, but also underwrites badly-written, dizzyingly-profitable best-selling novels. Moreover, in so doing, it perpetuates a disabling misconception about communication and the Bible: the idea that texts encode a concealed meaning that only the right interpreters can unveil. On one hand, this sensibility produces The Bible Code and The da Vinci Code; on the other, the Left Behind potboilers. All of these rest on the premise that a non-obvious meaning lurks behind the familiar surface of the Bible that unenlightened readers have been interpreting for centuries. Several possible objections should come to mind right away: first, if this is the real, true meaning of the Bible, why did no one identify it before the late nineteenth century? What of all those brilliant-but-presumably-hapless scholars who actually read the Bible fluently in its original languages? However one explains away those queries, though, the more disquieting aspect of the “coded Bible” axiom lies in the extent to which it mirrors the figure of the academic discipline of biblical studies, which frequently represents itself as a revelatory discourse of truth that banishes the misconceptions prevalent among untrained interpreters (especially ecclesiastical interpreters). The epithet “pre-critical” that historians of interpretation used to deploy without hesitation betrays the condescension with which modern scholars have treated their predecessors in the field. As long as contemporary critics insist on the axiom that the Bible encodes a “real meaning” that only the true experts can decrypt, they play into the hands of opponents who contest the qualifications for “true scholarship” rather than contributing to a richer discussion of what makes for sounder biblical interpretations.
 
A second pitfall that besets efforts to identify the “real meaning” of texts — particularly of the Bible — involves the red herring of “literalism.” Someday somebody will trace out the labyrinthine rhetoric relative to “literal” meaning, but at a very simple level one may note that neither those who espouse a virtuous “literal” interpretation of Scripture (as opposed to a misleading, evasive, fanciful “figurative” meaning) must rely on extrinsic contextual clues to explain which texts really should be read figuratively (for instance, when Jesus says “A man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho,” he doesn’t literally mean that he’s thinking of some particular fellow who actually made such a business trip); and those who repudiate an ignorant “literalism” lack a consistent rationale for distinguishing texts that should be taken literally from texts that shouldn’t. While the literal/figurative opposition doesn’t correlate with claims about “real meaning,” the two sets of hermeneutical claims intertwine and, by promoting the limited us-vs.-them binary alternatives, reinforce the latent axiom that some encoded real meaning awaits revelation by the appropriate privileged expert. [This paragraph has gone somewhere I don’t want it to; I’ll revise later, but now I want to wrap up for the day.]
 
In order to help interpreters to practice sound, well-informed exegesis, teachers must attend to the ways that language itself, and their students’ relation to language, and their assumptions about language, all make exegesis more difficult. Teachers should watch out for the effects of monolingualism on their students, should encourage students to a more critical relation to their own most comfortable modes of linguistic expression, and should exemplify both appropriate humility about their mastery of various languages and their appreciation of the tremendous value of learning more Hebrew and Greek (and for practically everyone, there is always more to learn). At the same time, teachers should steer clear of suggesting that knowledge of the original biblical languages affords students with a supernatural anointing that licenses them to know and preach “what this or that really means.” If teachers opt to uphold some model that posits an encrypted meaning subsisting in the text, they should extend themselves to display (to the extent possible) how one can distinguish well-founded practices of decryption from impoverished, misleading interpretive decryption.
 
[Whew, OK. I’ll probably revisit and emend the paragraph I marked above. When I tackle the next bite of “what makes exegesis so hard,” I’ll move ahead to problems attendant on the conduct of research. For now, I have other obligations to which I have to turn.]

[Part One, Two]
 
Finally, to the extent that sound interpretation entails identifying convincingly illuminating contexts with relation to which to read the text, teachers should bear in mind that the range of possibly-plausible includes so many alternatives that a student’s mind may reel at the prospect. Scholars typically concentrate on a select range of interpretive contexts, within which they have an acutely-trained sense of which proposals make sense. Even beyond their range of specialization, they have the transferred capacity to recognize likelier and less likely gestures — though it’s not that surprising to observe a specialist on the Dead Sea sect (for instance) faltering when dealing with Roman civil religion (or vice versa). Begin with the interpretive contexts based on the histories of Judea/Samaria/Galilee and their inhabitants, the histories of neighboring nations, the literary forms prevalent in the first century (or earlier, for Old Testament interpretation), distinctively Judaic culture (in both Judean and Diasporic flavors), gentile Hellenistic cultures, Roman culture, Mediterranean peasant culture, the dynamics of acquiescence and resistance in imperial /colonial relations, gender relations, the history of Judaism, the rise of rabbinic Judaism as the normative expression of Judaic faith, the history of Christianity, the various theological trajectories toward dominant orthodox Christian belief and toward various divergent expressions of Christianity, the politics of personal identity, the economic infrastructure on which social life rests — and any beginning student should feel justified at a case of vertigo.
 
Some of the judgments on the “appropriate” context(s) to introduce to textual interpretation rest on generally-shared scholarly assessment, but some involve ideological considerations as well. A beginning interpreter may invoke particular interpretive contexts apparently at random, or may endeavor to mimic the informed judgments and prejudices of the teacher, without appreciating the extent to which these judgments (and prejudices) rest on arguments, experiences, histories, institutional circumstances, and so on. A student who makes interpretive gestures without understanding their contexts may, with persistence, develop the capacity to recognize a fuller picture of these contexts — but such a student may also feel frustration and despair when a given paper’s interpretive approach receives sternly critical disapprobation from the teacher without careful explanation of why that interpretive repertoire doesn’t fit the interpretive circumstances.
 
By this point, the grounds for confusion and ambiguity in biblical interpretation should be obvious, if not entirely overwhelming. Those who have navigated the daunting hidden shoals and entered the calmer harbor waters of biblical interpretation can help their baffled, vexed colleagues by marking as much of the complexity as possible, explaining whence it arises, and showing ways around the most dangerous reefs. The very common alternative, however, of asserting that recognized scholarship simply approaches texts in an obvious, naturally appropriate, uniquely legitimate way — without attending to the grounds for confusion and error — ill serves eager learners. In order to encourage biblical interpreters to grasp the idioms and conventions of biblical scholarship and deploy the admirable results of millennia of close scrutiny, teachers of exegesis should never minimize the peculiarity of our practice.
 
[Next time I plan to talk about the problems attendant on the prominence of language in our interpretive practice. That may seem paradoxically obvious — “Duh, we’re working on verbal texts!” — but the very obviousness of language in our work tends to obscure a cornucopia of dimensions of exegesis that stymie beginning exegetes.]

[Last time I sketched stipulated definitions for the terms analysis, exposition, and exegesis; now I’ll go ahead to spell out some of the varying expectations that characterize exegesis teachers. Maybe I’ll go on to the related topic of exegetical genres if I get a head of steam.]

it involves learning the kinds of questions and inferences of which an exegetical scholar would approve

 
Some of the obstacles to successful exegesis involve mismatches of expectations, or unstated preconditions that learners may not yet have attained. Most teachers of exegesis have become so acculturated to the world of biblical criticism that they have a hard time identifying and articulating what a student has yet to learn. While scholars may not all have studied formal and informal logic in their academic careers, they have participated in enough discussions that they’ve had to learn what counts as a sound inference — in a way that most students have not. Years of writing for presentations and publications may have polished the teacher’s writing skills without her or his noticing exactly what has changed (so that the teacher has a hard time explaining what is lacking in a student’s writing). Scholars and students feel different degrees of satisfaction with speculative thinking; whereas students often trust that the majesty and explanatory power of their speculations warrant full credit, their teachers may regret the absence of any supporting evidence for a claim. Or a scholar may regard a particular premise as good as proved (Q, for example, or other source theories, or the non-Pauline character of some letters, or the indubitably Pauline authorship of the same), when a student who is not immersed in the guild’s literature may treat that same premise as unwarranted. And the long-standing problem of the relation of theological claims to interpretive conclusions affects the practice of exegesis in many ways. Some interpreters who hew to the premise that Scripture provides an intrinsically reliable recounting of the events it narrates and the claims it transmits may not perceive any urgency to provide further support for such inclinations, but if their students (or teachers) don’t share the same view of Scripture, the misalignment of their expectations will likely engender disappointment and frustration. No one will be able comprehensively to stipulate every presupposition they bring to the writing-desk, but teachers and students all should extend themselves to minimize the scope and effects of presuming that their audience shares all their experience, educational privileges, theological axioms, rhetorical skills, and other ingredients to effective exegetical papers.
 
Typical assignments in exegesis courses involve not just the balance of several different sorts of study and expression, but different literary modes, too. To describe this difference in simple terms, I’ll propose a spectrum whose poles are on one extreme the report, and on the other the argumentative essay. Most actual assignments will involve elements of each, but frequent conversation with students has persuaded me that no mater how hard we may try to communicate our expectations relative to the genre of the assignment, students consistently evince hesitancy and uncertainty about what they ought to turn in. When we don’t put a lot of effort into making our expectations explicit, students feel something akin to abject dread — for good reason.
 
At the “report” end of this oversimplified spectrum, a student is expected to turn in mostly data: perhaps a bibliography, perhaps summaries of the claims that scholars have made (and on the apparent preponderance of scholarly opinion), perhaps some of the results of analyzing the text. These require less interpretive judgment of the student, and more research skills. Sometimes teachers assign students specific exegetical tasks for a report paper; they may require a form-critical assessment of a text, or information on the apparent source(s) of the text. While we can see the texture of the assignment already shading over from strictly reporting information to rendering interpretive judgments, these assignments aim to direct students toward exercising the (broader-sense) exegetical basics: showing a grasp of the scholarly literature, identifying fundamental formal and grammatical features of the text, and so on. Such an assignment does not so much expect the student to compose a paper that resembles an article in the Journal of Biblical Literature as it expects something like an executive summary of things one ought to know before considering various argument about the text.
 
At the “essay” end of the spectrum, a student is expected to be capable of the basic steps that the report requires; rather than transmitting a compendium of data only some of which actually bears on the interpretive difficulties pertaining to the text, the essay-assignment expects the student to identify an interpretive problem and to show how best to resolve that problem. To that end, the student may not (depending on the problem) need to display familiarity with relatively minor text-critical issues in a given passage, or with the gender politics of the Hellenistic Judaic Diaspora. In an argumentative essay, the student takes responsibility to identify the pertinent evidence for a potentially controversial claim, and to display the rationale for that preferring that claim to other possible solutions.
 
Since most assignments partake of both reportage and discernment to some extent, it’s easy for teachers to under-clarify their expectations, and for students to provide an imbalanced response to the assignment. Often students provide a greater portion of reported data than reasoned argument — that pleases some teachers, but frustrates others. On the other hand, sometimes students neglect to demonstrate awareness of the basics of a text, rushing instead to try to prove their pet theory about it — thus disappointing teachers who want to make sure students have mastered the fundamentals.
 
We should note also that it’s quite possible to concentrate on the correct sort of genre in the assignment, but still do the work poorly. A student might, for instance, work hard on an annotated bibliography, but come up with only very marginal, unreliable sources on which to report. The same student might devote much attention to analysis of the text, but make mistakes in the grammar (or draw incorrect conclusions from the translation). Likewise, a student may attempt an argumentative essay, but place undue emphasis on speculative claims, or peripheral characteristics of the text. Many of the skills on which excellent (general) exegesis relies depend on prior skills over which few students have a solid grasp: grammatical awareness (such as diagramming clauses), logical argument, the relation of samples to wholes, the assessment of relative probability. Limited time may force exegesis courses to presuppose skills that few if any of the students have attained.
 
For all these reasons, teachers and students should devote diligent attention to addressing the specific literary genre for each exegetical assignment. If students don’t have a clear sense of what their teacher expects them to write, or if a teacher looks for characteristics of a genre that was not made explicit at the outset, the goal of learning to practice well the art of exegetical reasoning will be smothered by mismatched assumptions.
 
[Next time: varying interpretive contexts and their roles in learning exegesis.]