Galileo's conflict with the Roman Catholic Church has long held a very special fascination. The prime reason for this, of course, is that the Galileo affair has come to be seen as the paradigm case of the troubled interaction between science and religion.

Another reason is the sheer dramatic power of the events involved, which continue to attract the attention of the scholar, the novelist, and the playwright. Images easily multiply of the flawed tragic hero, of the struggle for intellectual freedom, of the unprotected individual pitted against a powerful institution committed to its selfpreservation, and of plots and subplots and counterplots worthy of the best mystery writer.

At yet another level, the Galileo case has, unfortunately, long provided many with an ideal arena for ideological posturing for and against both the scientific and the religious world views.

Galileo is one of the larger than life heroes of history. This status was conferred during his lifetime and grew with each succeeding century. Not only was he the hero of the Scientific Revolution, but after his troubles with the Catholic Church he became the hero of science. Today, only the names of Newton and Einstein rival that of Galileo in popularity and imagination. But yet we must ask, to what is his popularity due? What did Galileo actually do that made his image so great and so long-standing?

Certainly, he was impressive with his telescope. The discoveries, in 1609-1610, of the mountains on the Moon, the numerous stars in the Milky Way, and, of course, the four satellites of Jupiter (which he called the Medician stars) caught the imagination of the time. His book was much remarked about, but its first edition was limited to 550 copies, and the later Frankfurt edition printing probably included not more than 1,000 or so. Mario Biagioli has commented that Galileo's control of the distribution of his book was impressive, making sure it got to the right important people. Clearly, too, the invocation of the name of the Medici caused it to be looked at in court circles. Surely, too, books were even more shared and passed around then than in our own time, and, even more, the oral tradition of fame and status was still alive and accounted for a good bit of his popularity. Still, it is hard to fathom through the distance of centuries what caused such a ready reception of Galileo and his work.

The biblical books to be considered in this chapter are Joshua, Judges and Ruth; 1-2 Samuel, 1-2 Kings and 1-2 Chronicles; Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther. Together they tell the story of Israel from the point at which the people entered Canaan down to the Persian period, when some Jews had returned to their homeland and others still remained in foreign lands. The state of current research on these books may perhaps best be summarized in the following way. There is a lively debate among interpreters as to whether they are indeed best considered as 'historical books' at all, and in which sense they might be best considered so. There is a further debate about the proper or primary task of interpreters in relation to these books. In what follows we shall join these two debates and reflect upon the various issues that arise from them. In this way we shall form a rounded, if somewhat generalized, view of the ways in which our literature is currently being approached.

Any critical interpretation of the poetic books of the Hebrew Bible is dependent, or certainly should be dependent, on an understanding of the distinctive character of biblical poetry. On this question there has been less of a consensus than one might have expected at this late date in modern biblical studies. Broadly speaking, I would say that the investigation of biblical poetry since the beginning of the 1980s has made some real if uneven advances, against an unfortunately persistent background of confusions, misperceptions and aridly academic overcomplications.

The notion that biblical poetry is organized on a parallelism of meaning and structures between the two - sometimes three - parts of a line was first systematically articulated by Robert Lowth in his Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, originally published in Latin in 1753. Though the first two of his three categories of parallelism - synonymous and antithetical - are demonstrably operative in thousands of lines of biblical verse, his third category, 'synthetic parallelism', would come to seem in the eyes of many critics no parallelism at all, leading to some uneasiness with the theory as a whole. In the course of time, scholars would propose the most intricate varieties of sub-categories of parallelism in order to save the system, and, in the opposite direction, especially beginning in the 1970s, counter-systems would be put forth that relegated parallelism to a purely secondary role. Thus, syllable-count, sentence-types, syntax, musical quantity, thought-unit were each in turn promoted by various scholars as being the real organizing principle of biblical poetry. None of these theories has won general acceptance, and each, I believe, can be shown to be compromised by either internal contradictions or some basic misunderstanding of how poetry works.

It is often suggested that 'political readings' of Scripture are a recent invention, more especially of Marxist or leftist thought. That Scripture did not bear on human life together, on the 'polis', would however have sounded very strange to most Christians before the end of the eighteenth century, as a moment's reflection on the political involvement of the Byzantine and medieval Church will show. Martin Luther's two-kingdom doctrine, which taught that the Church and the state occupied two quite different spheres of responsibility, and which was very much a response to his own political situation, paved the way for the privatization of religion, especially in pietism. Luther himself, however, did not hesitate to draw the most brutal political consequences from Scripture. Where sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestantism read the whole Bible as the word of God, pietism focused on the New Testament, and the soul's relation to Jesus. The political context of the Old Testament was thereby lost to view. By 1790, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke is telling us that politics and the pulpit 'have little agreement', a foretaste of countless angry protests when church leaders have criticized political policies.

Critical study of the Gospels has sought the human Jesus behind the mythic and theological symbols of Christianity. Analysis of material common to Matthew, Mark and Luke and of sayings common to Matthew and Luke (designated 'Q', German Quelle, 'source') has provided an explanation of the sources of the synoptics (Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke (I-IX), pp. 63-106). Mark was the earliest narrative account of Jesus. References to war in Judea (Mark 13:5-8, 14-19) as well as to persecution (8:34-8; 13:9-13) suggested that it was written during Nero's persecution of Christians in Rome or the Jewish revolt in Judea (c. 66-70 CE; see Donahue, 'Windows and Mirrors'). Independently of each other, Matthew and Luke expanded Mark. Their sayings material (Q) came to each evangelist in different forms (cf. Matthew 5:3-10 and Luke 6:20-6; see Betz, The Sermon on the Mount, pp. 22-44,105-10)- Matthew and Luke sometimes substituted the Q version of an episode for Mark's (cf. Mark 1:12-13; Matthew 4:1-11 and Luke 4:1-13). In other cases, oral tradition underlies the agreements of Matthew and Luke against Mark (e.g. Mark 14:65; Matthew 26:68; Luke 22:64).

The quest for the social world of the Bible has been one of the major goals of biblical scholarship since the early nineteenth century. Travellers' reports from the Middle East of a culture radically different from that of the West; along with the increasing excitement of reports in the national press of archaeological discoveries in Palestine; captivated audiences across Europe and the USA. Such developments offered the prospect of revealing the world from which the Bible had emerged in the ancient past. Monumental works such as George Adam Smith's historical geography of Palestine brought alive an ancient landscape on which the biblical events were played out. At the same time; biblical scholars were trying to reconstruct the history and social contexts out of which the Bible arose in order to understand a foundational text for Western culture. The critical methods which emerged were designed to date and locate the biblical texts, or their constituent parts; in specific historical contexts in order to reveal their meaning.

'It might be interesting to speculate upon the probable length of a “depatriarchalized Bible”. Perhaps there would be enough salvageable material to comprise an interesting pamphlet.' Thus Mary Daly in 1973, sharply engaged with feminist interpretation in its early stages. Roughly twenty-five years later, feminist interpretation flourishes whether inside or outside the academic community where there are feminists qualified and interested enough to engage in it, with some of it undertaken by Jewish and Christian writers together, focusing on women and the gender symbolism of the Hebrew Bible. This chapter, however, engages with feminist Christian interpretation of the Bible as a whole (with some reference to the Apocrypha). Feminist interpretation is here understood as presupposing that the Bible is still read and heard and preached as an authoritative text in communities of belief and worship. And 'authoritative' here means that by using reason, imagination, historical insight, reflection on human experience and whatever other resources we can muster, the Bible somehow mediates to us a God who enables human beings to be most fully themselves. And there's the rub, for feminists at least. Mary Daly's sharp comment has its point.

Throughout the history of biblical interpretation, readers have understood the prophetic books in a variety of different ways and have employed a variety of different tools to interpret them. This plurality of understandings and interpretations has been due largely to the fact that the books themselves are highly diverse and complex. Although all of them except Jonah are primarily collections of prophetic oracles interspersed with a few narratives about their prophetic authors, each book has a distinctive literary style and history and reflects its own particular set of concerns. This diversity has historically provided readers with support for a wide range of interpretative options and has caused many contemporary biblical scholars to exhibit extreme reluctance to generalize about how the prophetic books are to be understood. Even when such generalizations are made, there is little scholarly agreement about the nature and interests of the prophetic books or about the proper way to interpret them. Contemporary scholarship on this literature provides examples of most of the approaches traditionally taken by general readers and then augments these approaches with a number of others that have not yet reached the non-specialist.

INTRODUCTION

Of all the writings of the Bible none is more obviously an integrated whole than the Gospel of John. The first-time reader lionized by reader-response critics is sure to find it, as David Friedrich Strauss famously did, a 'seamless garment'. Its themes (judgement, mission, revelation, truth) and symbols (light, water, bread, healing, life) are skilfully interwoven into the familiar gospel story of Jesus' brief career as a teacher and wonder-worker, with its dramatic ending of death and resurrection. In this, the fourth version of the story, the parts are more than usually representative of the whole. Besides the sustained self-allusiveness consequential upon the evangelist's interpenetrative technique, the reason for this is that once under way the story is dominated throughout by the powerful presence of Jesus, who keeps introducing fresh variations on the single theme of life-giving revelation. This is what justifies the synecdochic approach of the present chapter. In John 4 the Samaritan woman, passing from incredulity to belief, invites a similar response from the readers of the Gospel. Those acquainted with the whole Gospel know that the same invitation is issued on almost every page: any episode of comparable length could be used, as this one is here, to illustrate models of interpretation.

The non-Pauline Letters - what do we mean by that description? The negative suggests that we are dealing with somewhat marginalized texts compared with Paul. Many of our texts have indeed become cinderellas, though one comes from a theologian worthy to rank alongside Paul and 'John'; and the rest are increasingly seen as intriguing, for they enable access to the development of diverse traditions within early Christianity. Comparing and contrasting these makes study of these apparent 'oddments' rewarding. For this reason we shall keep them all in play alongside one another. But first to identify them.

Associated with the Pauline tradition, but definitely to be distinguished from Paul's work, is the Epistle to the Hebrews. Even if ascribed to Paul in the process of canonization, this work does not bear his name, and the Church of the third century CE knew not whence it came: one suggested Barnabas (Tertullian), one supposed Paul had written it in Hebrew and Luke translated it (Clement of Alexandria), one knew that Clement of Rome had been suggested but concluded that only God knows the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews (Origen).

The twentieth century has seen a growing fascination with the Bible 'as literature', with an accompanying persistent sense of theological unease, apart from the obvious recognition that it is a collection of literary' texts having, in common with other literature, narratives, poems, epistles and so on. In 1935 T. S. Eliot suggested that when the Bible is discussed as 'literature' then its 'literary' influence is at an end, for it is far more than that. For T. R. Henn more recently, however, the phrase 'the Bible as literature' suggests a manner of approach to the reading of Scripture, and therefore also a means of assessment, one lightened of theology. As C. S. Lewis earlier wrote of the Authorized Version, 'it is very generally implied that those who have rejected its theological pretensions nevertheless continue to enjoy it as a treasurehouse of English prose'.

Poststructuralism is a convenient umbrella term for a wide range of different and differing theoretical approaches to architecture; the arts, literature, philosophy, cultural and textual studies characterized, among other things, by its dissent from the search for binary forms and its opposition to criticism and Enlightenment values. If structuralism had sought to overcome the text by the use of tightly structured analyses which forced texts to yield up all their secrets to a mathematically inscribed scrutiny, in biblical studies structural analysis quickly gave way to poststructuralist approaches to the text. A new generation of theory-driven scholars emerged after the 1960s determined to read themselves into the text and to construct reading strategies in the discipline of biblical studies which would reflect the points of view of their own reader-response approaches to the biblical text. Rejecting structuralism's obsession with discovering binary oppositions everywhere in the text, poststructuralism emphasized the instability of the signifier, especially in its deconstructive mode.

Linguistics as the 'science of language' is concerned not just with the description of individual languages in and for themselves (though these provide essential data) but with abstract and general questions that arise from language as a universal human phenomenon. The theoretical issues involved in the study of language and of the processes in the mind and in the environment which enable learning and communication have many ramifications; psychological, sociological and philosophical.

The Bible, as a library of literary works written in three original languages, Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, and translated in whole or in part into some 2,000 'receptor' languages, inevitably raises questions posed by linguistics at both the practical and the theoretical levels. Most biblical interpreters approach these questions pragmatically. They are concerned with a range of practical tasks and it is through the effort to discharge these tasks that they are most likely to encounter the underlying theoretical issues. For example, the problems involved in translation, one of the most challenging areas of linguistic theory and practice, are inescapable already in New Testament interpretation, for the version of the Hebrew Scriptures largely presupposed in the New Testament is already a translation, the Greek Septuagint from the second century BCE. And, since no-one is a native speaker of classical Hebrew, imperial Aramaic or koine Greek, the problems of translation from 'source' to 'receptor' language confront the interpreter of the Bible at every turn as the attempt is made to transpose words and content out of the original language into the idioms of the interpreter's everyday speech. Formally or informally, on paper or just in the mind, the anglophone has to convey in English what the text of the original says and it is that process which marks the definitive stage in the decision about the meaning of what is written in the ancient language.

The Bible contains two books that are usually called apocalypses: Daniel (especially chapters 2, 7-12) and Revelation. There are also several sections of books that some scholars label apocalypses; examples are Isaiah 24-7, the visions in Zechariah i-8; and the Synoptic Apocalypse (Mark 13 with parallels in Matthew 24 and Luke 21). The nature of these literary units as divine disclosures of what is destined to take place sets them off from other scriptural books and has gained for them a certain popular and scholarly fascination. Their concern with the future has led more literal readers to mine the texts for clues to when the end will be and what signs will mark its approach; modern apocalyptic groups have joined a series of predecessors in this effort. The potential dangers of a literal reading have caused some uneasiness, especially about the book of Revelation in Christian history. So much has this been the case that its place in the New Testament was denied by some already in antiquity. In recent times scholars have devoted large amounts of time to clarifying obscure points in Daniel and Revelation and to studying them in connection with other, extra-biblical works that appear to belong to the same literary category.

INTRODUCTION

As is often the case with such invitations, John Barton's request to me for a contribution to this volume represented a challenge to think seriously about how each of us was viewing the topic, and about how best to tackle it in the present context. In the original letter inviting me to submit a chapter, the editor explained that the volume would attempt to cover the principal approaches to the Bible in the modern 'critical' era. Conscious as he was of the continuation of older methods and approaches, 'whether naive in the sense of simply untouched by criticism, or anti-critical and conscientiously opposed to criticism', he was anxious that Jewish and Christian conservatism, including fundamentalist interpretations, should receive attention. Given that Christian conservatism was likely to be discussed in other chapters, he thought it would be good if the chapter I was being invited to write could be 'preponderantly Jewish in its concerns'. He was hoping for an article that not only covered the field but represented personal opinions, not just 'bland consensus'.

Hermeneutics entails critical reflection on the basis, nature and goals of reading, interpreting and understanding communicative acts and processes. This characteristically concerns the understanding of texts, especially biblical or literary texts, or those of another era or culture. However, it also includes reflection on the nature of understanding human actions, signsystems, visual data, institutions, artefacts or other aspects of life. In biblical studies it applies traditionally to the interpretation of texts, but also the interweaving of language and life both within the horizon of the text and within the horizons of traditions and the modern reader.

It remains helpful to distinguish hermeneutics as critical and theoretical reflection on these processes from the actual work of interpreting and understanding as a first-order activity. Often writers speak loosely of someone's 'hermeneutic' when they discuss only how they go about the task rather than their reasons for doing so and their reflection on what is at issue in the process. The decisive foundation of theoretical hermeneutics as a modern discipline occurred with the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher over the first thirty years of the nineteenth century. All the same, scattered building blocks for modern theory emerge at regular intervals from the ancient world to the post-Reformation period up to Schleiermacher. These might be regarded as constituting the prehistory of theoretical hermeneutics, in the modern sense of the term.