By Moshe Halbertal
Whereas Scripture is on the heart of many faiths, between them Islam and Christianity, this e-book inquires into the functionality, improvement, and implications of the centrality of textual content upon the Jewish group, and via extension at the better query of canonization and the text-centered neighborhood. it's a common to notice how the landless and scattered Jewish groups have, from the time of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D. till the founding of contemporary Israel in 1948, cleaved to the textual content and derived their id from it. however the tale is way extra advanced. The shift from the Bible to the Torah, from biblical faith to rabbinic Judaism mediated via the Sages, and the sealing of the canon including its carrying on with interpretive paintings demanded from the neighborhood, volume to what should be referred to as an exceptional obsession with textuality. Halbertal supplies us insights into the background of this obsession, in a philosophically subtle but user-friendly narrative. humans of the ebook bargains the simplest advent to be had to Jewish hermeneutics, a booklet able to conveying the significance of the culture to a large viewers of either educational and basic readers. Halbertal presents a wide ranging survey of Jewish attitudes towards Scripture, provocatively prepared round difficulties of normative and formative authority, with an emphasis at the altering prestige and services of Mishnah, Talmud, and Kabbalah. With a present for weaving complicated problems with interpretation into his personal plot, he animates old texts via assigning them roles in his personal hugely persuasive narrative.
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Extra resources for People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority
Sample text
42 The question of whether Scripture speaks in a qualitatively different language and hence must be approached with hermeneutic tools not applicable to human speech was debated within rabbinic Midrash from the second century onwards. According to the school of R. Ishmael, the Torah spoke in the language of humans. Thus it used conventional rhetorical devices such as doubling a term or a commandment to emphasize a point. According to R. 43 Given their conception of Torah language as divine, the kabbalists' hermeneutics is a continuation of the trend of R.
In the next paragraph Nachmanides states: Everything that was transmitted to Moses our teacher through the fortynine gates of understanding was written in the Torah explicitly or by implication in words, in the numerical value of the letters or in the form of the letters, that is, whether written normally or with some change in form such as bent or crooked letters and other deviations, or in the tips of the letters and their crownlets. The Torah implicitly includes all possible knowledge, and an interpreter armed with the proper hermeneutical key can lay bare those secrets.
Ronald Dworkin extends Quine's principle of charity in interpretation to the second level. Dworkin claims that the choice between competing interpretations is governed by the criterion of which interpretation shows the work in the best light. In literary interpretation we will choose the one that accounts for all the aspects of the narrative. An interpretation that seems to leave a portion of the story unconnected and therefore superfluous will be ruled out. In legal interpretation the standard for the best possible interpretation is not aesthetic but moral.