Allegory, Nephi, Nomos and Narrative

Posted on February 6, 2009
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Nate has been doing an interesting series on 1 Nephi 17 over at Times and Seasons. Over at his personal blog, Akrasia, he has up a very interesting post “Nomos, Narrative, and Nephi” that ties things together. We’d discussed this a bit elsewhere as well.

The basic issue is that typology for Nephi appears to be more than “mere allegory.” There’s this sense of literally re-enacting the same events in ones own life. A kind of immanent reading of the text in lived life. (The very common “liken the scriptures to yourself” meme among Mormons) Now Nate is reading this in light of Gadamer. Unfortunately I somehow lost my copy of Truth and Method somewhere. So I couldn’t reread the passage that Nate saw as relevant. (“The Ontology of the Work of Art and its Hermeneutic Significance”) However I immediately thought of Michael Fishbane and his writings on ancient Israelite hermeneutics. So allow me an extended quotation from The Garments of the Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics.

Remez is the allegorical sphere of text interpretation. It is here that the dialogue between text and interpreter produces meanings. This dynamic between a text and an external code which explains it, or translates it into another context of meaning, is the central phenomenon of allegory upon which my reinterpretation is based. Accordingly, we may say that the Remez involves the determination of significance by means of factors independent of, and external to, the textual surface (the Peshat). Thus to the extent that texts represent personal or historical experiences, or posit certain phenomenal realities, these representations and propositions are interpreted by means of something (facts, words, or ideas) outside it. Such correlations (be they ever so latent or prereflective) help constitute the meaning at hand.

The extent to which there is agreement between the Peshat and what it “means” depends upon methodological conventions and periodic preferences. This process begins with the lexical code. For if we understand “silly babe” or ‘Jealous God” in terms of twentieth-century discourse, and not in terms of elizabethan usage, we do not appreciate that the first adjective meant “helpless” and the second “zealous.” In both cases, there is a clarification by means of extrinsic information. At the lexical level of Remez, then, the meaning of a biblical word may be interpreted with reference to its context, other usages in Scripture, or comparative Semitic philology. But if the words of the Peshat are translated into another world of discourse, we may learn that the text is “really talking about” a certain philosophical issue, a state of the soul, or the hierarchy of moral qualities. The latter are what Hellenistic writers on allegory called the hyponoia, or “deep sense” of the text.

This allegorical aspect of Remez, whereby one thing is explained by and in terms of another, shades into a methodological system at the other end of the spectrum. Methodology may thus be perceived as the systematization of a way of coding and coordinating material. The principle of order or arrangement-when external to the text-is the allegory. From this perspective, the truths of interpretation are a function of allegorical structures of the imagination (whether conscious or not). Each allegorical structure is self-contained. The formal difference between the ancient Aramaic Targum’s interpretation of the Song of Songs as a history of ancient Israel, and the views of modern commentators who compare its lyrics with the Arabic wasf or ancient Egyptian love poems, is that of different points of reference. Both utilize external “figures.” In a similar way, the sages of midrash would “interpret (lit., ‘release’) Scripture (patar qarya)” by explicating the words of a text through fixed (though exchangeable) terms of reference.

It is thus evident that each “allegory” is appropriate to the degree that it is judged so by those who share its point of orientation. Shared explorations correct and enlarge one another. They further deepen the community of shared reading in relation to an assumed standard of meaning and method.. [he text is only known in proportion to the explanative power of any specific allegory-a fact conditioned by cultural taste and requirement. Thus many of the scholarly methodologies of our day satisfy certain historical interests as opposed, say, to other periods of Bible studywhen the concern was to understand the text in the light of its religious spirit, or its ethical and ritual imperatives. To bring one type of interpretative allegory into a different cognitive framework, where there is no shared method or meaning, risks miscomprehension and rejection by such labels as “blasphemous” or “unscientific.” It therefore makes little sense to compare the ancient rabbinic rules of hermeneutical analogy with modern forms of deductive reasoning-unless one is interested in a comparative history of logic and exegesis. But one might profitably compare the works of the medieval Jewish grammarians (particularly those in the Arab environment) with those of modern students of Semitics; for here the frames of reference are more similar, even if some of the assumptions about language are vastly different.

Taken all together, it should be clear that by Remez I mean those hermeneutical strategies whereby meaning is produced for a given text. The Peshat is always independent of the Remez, to be sure. In Buber’s words, “interpretative claims come and go, but the text remains throughout.” But we also know that the Peshat is in need of the Remez; for the text itself maintains a “majestic silence.” Without the ever-renewed and necessary allegories of interpretation, the text would not live. Teachers know this truth as task and responsibility. And they seek to transmit it. Analogous tot he insight of the rabbis, the written word and the oral teaching (Peshat and Remez) are the two Torahs of life.

Just to situation this a bit. Fishbane is expounding on the four levels of medieval Jewish hermeneutics. Peshat is the literal reading.

Related posts:

  1. Sartre’s Existentialism and the Meaning of Life
  2. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave Animated
  3. Davidson and Derrida
  4. Interview with Richard Capobianco
  5. Meaning of Life?
  6. Meaning of Life

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