It's All About Interpretation

This is a bit off topic, but I wanted to say something about it anyway. I just picked up this article, Mitchell N. Berman, Originalism Is Bunk, 84 N.Y.U. L. REV. 1 (2009), that I think is quite good on interpretation. There is first summary here and then the article itself here.

The debate over the scope and approach to interpretation echoes my view of Biblical interpretation (it's all about the text and interpretation, hardly a radical insight). How do you determine originalism -- a feat that for much of the Hebrew Bible is nigh impossible, and very difficult for the Christian Bible and, as I understand it, the Koran? Jim Kugel makes the point that, well, at least for much of the Hebrew Bible, we really can't know what the author of the ancient cryptic text meant; the relevant intent is not the original author(s) but the intent -- or interpretation -- of the community when the text was adopted as canonical. (You can listen to a variation on that theme in Kugel's talk, Can the Torah Make It's Peace with Modern Biblical Scholarship, at JTS here which I highly recommend.) In the case of the Hebrew Bible, the canonization process took a couple of hundred years a couple of thousand years ago, but long after much of the text was written. By that time, the community had interpreted the text in ways that were far from the original author(s) intention. Song of Songs - Song of Solomon in the Christian Bible -- is Kugel's classic proof text where a love, even bawdy, text about very human lovers was re-imagined a text of love between God and humanity. There are many other less dramatic examples. A similar process happened with the Christian Bible; I don't know enough about the Koran, but I do understand that all of these canonical texts can be interpreted in a bad way or a good way and it is up to the community to take the high road. See Robert Wright, The Evolution of God (2009), The process of interpretation that takes the high road permits a progressive re-imagination of the text for the needs of the ongoing community. The community cannot and should not be wed irrevocably to any original intention either of the authors or the community at canonization even when that can be discerned, but should be controlled by the needs of the ongoing community. After all, we have long since reinterpreted and essentially re-written the proscription of eye for an eye. And that process continues as we rethink attitudes in the ancient text that are no longer relevant to and, in some sense, destructive to the ongoing moral imagination of the community. I guess all of this to say is that it is all about interpretation which must interpret any text to meet the needs of the ongoing community, guided but not controlled by the original intent of whatever referrant point you want. I think that is Professor Berman's point, although he states it and develops it far more elegantly than I do.