Abstract
The illusion is endlessly reborn that the text is a structure in itself and for itself and that reading happens to the text as some extrinsic and contingent event. – Paul Ricoeur A consideration of the origins, development, and aftermath of Reader‑Response theory helps place both possibilities and limits on the role of reading and interpretation of texts, biblical in particular. With its main tenets and representatives surveyed, it can be correlated with the historical‑critical enterprise that it challenged and with the literary turn that preceded and paved the way for it. Finally, it offers us a context in which to place and appreciate pre‑critical Jewish and Christian interpretations. The article closes with a set of suggestions for interpretation in view of its long history in biblical studies.
Highlights
Within the lifetime of everyone who reads this article – at least when it first appears – the map of interpretive moves has changed dramatically
A similar change has accompanied the reading and interpretation process, and those engaged in the interpretation of biblical texts do well to ponder a mapping of hermeneutical moves
Excellent questions were asked, probing beneath the extant biblical text: What happened, and how can we investigate such events? Who wrote or produced the material we call biblical? What compositional processes were involved? What material was borrowed from cognate or cousin cultures, and how was it re‐shaped distinctively, over time, and in response to what general and particular sets of pressures and influences? How do we weight the contributions of old information, filtered as it is by subsequent perspectives?
Summary
Within the lifetime of everyone who reads this article – at least when it first appears – the map of interpretive moves has changed dramatically. The challenge here is acute for an ancient text like the Bible that has been for some twenty‐five hundred years accepted as Scripture, normative and formative for the lives of (in this instance) Jewish and Christian readers (Smith 1993). Outcomes, strategies and their underlying assumptions have moved considerably during those hundreds of years, and many diverse and even contradictory claims have been and continue to be made for texts. We will conclude with a set of ten suggestions for reading that makes good use of the best that biblical scholars have been through
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