The emergence of biblical interpretation in antiquity

Even before the last parts of the Hebrew Bible were written, people were busy interpreting its earlier parts, particularly the Torah (Pentateuch). Their interpretations have been preserved in a variety of ancient sources (outside of the Bible itself), principally in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the biblical Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, and Hellenistic Jewish writings. These interpretations take different forms: some are retellings of biblical narratives; others are commentaries proper; still others consist only of brief, offhand remarks that reveal how a particular text was interpreted in ancient times. These interpretive writings all date from about the third century BCE to the first century CE. Then come the earliest Christian interpretive works as well as the classical works of rabbinic Judaism; both of these lead in turn to the medieval period, upon which many of the essays in the present volume are centered. Yet the story of ancient biblical interpretation does not begin in the third century BCE, nor is it easily separated from the whole early history of those texts that eventually came to make up the Jewish Bible. The evidence suggests a more complicated picture of the emergence of such interpretive writings and, indeed, a somewhat unusual notion of what interpretation truly meant in ancient times. The making of the Hebrew Bible Modern biblical scholars agree that most books of our Bible are the product of different hands in different periods. Earlier versions were supplemented by later editors, who sometimes altered entirely the content and significance of the original text’s words. To cite one well-known example: the last third of the book of Isaiah (chapters 40-66) is indisputably not the work of the eighth-century prophet named Isaiah; it came, rather, from an anonymous writer (or writers) who lived a century and a half after Isaiah, during the time of the Babylonian exile and the return to Judah that followed it. But even the thirty-nine chapters that precede this anonymous prophet’s words are not all one piece. For example, the oracles against foreign nations (chapters 13-23) are now generally thought to have come from different hands during or following the period of Assyrian ascendancy in the ancient Near East. Likewise, the “Isaiah Apocalypse” (chapters 24-27) is widely recognized to be an independent unit, which may have been composed during the Babylonian exile or after the return to Zion.