Of Deltas and Backwaters

To introduce the reader to the world of Jewish interpretation, I want to draw on and re-arrange the river image Yvonne Sherwood used to illustrate the place of Jewish interpretation in a broader pattern of biblical exegesis. She describes Jewish interpretation as one of a number of ‘Back-waters…that do not flow as tributaries into the Mainstream’ (2000: 91). She is highlighting the fact that biblical studies has been constructed as a form of implicit Christian Studies, ‘where to study the Bible without studying Christian theology is regarded by many as strange in the extreme, but where Jewish Studies is regarded as a separate specialist area (an extra string to one's academic bow?)’ (2000: 92). Her image works well both to parody the assumptions of the Mainstream, and to dispel any supersessionist notions of the world of Judaism in the Christian Mainstream. Jewish interpretation is not dependent on and nor is it fulfilled in the understandings of Christianity.

However, while recognizing that Jewish interpretation is not a tributary to any Christian river, I confess to being uncomfortable with this image. It tends to reinscribe the assumptions of the Mainstream, making Jewish (and other) interpretation ‘a collection of curios, gathered from places foreign to the biblical critic’ (Sherwood 2000: 93). Terming Jewish interpretative traditions a Backwater does not adequately represent the relationship of the two traditions, which do not work as two lines, one broad and dark the other thin and faint, running parallel without ever meeting.