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Two methods of Scripture interpretation that emerged in the late twentieth century are important for the relation between revelation and interpretation. I want to consider both of these methods in relation to the revelatory character of the text.

The first of these methods is sociology—or more broadly, social-scientific criticism: this includes especially macrosociology and cultural anthropology.1 It has become apparent that much historical-critical study has focused on the question of facticity to so large an extent that it has bracketed out questions of social process, social interest, and social possibility. A number of studies have made use of tools of social analysis to ask about the social intention and social function of a text in relation to the community and the situation upon which the text impinges.2 Among the more important of these studies are:

• Norman K. Gottwald on the early period,3

• James W. Flanagan on David,4

• Robert R. Wilson and Thomas W. Overholt on the prophets,5

• Paul D. Hanson on the later exilic and post-exilic periods,6

• Jon L. Berquist on the Persian era,7

• Carol Meyers on women in ancient Israel,8

• Lester L. Grabbe on “religious specialists.”9

A programmatic formula for such an enterprise is that it is a “materialist” reading,10 a phrase Gottwald would accept for his work, but perhaps some of the others mentioned would not. A “materialist reading” suggests that the text cannot be separated from the social processes out of which it emerged. The text also is a product of the community. The community that generates the text is engaged in production of the text, and the community that reads it is engaged in consumption of the text, so that the text needs to be discussed according to processes of production and consumption.11 In what follows, I will want to consider a materialist reading of a text, as an attempt to appropriate its revelatory claim. The text as product for consumption suggests the operation of intentionality and interest in the shaping of the text.

The second emerging method that will be useful for us is literary analysis. Literary analysis seeks to take the text on its own terms as an offer of meaning, as an exercise in creative imagination to construct a world that does not exist apart from the literary act of the text.12 The nuances of the text are not simply imaginative literary moves, but are acts of world-making that create and evoke an alternative world available only through this text. The authoritative voices in such a method are

• Paul Ricoeur, from the perspective of hermeneutics13

• Amos Wilder, from the perspective of rhetoric.14

In Old Testament studies, among the more effective efforts at analyses of literature as “making worlds” are those of:

• David Gunn15

• David J. A. Clines16

• Phyllis Trible17

• Robert Alter18

• Meir Sternberg.19

This literary approach seeks to receive the world offered in the text, even if that world is distant from and incongruent with our own. Thus the text is not a report on a world “out there,” but is an offer of another world that is evoked in and precisely by the text. The text “reveals” a world that would not be disclosed apart from this text. This view suggests that the alternative to the world of this text is not an objective world out there, but it is another “evoked world” from another text,20 albeit a text that may be invisible and unrecognized by us. We are always choosing between texts, and the interpretive act is to see the ways in which the world disclosed in this text is a compelling “sense-making” world.21 Literary analysis assumes that the text is not a one-dimensional statement, but is an offer of a world that has an interiority, in which the text is not a monolithic voice, but is a conversation out of which comes a new world.

When one puts the social-scientific and literary methods together in a common interpretive act,22 it is clear that the voices in the text may speak and be heard and interpreted in various ways. Some voices may be shrill, arid, domineering; some may be willingly quiet; some may be silenced and defeated. It is, nonetheless, the entire conversation in the text that discloses an alternative world for us. Thus Scripture as revelation is not a flat, obvious offer of a conclusion, but it is an ongoing conversation that evokes, invites, and offers. It is the process of the text itself, in which each interpretive generation participates, that is the truth of revelation. Such an interaction is not a contextless activity but the context is kept open and freshly available, depending on the social commitments of the interpreter and the sense-making conversations heard in the act of interpretation. In this strange interpretive process, we dare to claim and confess that God’s fresh word and new truth are mediated and made available to us.

It will be clear from the foregoing that my assumption is that there are no “innocent” readings of Scripture, and surely there are no “innocent” formations of Scripture. This is not to reduce the witness or interpretation of Scripture to vested interest, but it is to insist that every faithful witness and interpretation is to some extent filtered through and impinged upon by the interpreter. One way of recognizing that “truth” is impacted by “power” is to see that every text is a carrier of interest that voices truth from a certain perspective. Of course the generic name for that reality is “ideology,” even though the term itself is more than a little problematic. On the one hand “ideology” is a gift from Karl Marx, who proposed that articulations of truth from above are characteristically done in bad faith, because they reflect particular interests, and characteristically seek to disguise that interest in language that deceives. Freud, of course, went further with his perception of the ways in which human persons have the power to self-deceive. On the other hand, a much more benign notion of ideology is fostered by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who understands the term to refer to any sense-making account of reality, so that it need not necessarily be an articulation of bad faith or deceit.23 In that usage the term “ideology” serves as a synonym for elemental social conviction, or even theological conviction, a passionate articulation of an overall meaning. Of course the distinction between the two uses is slippery, and there is a tendency to judge that even a “benign ideology” may serve a special pleading.

In any use, any awareness of ideology at all serves to alert one that texts are not to be read and trusted with straightforward claims, but that one must ask what the text and the interpretation of the text seek to do in the act of interpretation. It is for that reason that critical studies of late have become much interested in ideology critique as a counter to the kind of historical criticism that has tended toward positivism. The methods I have identified—rhetorical criticism and social-scientific criticism—recognize that every interpretation—and every text—is an act designed to accomplish something. Ideology critique is an effort to exercise a kind of hermeneutic of suspicion that does not dismiss the text in a skeptical way, but that recognizes that texts not only say, but do.

Once one has recognized that texts do as well as say, it is useful to refer to the rubric of my Theology of the Old Testament with its subthesis of “testimony, dispute, and advocacy.” I have utilized these terms in order to explicate Old Testament theology because I have come to view the Old Testament (and its interpretive trajectories) as a contestation about the truth of God and of God’s world. The juridical terms I have employed suggest that the text and its interpretations are an ongoing act to determine what is true. There I have suggested

• that testimony is a verbal account of reality that bears witness to a certain version of reality;

• that such testimony is inescapably in dispute with other versions of reality that are also attested,

• so that every version of reality—each text and each interpretation—vis-à-vis other texts and other interpretations advocates a certain version of reality that seeks to challenge and refute other versions.

It is for that reason that I have utilized a juridical metaphor for Old Testament theology, because texts are like witnesses that trace out the character of Yahweh against other characterizations of Yahweh, and thereby advocate a certain rendering of reality.

The upshot of this view of method, ideology, and testimony–dispute–advocacy is the recognition that every text makes its claim. Each such claim, moreover, requires attention, that it be recognized and understood and weighed alongside other texts with other claims. Such a perspective on biblical texts sees the “canon” as a venue for contestation. It takes the canon seriously but recognizes that the canonical literature does not offer a settled, coherent account of reality; rather it provides the materials for ongoing disputatious interpretation. Any consideration of the “culture wars” of our society—wherein both sides appeal to biblical texts—makes clear that the biblical text is a venue for contestation and that the texts themselves are grist for the dispute. In what follows I consider a text that surely is to be understood as thick with ideology, but that nonetheless is a carrier of “a disclosure” of the Holy One of Israel.

1. See the summary statement of Wilson, Sociological Approaches to the Old Testament; Overholt, Cultural Anthropology and the Old Testament; and Carter, “Social Scientific Approaches.”

2. A helpful example of how sociological analysis may shape exegetical interpretation is offered in God of the Lowly, edited by Schottroff and Stegemann.

3. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh; see also his The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-literary Introduction.

4. Flanagan, David’s Social Drama.

5. Wilson, Prophecy and Society in Ancient Israel; Overholt, Channels of Prophecy.

6. Hanson, The Dawn of Apocalyptic.

7. Berquist, Judaism in Persia’s Shadow.

8. Meyers, Discovering Eve; and Households and Holiness.

9. Grabbe, Priests, Prophets, Diviners, Sages.

10. See Füssel, “The Materialist Reading of the Bible”; and more generally, Clevenot, Materialist Approaches to the Bible.

11. Leonardo Boff has applied these categories to the sacramental life of the church, even as Füssel has applied them to the character of the text; see Boff, Church: Charisma and Power, 110–15.

12. For a critical assessment of this interpretive view as it pertains to biblical interpretation, see Barton, Reading the Old Testament.

13. Ricoeur’s work is scattered in many places, but see especially Interpretation Theory; The Conflict of Interpretations; and The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. See also Crossan, editor, Paul Ricoeur on Biblical Hermeneutics.

14. For a most helpful introduction to Wilder’s view of literature as world-making, see Wilder, “Story and Story-World.”

15. Gunn, The Fate of King Saul; and The Story of King David.

16. See especially Clines, I, He, We and They.

17. Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, Texts of Terror, and Rhetorical Criticism.

18. Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative.

19. Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative.

20. Myers has shown how the work of Hobbes is “the text” for Adam Smith, which in turn has become the text for the capitalist world, even if unacknowledged; The Soul of Modern Economic Man.

21. On the active power of “sense-making” as the production of sense, see Jobling, The Sense of Biblical Narrative, especially 1–3; and Brueggemann, “As the Text ‘Makes Sense,’” 7–10.

22. See my attempt at such a methodological interface in Brueggemann, David’s Truth; Theology of the Old Testament; and most recently in A Pathway of Interpretation.

23. Geertz, “Ideology as a Cultural System.”