Varieties of Indeterminacy
Nothing that I can write here is going to make much difference to the grand theoretical issue of textual indeterminacy. What I can offer is, rather, an account of the experiences of a practical exegete and textual scholar alert to the question of meaning, and not a little surprised, at times, by the apparent mismatch between what I hold as theory and what I Þnd myself doing by way of 'good practice'.
The main intention of this paper then will be to explore the indeterminacies I Þnd myself involved in across several different areas of my scholarly work. I will be concluding that I encounter varieties of indeterminacy, an indeterminacy of indeterminacies, and I will be suggesting possible reasons for my apparent yearning for determinate meanings in one project and my abandonment to multiple and indeterminate meanings in another.
1. Principles
But I should say Þrst where I stand (or think I stand) theoretically, which is to say, when I am thinking about the principles I consciously hold to rather than analysing the principles I Þnd in hindsight that I have been employing (for that is the stuff, and not the preface, of this paper). In principle, in short, I think I believe that meaning does not reside in texts but that readers create meaning when they read texts. To tell the truth, I have no clarity on the large question of the extent to which texts are responsible for the meanings that readers create. But I do not feel I have to be able to rightly apportion the responsibility between text and readers in order to afÞrm that the differences between meanings-which is what is interesting to me, and which is the subject we are speaking of, indeterminacy-are the effect of the plurality of readers rather than the effect of some property in the text. That means to say, I suppose, that I do not hold in any strict sense with the idea of textual indeterminacy, for that would imply that it is texts that have meaning, determinate or otherwise. It must be the various meanings that readers come up with when reading texts that create the impression that it was the text itself that was indeterminate. In fact, I think the text is neither determinate or indeterminate; but, once again, practically speaking, it makes little difference where the responsibility lies. For if the result of reading texts is multiple meanings, it matters little whether it was some property of the text that engendered the multiplicity, something in the text that different readers were responding to differently, or whether it was simply different readers reading the one text differently. The outcome is the same: the situation of indeterminacy exists.
So, in the end, speaking about texts 'meaning' does not need to be proscribed, not in everyday language at least. If readers mean something by texts, it is no great crime to say that texts mean. It's no crime; it's just not true, properly speaking, that's all.
2. Indeterminacy and the Practical Theorist
Here I want to deal with the question of indeterminacy in a general and, I suppose, somewhat theoretical way. But since I usually feel more comfortable thinking theoretically if I can deal with some concrete example at the same time, I call my endeavours in this direction the work of a 'practical theorist'.
I spoke of the 'situation of indeterminacy' that is our given. I mean to begin with the practical and empirical situation that different readers do in fact understand a given text differently. This is of course not just a fact of life for practical exegetes. It is also the cause of extreme anxiety for many. So to address the 'situation of indeterminacy' is not just an intellectual challenge. It is also, in some cases, an existential imperative.
My preference is to confront the question in its most acute form, the anxious phrasing used by those troubled by the idea of indeterminacy: 'Can a text mean anything at all, anything a reader wants it to mean?'
My Þrst line of reply has been, What is this word 'can'? If there are no meanings without readers, 'can' is not a property of texts but a potentiality of readers. And who can know the mind of readers? All we know is what readers have done, do do. And, short of inÞnity, it seems that readers are indeed capable of any interpretation.
So I conclude that 'can' in such a question is probably a cipher for something other than mere capability. It is a displacement of 'may' or 'should'. The question invokes the question of legitimacy, of whether such and such an interpretation is to be allowed. And that is a real question-a political question and a psychological one. Allowing and disallowing is the very business of people with power, and we can be sure that powerholders will have some very Þrm views about the propriety of others submitting to their power. It is a question too about the psychological needs of the questioner who wants someone else to be taking the responsibility for outlawing interpretations that they themselves do not feel comfortable about. But these are not the questions of this paper.
My second line of reply has been to work with an example. Rather than attempt to answer in general whether any text can mean anything at all, I try to ask, can one particular text not mean something in particular? Here is an experiment I once tried. What, I asked, can Psalm 23 not mean? What would be a statement that could not be an interpretation of 'The Lord is my shepherd'?
I thought I had succeeded, that I had found an 'impossible' meaning of the text, when I found myself saying, 'Two and two make four'. Surely no one would say that that is what 'The Lord is my shepherd' means? But pretty soon I realized that it was not so simple. For what does 'Two and two make four' itself 'mean' except something like: all is in order, the world is trustworthy, everything in the garden is lovely? Yet is not that what 'The Lord is my shepherd' 'means'? Lying down by still waters and having your cup run over sounds very similar to living in a regular and safely ordered universe where you can count on two and two adding to four.
But then, it occurred to me, if 'The Lord is my shepherd' 'means' 'two and two make four', surely what it cannot mean is: 'two and two do not make four'? Perhaps that is the 'impossible' meaning of the text? But not so fast!, I cautioned myself. For what happens to the sheep who has the Lord as its shepherd is that once it has been led from green pastures through dark valleys it is guided, eventually, up to the house of the Lord. And we all know why sheep go the house of the Lord. Now, it might be a sheep's highest ambition to end up as a holocaust on a sacriÞcial altar rather than lamb chops in the butcher's shop. But nothing like that is in the sheep's mind when it pronounces 'the Lord is my shepherd'. Indeed, must we not say that everything is not in order in a world in which sheep feel protected by a kindly shepherd, at the very moment when his intention is to slaughter them in sacriÞce? For the sheep of Psalm 23, must we not say, one of the meanings of having the Lord as its shepherd is that the universe is dangerous and life-threatening, that two and two do not make four.
Surely, however, there is one thing that 'The Lord is my shepherd' cannot mean. Good shepherd or bad shepherd, surely what 'The Lord is my shepherd' cannot mean is: 'The Lord is not my shepherd'? But of course. Unless perhaps the psalmist actually is a sheep (which I doubt), the psalmist has no shepherd, for humans are not sheep and so cannot have shepherds. Shepherds shepherd sheep, not psalmists. Ergo, the one thing that Psalm 23 can mean, must mean, whatever else it means, is that the Lord is not my shepherd.
Now, that is only one example, and I dare say that a moderately intelligent respondent could easily enough think of an interpretation of a text that I myself could not defend as a 'possible' interpretation. But, if I could not, I would be tempted to blame the resilience of my own imagination sooner than confess that my interlocutor had hit upon a truly 'impossible' interpretation. My experience with Psalm 23 was enough to convince me that 'possible' and 'impossible' are not categories to be applied to interpretations, that, as far as I could see, a text can mean anything at all, and that I myself was (? oxymoronically) an absolute indeterminist.
3. Indeterminacy and the Lexicographer
It comes as something of a surprise to others, as also to myself, given the inclinations I have just voiced, that I am also engaged in the preparation of The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew,/1. / which must seem to be nothing but an enormous monument to the determinacy of meaning. Page after page tell the earnest reader that this word means 'terebinth', this 'cubit', this 'gecko', and so on. What are these if not determinate meanings? One reviewer indeed, has complained of the 'peremptory' tone of the Dictionary (unlike, are we to understand, the geniality of the OED, the conspiratorial air of the Berlitz Engelsk-Svensk Ordbok, or the whimsicality of Arndtp;Gingrich?). I cannot deny it, I admit the fair impeachment. That is how it looks. But I shall try to wriggle my way out of it, all the same.
I can confess that when we Þrst mooted the idea of the Dictionary, more than ten years ago, my vision of it was as a 'handbook of exegetical decisions', in which the best, the most correct, interpretation of every word in all of its contexts was registered in the appropriate place as a modest but authoritative guide for the perplexed. I imagined that under the verb 'åmar, for example, it might be possible to determine the places where it meant 'promise', 'think', or 'answer' as distinct from just simply 'say'. I thought, again for example, that it was our business to decide when 'ereß meant 'land' and when it meant 'earth'-determining, that is to say, what the words mean, as precisely as possible, in context after context.
There is a sense in which it is rather obvious that many Hebrew words, 'ereß, for example, are rather indeterminate. One could easily argue that a word that could mean either the land of Israel or the whole earth has to be acknowledged as far from determinate. One could say too that if 'å can mean either 'brother' or 'kinsman' or 'fellow-member of the whole nation' its meaning also must be described as indeterminate. But the degree of indeterminacy in such cases was rather severely controlled. We were never inclined to suggest that 'ereß might sometimes mean 'brother' and 'å might sometimes mean 'land'. So there seemed to be a degree of determinacy and a degree of indeterminacy.
In practice, we usually found ourselves operating with a concept of determinate meanings. We divided up all the 696 occurrences of 'å into seven categories of meaning, and assigned to each occurrence one or other meaning. With 'ereß, we divided all the occurrences we mentioned into one of the three senses, 'land', 'world', or 'ground'. With 'åkal, we distinguished in every use between meaning 1, 'eat food or ingredients of food' and meaning 2, 'destroy, devour'. Although we noted that the distinction between the two senses is not always clear, we regarded that as a difÞculty we had with individual texts rather than a structural feature of the language or a truth about language in general.
Nonetheless, the idea of a handbook of exegetical decisions and the prominence of the concept of determinate meanings receded as the work progressed. In the Þrst place, the 'gloss' or English translation that immediately followed the Hebrew headword I came to think of as merely indexial, as essentially and in principle a way of distinguishing, for example, between 'zl i 'go' and 'zl ii 'weave', between 'zn i 'hear' and 'zn ii 'weigh'. I did not mean to say, This Hebrew word 'means' this English word. In the second place, I came to feel that the structure of the articles served to downplay the idea of determinate meanings, for the stress in articles as wholes was upon the kinds of contexts in which words were used rather than upon some speciÞcation by the Dictionary team of what the words meant. So although we listed the occurrences of 'ereß under the three senses I have mentioned above, the bulk of the article is devoted, not to discussing the correct meaning of the word in each of its several contexts, but to showing which verbs and nouns can be associated with the word. So the reader learns that an 'ereß in the sense of a land can be full, be peaceful, stink, mourn, perish, þow, and so on, and that one can Þnd references to a land of desire, of delight, of distance, of gloom, of saltiness, and so on. There is no discussion of what constitutes a land, and, I think it can be said, the direction of the article is in general against speciÞcation and determinacy. This is of course a fault in the eyes of traditional lexicographers who operate, or try to operate, with determinate meanings all the time, the more determinate the better.
I even had the nerve to suggest in the Introduction to the Dictionary that a dictionary at the end of the twentieth century should reþect something of the spirit of the age and be as best it could postmodern in orientation, 'resisting concepts of authority, determinate meanings and the like, and . . . emphasizing instead the perpetual deferral of meaning as well as the plurality and historical conditionedness of scholarly values . . . short on authority and prescription and long on reader-involvement, open-endedness and uncertainty'./2. / It is a hard task for a lexicon-of all things-by anyone's standards. The question in the present context must be whether it is even possible.
4. Indeterminacy and the Exegete
Now I am turning to think about indeterminacy in the context of my work as a verse by verse exegete, especially in my commentary on Job./3. / My daily task, I must admit, I conceive of as a moving toward closure on every matter that the text raises, on every verse, its text and its translation. There is not much room for indeterminacy in the way I have been working.
On my desk there are, as well as my Hebrew Bible, 15 or so English translations, 20 or so commentaries and a heap of photocopies of journal articles on the chapter in question. On my Mac there is an enormous bibliography of publications on Job from two thousand years of exegesis, and the wall behind me is shelved with more commentaries, books on Hebrew poetry, Hebrew grammars and dictionaries, Bible encyclopaedias. Within a few square feet I have about me all the makings of a thoroughgoingly indeterminate exegesis of the book of Job. Indeterminacy is not only possible, it seems almost inevitable.
What then do I do, surrounded by this cornucopia of multiple meanings? The fact is, unhappy fact if you prefer to call it so, that I strive toward reducing everything toward order, towards eliminating every meaning for a text except one, the one that I will adopt, the one that I choose. When, for example, Job recalls the days of his prime (29.4-6) and the commentators want to specify, each in his own way, what the essence of Job's happiness was, I want to contradict them and have it my own way. They insist in saying things like 'Naturally the Þrst element in Job's happiness . . . was the presence of his children . . . The second, though a less, element of his happiness was his overþowing abundance.'/4. / Or, 'The sum of his happiness had been his sure untroubled sense of the divine presence . . . The second element of his happiness had been his domestic gladness.'/5. / But I say, Not so; 'Job simply puts side by side various memories of the past, without categorizing or prioritizing them. Even if he thinks it, he does not want to say that any one of them is the key or the source of the happiness; he is not in the business of accounting.'/6. / I cannot accept that these commentators can be right and I can be right at the same time.
Or when Bildad asks, 'How can a mortal be righteous before God?' (25.4), I Þnd myself writing, tetchily perhaps, but Þrmly and determinately certainly: 'The issue for Bildad is not, of course, whether humans can be declared innocent by God, but whether they can in fact be so. So it is not a matter of whether one can "be in the right before God"/7. / or "be cleared of guilt" (njps) or "How can a man be justiÞed in God's sight?" (neb). Nor is it a matter of "having a righteousness independent of God's".'/8. / It is simply whether in comparison with God's standards any mortal can in any degree be 'righteous'.
The same goes for the philology. Faced with the vast variety of suggestions for new meanings for the Hebrew words and of never-ending proposals for emendation, I buckle up my courage with the thought that only one reading can be right, the original text must have had just one reading, and I deÞne my task as establishing that reading. Of course I know that I am as fallible as the next, or last, commentator, but what else am I to do?
I also have my readers in mind. What, I worry all the time, do they really want? Do they want a blessed indeterminacy on every verse, a smorgasbord of possible meanings (and where would the choice stop?), or do they want me to make sense (rather than make senses) of one verse after another? My guess is that they are reading me for my answers to the problems of interpretation, and that they will be checking me out for coherence and consistency.
I also have the book as a whole in mind as I go. Rightly or wrongly, I think the book as a whole has a logical sense, that the characters in the book have points to make, that we can distinguish Bildad's position from Eliphaz's, that Job changes his perspective from one speech to the next but his speeches as a whole have a dramatic coherence, and the like. I think that every verse contributes to the meaning of the book as a whole, and I want to identify that contribution and signal it clearly to my readers.
In short, as an exegete, I behave for all the world as if the indeterminacy of texts had never been heard of. I even believe so much in determinacy of meaning that I Þnd myself saying, Most of everything that has ever been written in Job is wrong; if X's reading is right, everyone else's is wrong. And I approach the latest article in the learned journals with a highly sceptical reckoning of the chances of its esteemed author being right. I am not proud of being so unreconstructed an advocate of determinate meanings, and especially of being inconsistent with the self that wrote the beginning of this article-which inconsistency is (so I am told) the greater sin. I do not expect that mere confession will cure my soul.
5. Indeterminacy and the Critic
There is another aspect of my work, however, that I think I should also speak of in connection with indeterminacy. I call this 'criticism', by which I mean critique or evaluation. My opinion is that this is a separate undertaking from what is generally done in the name of biblical studies, which is interpretation. I think that in interpretation scholars are essentially the servants of the text (as I am when I am writing my commentary on Job). It is our business in that role to unfold, explain, represent, annotate, rehearse the text, thinking the authors' thoughts after them, so to speak. In critique, on the other hand, the scholar is measuring the text by a standard outside the text. Feminist criticism, for example, and all other ideological criticisms, are judging the text from an ethical or intellectual position that lies outside the text; they are reading against the grain of the text.
My point here is that the moment we allow that there are other standpoints apart from that inscribed in the text from which we may read a text we have committed ourselves to indeterminacy of meaning. For the meaning of a text is thereafter relative to the position of interest from which the evaluation is made. Indeed, the very issue of 'meaning' may fall off the agenda. If, for example, we lived under the slogan that the point is not to understand reality but to change it, 'meaning', indeterminate or otherwise, has a hard time earning its keep.
This is where I think the future of biblical studies lies, in the evaluation of the biblical corpus according to the norms that various real readers have for themselves. Needless to say, such a future will be chock full of indeterminacy, since every interest group will have its own evaluation to offer. I give a sample of one such offering I have been attempting with Psalm 2, under the title 'Psalm 2 and the MLF (Moabite Liberation Front)'/9. / Obviously, this is a political reading of the text, and it leads to a critical evaluation of the psalm such as has not, I believe, previously been offered (in print).
It is a well-known feature of polemic that opponents are denied a recognition of their own identity, as human beings in their own right. Here also, in Psalm 2, those on one side of the conþict bear the names of Yahweh, his anointed, his king, his son, and they are located at a particular location on the face of the globe. Their opponents, on the other hand, are called only by the most general of terms, nations, peoples, kings and rulers, and they are to be found at no particular place on earth but, indeterminately, over the earth in general. I name these opponents of Yahweh and his anointed Israelite king 'Moabites'-not that I think for a moment that the rebellious people spoken of in the psalm are actually and precisely Moabite. Rather, 'Moabite' serves as a symbolic name for people who found themselves in bondage to an Israelite king and who desired liberation from their overlord.
In this psalm, the Israelite king as the holder of power and the Israelite poet as his propagandist refuse to countenance for a moment the 'Moabite' claim or to acknowledge that 'Moabites' have any right to self-determination or political autonomy. I myself happen to disapprove of such an attitude to 'Moabites', and I think it my duty as a commentator on the text to say so. But I also think the Hebrew Bible itself might disapprove of such an attitude, if only it knew what it was doing. For whereas in most parts of the Hebrew Bible Israel is very happy to have been liberated itself, this psalm does not want anyone else to be liberated-and that seems to undermine the value Israel put on national freedom, and to render its attitude to freedom ambivalent and incoherent. Its national story was of itself as a body of slaves escaped from Egypt. In refusing a similar history to others, it implicitly denies the value of its own liberation.
Now that is a critique of the text, not exactly an interpretation. Perhaps someone will call it a 'reading', but I will not thank them for that, for I would prefer to think of it as an agenda or a judgment. At the same time, I realize that once I have taken up the cudgels on behalf of Moabites I am into a conþictual situation, and there will be others who will arm themselves on behalf of the other interests reþected in the text. Everything begins in religion and ends in politics. And even if the religion makes pretences to determinacy, the politics hardly can. If this is the way biblical studies is moving, then, like futures everywhere, the future for biblical texts seems indeterminate through and through.
6. Conclusions?
Trying to make sense of the ambivalences toward indeterminacy in my own work, I have come up with three theorems.
1. The more text, the more indeterminacy. Perhaps some simple arithmetic is all that we need in order to accept this theorem. If one word can mean ten things, then would not two words mean a hundred things, and three words a thousand things, and a whole sentence near enough to inÞnity? That would explain why I am so determinate when I am doing lexicography, and so indeterminate when I am deconstructing the whole book of Job, for example. But it will not explain why I think that 'the Lord is my shepherd' can mean anything at all, but insist that every verse I comment on in Job means one thing and one thing only.
2. No one can determine your indeterminacy for you. It seemed to me that I myself had some choice about how determinate or indeterminate I let my readings be. While I can easily see how readers could make multiple meanings out of a text like 'the Lord is my shepherd', I do not feel obliged to devise multiple meanings whenever I am doing interpretation, and sometimes I want to argue vigorously for my, determinate meaning. Even if someone came up with another meaning that they wanted to hold, indeterminately, alongside mine and not as a replacement of it, I might still maintain my meaning as the best or the most correct meaning. For most of the time, I am sorry to say that I am in the business of defending my determinate meanings against other people's determinate meanings, and though we may not agree on the meaning we are usually in agreement on one thing, that we cannot both be right; if my meaning is correct, theirs cannot be, and vice versa. And I do not see that state of affairs going away for a long time.
3. Indeterminacy is not a private matter. I can determine the degree of my indeterminacy for all I am worth, but what does it beneÞt me if I cannot get others to agree? Enter the interpretative community, which authorizes all that I do by way of interpretation-or critique, for that matter. I am free to interpret as I will, but no one will pay me to interpret outside the norms of some community or other. So in the classroom for translation of Hebrew prose texts there is little room for independence of judgment or creative exegesis. In that setting, you Þnd me defending the traditional and most determinate norms of the academic guild by insisting to wilful or wayward students that 'å means 'brother', or some such, and not 'sister' or 'gecko' or some such. In a different, and more postmodern, environment I may be at liberty to dazzle the audience with the fecundity of my indeterminacy. But, even there, if no one will listen to my political critiques of the Psalms, reading against their grain, I shall have to shut up shop. My notion of indeterminate readings can only be sustained if it is bought by an interpretative community.
In a word, the varieties of indeterminacy (ranging from lots to none at all) I Þnd myself practising are context-dependent and so, and rightly so, indeterminate.
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