Words Become Worlds: Semantic Studies of Genesis 1-11

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Dec 1997 by Mathews, Kenneth A

Words Become Worlds: Semantic Studies of Genesis 1-11. By Ellen van Wolde. Leiden: Brill, 1994, xi 218 pp., n.p.

As the sixth volume in the Biblical Interpretation series, Words Become Worlds meets the series' objectives by proposing a newer hermeneutical method and applying it to specific Biblical samples. The first half concerns readings in Genesis 1-11, and the second half lays out the philosophical underpinning of her method-namely, text semantics. The title captures the essence of her exegesis. "Words" concerns the Biblical text, which requires knowledge of the Hebrew language and the mode of thinking among the ancient authors and their readers. But the text of "words" provides for new "worlds" of meaning when it is read anew. There is a collision between the old "world" of the text and the new "world" of the interpreter who must make choices in giving meaning to the text. Although the text has many possible meanings, it is the reader in making choices concerning the text that limits the scope of meaning. Essentially, van Wolde believes that meaning is an interactive process involving language, text and reader.

By seizing on the complementary features of structuralist semiotics (Saussure and Greimas) and the semiotics of interpretation (Peirce), van Wolde calls for a holistic approach to textual exegesis. Structural exegesis provides the method by calling for a synchronic reading of the text as an autonomous unity, but by itself structural exegesis is deficient. It fails to acknowledge the referential world (real) in which the text was produced and for whom it was written. Peircean semiotics overcomes this impasse by recognizing that the author assumed his (ancient) reader had a knowledge of the text's "connotative subcode" as well as its denotative meaning. The exegetical process is not complete, however, without a study of the conventional hermeneutics of (ancient) history and culture that produced and transmitted the text.

Her text semantics observes that meaning involves both logical inferences derived from the text and innertextual analogies between elements of the text (e.g. similarities in sounds, forms, lexemes, and syntax). When applied to readings in Genesis 1-11, her conclusions differ remarkably from traditional Jewish and Christian exegesis. God's interest in humanity is subsidiary to the progress and perpetuation of the earth. The orientation of Genesis 1-11 is not vertical, where humanity strives to obtain immortality and suffers punishment for its rebellion; rather, it is horizontal, the spreading out of humanity upon the face of the earth.

The emphasis van Wolde gives to the reader in the hermeneutical process is both the weakness and strength of her semiotic method. The weakness is that the reader is invested with too much authority over the text. It is left to the reader to observe the conventional meaning of the text but also to discern and integrate the analogic (iconic) subtext(s) that is the reservoir for potential readings. Too often, however, in her readings proposed for Genesis 1-11 the subtext(s) takes priority over the linguistic conventions of the text. Yet the recognition of the role of the reader is a positive aspect in her method since the meaning process must involve the reader, though the locus of meaning is not found in the reader. Some close readings of the text and the analogic associations of the linguistic phenomena result in different ways of stating what is generally found already in the explicit denotative meaning. Here there is benefit for the traditional exegete, and the iconic associations proposed undergird the conventional sense. Some new readings, however, counteract what the explicit level of the text has presented. All in all the volume challenges the reader to look for such embedded associations of meaning and drives the reader all the more to the text.

Kenneth A. Mathews

Beeson Divinity School, Samford University, Birmingham, AL