The Formation of Godly Community: Old Testament Hermeneutics in the Presence of the Other

Carolyn J. Sharp (Episcopal Church Foundation Fellows Forum, February 2004)

Carolyn Sharp, Assistant Professor of Old Testament at Yale Divinity School, is a member of the Advisory Council and the National Working Group of the Faith as a Way of Life project. She delivered this paper to the Fellows Forum of the Episcopal Church Foundation, a group of scholars charged with serving as “lively advocates for ‘the life of the mind’ in the Episcopal Church.”

“Take and read! Take and read!” A childlike chant prompted St. Augustine to open his heart to the authority of Scripture, and the anguished sinner was transformed. A single transparent moment in the act of reading Romans — so the metanarrative goes — had profound consequences for the life of Augustine and for the shape of the Christian theological tradition. But many of us who “take and read” these days do not find the act of interpreting Scripture to be so uncomplicated as it may have been in that garden for Augustine. The Church finds itself today, no less and no more than in previous centuries, in a highly charged battle of hermeneutical perspectives. Our current debates have been described simplistically as struggles between conservative and liberal approaches to the Bible. But they may be more fruitfully characterized as the vitally important efforts of readers to bring into conversation Scriptural truths that transcend and expand the limitations of human understanding, on the one hand, and Scriptural truths that honor the particular contextual variables of human life, on the other. Further complications abound when struggles are played out among interpretive temperaments that value tradition and temperaments that are drawn to reform, temperaments that laud pragmatism as the only rational way forward and temperaments that thrive on visionary idealism. How, then, do we all read Scripture together, in community? [1]

Reading Scripture together has always been a formative practice for Christian communities of conviction, and reading practices certainly shape the heart of Anglican identity. We read the Bible with each other, proclaiming its redemptive Word in worship, wrestling with its cruxes in Bible studies, exploring its complexities in seminary classrooms. We read the Bible at each other as well, mining its riches for a devastating catch-phrase to put ecclesial opponents in their place, using Biblical texts to silence the impertinent question of a skeptic, aggressively citing Jesus or Paul or Leviticus in order to destabilize those whose readings of Scripture discern truths other than the ones to which we cling. [2]

Practices of reading are among the most life-giving and most dangerous of all the operations of human culture. The power of reading to shape godly communities is phenomenal: transformative, Spirit-filled, and upbuilding at its best, to be sure, but ruthlessly deformative and deeply harmful at its worst, and never more damaging to the Gospel of Christ than when Scripture is commodified to serve our addictions to power and control. That is most certainly not how we learned Christ. [3]

Hence hermeneutics is vitally important for the life of the Church and must be addressed by Church leaders, and indeed all believers, [4] with as much integrity, sophistication, and courage as we can muster. The ways in which we practice our reading strategies together in communities of faith affect every other aspect of our Christian life and witness. Readings of Scripture shape our liturgies and fire our homiletical imaginations, ground the mission statements of our theological schools, drive our evangelization efforts, empower our social justice movements. So much is at stake in our reading and rereading of Scripture! I find it astonishing that we dare read at all, that we are not paralyzed by the weight of it, terrified by the risk of missed opportunity and the threat of misunderstanding every time we approach the Holy Word of God.

But read we must. How, then, can we read together?

Ancient Christians understood the power of reading Scripture to be the essential means of forming communities of Christian conviction constituted by baptism and gathered around the Eucharistic table. But the difficulty of interpreting could not be acknowledged by one such as Irenaeus, for whom not only doctrine but the very definition of the Church was at stake, requiring reading a unified message from the Bible against heresy. Irenaeus’s confidence that “the entire Scriptures, the prophets, and the Gospels, can be clearly, unambiguously, and harmoniously understood by all” [5] is shared by few today who have had the opportunity to study a little Hebrew or Greek, who have reflected at any length on the problems presented by the tangled syntax of Hosea, or who have been baffled by the stunning semantic opacities of the Book of Job. Indeed, understanding the subtleties of Hellenistic philosophical tradition in the writings of Paul alone is a far more challenging task than confident readers of the New Testament seem to realize. But it is particularly the presence of the Old Testament in our canon that points up the intricate complexities — philological, semantic, historical, ethical, theological — involved in reading Scripture in diverse communities today.

I am convinced that what matters most for godly communities in times of acute hermeneutical crisis is our continuing to read in the presence of the Other. Reading in the presence of another whose perspective and commitments differ from our own requires patience, humility, and most of all, courage, for a tremendous danger looms whenever we dare to read Scripture while remaining present to the Other. The danger is that we may understand, however fleetingly, that we cannot take God’s Word away from another who is reading it differently. The ecclesiological implications of this are powerful indeed.

In what follows, I will trace two relatively recent shifts in hermeneutics that have left the Church poised in a cultural moment of unparalleled risk and opportunity. Then I will offer a reading and rereading of the story of Rahab, hoping to illustrate an Old Testament hermeneutic that takes seriously the importance of reading in the presence of the Other. Here, the Otherness of the “Old Testament” aspect of this endeavor is not merely illustrative but defining, and I hope it can point a way forward in our ecclesiological engagements with one another.

I

The discipline of hermeneutics has undergone fundamental changes in the last 30 years, and two of these changes are continuing to have major implications for the ways in which scholars approach the Bible. First, the notions of “text” and “reading” are no longer simple. There has been a move to challenge and complicate those reading strategies that rely on the idea of text as a stable series of authorial clues and codes to be deciphered. Late-modern and postmodern conceptions of reading acknowledge the power of ideologies — whether recognized or unrecognized by authors, readers, and communities of interpretation — that continually form and deform the ways in which we read. Poststructuralist approaches to texts are finding significant the ways in which texts betray themselves, ironize their own claims, and in myriad other ways signal their own incompleteness and instability. Modernist certainties and foundational claims have been eroded by the lively critiques of deconstruction, postcolonialism, and other postmodern ways of understanding how readers matter in the act of interpreting. This major shift in hermeneutics has resulted in a chaotic flood of books on interpretation from all sides. There have been waves of books on hermeneutics by evangelical Christians that have attempted to counter the postmodern turn, books by traditional historical critics who are passionate about defending the viability of old-school positivist historical criticism, and books by postmodern readers of many different stripes who insist that interpreters acknowledge the ideologically skewed, constructed nature of all “texts” and the infinitely deferred and unstable nature of meaning. [6]

This can make for some confusing reading. Indeed, for those who prefer their Scripture interpretation simple and accessible, the current rich profusion of interpretive approaches is a development to be deplored. But this superabundance of hermeneutical options is potentially of great value to the Church, for it invites us to reflect deeply on how we offer witness through the reading of Scripture together. It may not be an overstatement to suggest that the character of our Christian confession may be at stake in the reading practices of Christian communities of conviction. Homiletician David Lose argues that “far from threatening the life of the church, postmodernism presses us to release deceptive foundational securities and live, once more, by faith alone…. the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ expose the lie — more devastatingly than postmodernism ever could — of any and all foundations upon which we would guarantee our faith…. destroying every place of refuge to which we would flee other than the naked proclamation of the gospel.” [7]

Crucial in this enterprise will be our finding the courage to stop domesticating the Bible by means of broad themes and coercively monolithic reading practices — in short, to stop stifling the witness of Scripture by means of totalizing narratives that reduce its threat and impoverish its promise. [8] Dare we stop using simplistic themes in our sermons and our seminary classrooms to master the unruly Otherness of the Bible? Might we stop naming “Israel” with a single dismissive word in passing on the way to New Testament appropriation, as if ancient Israel were a single monochrome entity wholly controlled by Pauline rhetoric, when in fact Israelite peoples lived in vastly diverse communities with strikingly differing cultural norms and radically shifting theological values over a period of 15 centuries before the birth of Christ? Might we stop teaching parishioners and seminarians that the whole Bible can be summed up with a “single plot of grace” or with a single developmental view of God’s action in history? [9]

It is imperative that the Church move beyond simplistic formulations of the hermeneutical options. Sweeping reductionist claims are, of course, often intended to be accessible, to welcome neophytes into the richness of God’s Word. But such claims do a drastic disservice to all readers of Scripture, and especially to beginners and non-specialists. Reductionist summaries underplay precisely those complex textual dynamics and issues of reader accountability that we need to acknowledge in our own embodied and particular contexts in order to avoid the unwitting deification of our own loyalties, idolatries, and misunderstandings.

So, then, an increasing awareness of the complexity of hermeneutical strategies may be assessed as perhaps unsettling but potentially salutary both for interpretation and for ecclesiology. A second development within the discipline of Biblical hermeneutics is harder to characterize with a monolithic label. But it presents abundant riches for ecclesial appropriation. This development I will term the refinement of rhetorical criticism — understood not simply as a matter of literary aesthetics but more fully as attentiveness to the performativity of Scripture, to the power of literary tropes and the enactment and subversion of genre constraints, and to other nuanced means of persuasion employed in the Bible by authors and invoked by readers.

Interpreters are becoming increasingly adept at probing complex questions of literary form, implied audience, the use of authorial voices and personae, characterization in narrative, pressures and counterpressures of the conventions of genre, multivalent functions of metaphor, subtle properties of ambiguity and disjuncture in narrative and discourse, and so on. Technical jargon abounds, naturally. One is forever tripping over “enthymemes” in the works of philosophical rhetorical critics, seeking refuge in the more literary essays only to find “syntagms” linking everything in sight and “aporias” gaping on every side. But accessible and inviting treatments of complexity do exist — Carol Newsom’s brilliant new book on Job is one example [10] — and these kinds of works are precisely what the Church needs to move our hermeneutical debates forward in diverse communal contexts.

I am convinced that the viability of the Church in the 21st century may depend in no small part on our daring to share with others — with those who read differently — the fruits of sophisticated, imaginative reflection on Scripture. We need to share what is at stake in competing hermeneutical methods and in intelligent appropriation of the complexities of Scripture’s artistry. Above all, we are called to read bravely and responsively in the presence of the Other. Engaged and responsive hermeneutical dialogue may prove a powerful tool for evangelism as well, for our courage in reading together will testify to two things: first, that it does matter, urgently, to read the Bible; and second, that the Word of God can make not only each reader but whole ecclesial communities into a new creation through the Logos, Jesus Christ.

II

I invite you to consider two readings of the story of Rahab in the Book of Joshua, offered as an illustration of dialogic engagement. My first reading of Rahab’s story is entirely traditional, emphasizing the conversion of the Canaanite prostitute to faith in the God of Israel. You’ll recall that Rahab assists the two Israelite spies who have come to assess the fortifications of Jericho, hiding them and misdirecting the men from the king of Jericho who come in pursuit. She approaches the spies before bedtime and acclaims the God of Israel as One Who has performed mighty deeds of power, as “indeed God in heaven above and on earth below.” Rahab pleads for the life of herself and her family in return for her service to the Israelites’ God. She helps the spies escape, and when the Israelites come to conquer Jericho, Rahab and her family are spared. We learn in Joshua 6:25 that “her family has lived in the midst of Israel ever since,” taken into the community of God’s chosen people because of her loyalty.

The so-called “confession of Rahab” has long been accounted in Christian tradition as one of those paradigmatic and praiseworthy confessions of those who are outsiders to Israel’s faith. [11] The Canaanite prostitute’s conversion illustrates the marvelous purposes of God in working through unexpected agents to bring His plan of salvation to fruition. [12] Indeed, the scarlet cord Rahab ties outside her window as a signal to Israel has been read since the second century as prefiguring the saving blood of Christ. Clement of Alexandria reads this way: “… they gave her a sign to this effect, that she should hang forth from her house a scarlet thread. And thus they made it manifest that redemption should flow through the blood of the Lord to all them that believe and hope in God. Ye see, beloved, that there was not only faith, but prophecy, in this woman.” [13]

Now consider a counter-reading of the story of Rahab from a postcolonial perspective. Rahab “confesses” that she and the people of Jericho are paralyzed by terror of this deity who has wreaked such military devastation on behalf of Israel. Desperate to save the lives of those she loves, Rahab betrays her own people. The marauding Israelites march into Jericho. As her neighbors are being butchered in their homes and in the streets, Rahab slips quietly away with her family, perhaps covering the ears of the children so that they won’t hear the screams of their playmates as they are hacked to death. And what of the identity of Rahab’s family, their life afterwards? The Book of Joshua preserves another tradition about Rahab that is not so sanguine about the life of her descendants in the “midst” of Israel: Joshua 6:23 notes that Rahab and her family were brought from Jericho and set “outside the camp of Israel.” This term, “outside the camp,” is a technical term signaling the distancing of people and material goods of cultically impure or otherwise unacceptable outsider status. [14] Joshua 6:23 is careful to note that Rahab was by no means accepted by the Israelite community as one of their own. The presence of God in the holy war enterprise demanded these boundaries: in the words of Deuteronomy, “Because the LORD your God travels along with your camp, to save you and to hand over your enemies to you, therefore your camp must be holy, so that He may not see anything indecent among you and turn away from you” (Deut 23:15). A Canaanite prostitute would have been designated “indecent” on several counts according to Deuteronomic regulations. [15] Indeed, it is even possible to read the apparently more positive statement in Josh 6:25 as ambivalent: attentive readers have long noted that the Canaanite ethnic groups that were not exterminated in the Conquest (and remained a snare to the Israelites) were also said to remain “in the midst” of Israel. [16]

Doubtless abhorred by her fellow Canaanites after her self-serving treachery, and never fully accepted by Israel either, Rahab and her family may have survived the edge of the sword only to live a life of loneliness and shame on the margins of Israelite community, quite plausibly in continuous fear for their safety given the nearness of xenophobic Israelite ideologues. A postcolonial reading would argue that the presence of Rahab in Israel does not necessarily subvert Deuteronomistic holy-war legislation in a transcendent or liberating way. [17] Coerced into an allegiance that required the wholesale slaughter of her friends and townspeople, Rahab dramatically proves the xenophobic rule governing Deuteronomistic traditions of ethnic cleansing and colonization.

Do we read Rahab as a praiseworthy paradigm of Gentile conversion to true faith, an exemplar of theological purity whose noble confession may fairly be used hermeneutically to secure the boundaries of our Christian doctrine and ecclesial identity as worshippers of the invincible true God? Or do we read Rahab as a coerced woman whose collaboration with genocidal colonizers yields her and her descendants a marginal life “outside the camp” of the marauders who destroyed her culture? And a more difficult question: how might these readings enter into conversation with one another?

The traditional reading would suggest that Christ redeems us precisely in spite of our requirements of communal purity. Through His genealogy as a descendant of Rahab, and through His blood prefigured in her scarlet cord, what Christ conquers in this narrative is our misguided need for traditional ecclesial boundaries to remain impermeable. The postcolonial reading would suggest that inclusion — assimilation into the aggressive dominant culture — may come at too high a cost for those who are considered “other” by current systems of ecclesial power. Perhaps not what we would expect: that traditionalists might reach across the boundaries of exclusion, while postmodernists might recoil from a long-deferred invitation into the centers of power. However these and other readings be adjudicated, here is the beginning of a hermeneutical conversation that is truly open to graced horizons of possibility.

Every imaginative reading — whether that of Clement of Alexandria or of a contemporary postcolonialist interpreter — needs to be present to other options and other readers, notwithstanding the risks. The story of Rahab demonstrates finally that we are “in the midst” of each other, that otherness is always present whether in the centers or margins of Christian community. In “the place where memory and imagination meet,” we stand as readers of God’s wildly complex, life-giving Word. [18] It is my hope that we can stand together and read with each Other, not in the hermetic safety of artificially homogeneous groups, but amid all of the untameable differences of godly community, trusting in the grace of the Holy Spirit.

III

It has ever been the calling of Christian communities of conviction to position themselves in the most dangerous intersections of culture and faith, to dare to live their particular witnesses to Jesus Christ precisely in those locations of gravest risk where so much is at stake for the challenging and transforming of our cultures. It is my passionate conviction that we are not meant simply to muddle through the exhausting tensions, bitter disappointments, and heated anger occasioned by truly multivocal dialogue — not to just survive them by whatever means possible and move on — but instead to embrace as our deepest and most meaningful work the challenge to live faithfully in community precisely in these matrixes of disagreement and alternative witness. Evangelism and mission can take place only through the faithful negotiation of these clashes and the welcoming of opportunities for encountering the “Other” whose perspective and life experiences are so different from one’s own that finding common ground seems virtually impossible. [19]

Welcoming the Other in mutually aware and responsive practices of reading need not require that we embrace unbridled relativism, or settle for eclectic compromises, or be satisfied by parallel play without real engagement. [20] A truly responsive welcoming of the Other will be constituted by engaged witness to the power of God’s Word in multiple communities formed in distinct and graced ways by faithful interpretation. [21]

Reading in the presence of the Other will radically subordinate foundationalism and reductionism to the passionately embodied claims of difference that fracture and enrich our world. Our theologies may need to be similarly fractured and enriched. Our ecclesiologies may need to suffer in the presence of that which is “Other.” But I believe that we are called by Christ, the living Word of God, to stay present to this suffering and to continue to read together. What a testimony it will give to Christ when we read on together through dissent, through contradictory hermeneutical assumptions, through the pain of responding to readings that destabilize our favorite idolatries and press insistently against our most cherished community boundaries! As Augustine learned centuries ago, the Word of God brings us to our knees. Let us read there together, on our knees before the One whose incarnate Word of love conquers all. For with God, nothing is impossible; and we are more than conquerors through Him who loves us.

Notes

[1] L. William Countryman has rightly noted that hermeneutical debates and diversity of approaches need not be seen as problems. In his “Healing Leaves: The Bible as Source of Hope” (Anglican Theological Review 83 [2001]: pp. 49–63), Countryman suggests that we may discern in our disagreements the work of “the Spirit of God, whose penchant for disrupting the Church’s serenity has been the single most constant factor in Anglican history” (p. 50). Quoting Richard Hooker, he urges that we “learn how to appreciate anew ‘that manifold and yet harmonious dissimilitude’ that characterizes the people of God on earth” (p. 63). His exhortation reminds us that debates may be a locus of teaching by the Spirit for living in faithful community.

[2] My ethical concern here has chiefly to do with the harm we cause other readers of God’s Word when we commodify Scripture as a weapon in ecclesial discourse. But one might also consider the violence done by aggressive hermeneutics to the Biblical text itself. Gordon H. Matties deplores what he calls the “plundering” of Biblical narrative: “The function of commentary … is not to pronounce meaning or application, but to evoke a response to the narrative. Its first goal is not to distill principles from the narrative, nor to offer analogous situations. It is to present the story world in such a way that readers can enter that world imaginatively in order to be engaged in the dynamic conversation that the text itself evoked among its ancient readers…. The greatest danger in applying narrative is plundering it, by which we kill the text and render it mute. Once we have the principles, why bother with the text? Or if we can find the principles elsewhere, why do we need this particular text?” (p. 62 in “Reading Rahab’s Story: Beyond the Moral of the Story [Joshua 2],” Direction 24 [1995]: pp. 57–70).

[3] Eph 4:20. In the current strife fracturing our ecclesial unity, we would do well to acknowledge the warning in Ephesians about hardness of heart and heed the exhortation: “Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you” (Eph 4:31).

[4] As Kevin J. Vanhoozer rightly notes, “… meaning and interpretation are too important to be left to the specialists” (Is There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998], p. 10).

[5] Irenaeus, Against Heresies XXVII, 2, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Fathers Down to A. D. 325, Vol. I (Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996; reprint of the T & T Clark edition), p. 398.

[6] Works by historical critics still dominate Biblical scholarship, and listing even representative examples would be redundant here. Among the flood of evangelical works on hermeneutics are the following representative volumes: William W. Klein, Craig L. Blomberg, and Robert L. Hubbard, Jr., Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Dallas: Word, 1993); Walter C. Kaiser and Moisés Silva, An Introduction to Biblical Hermeneutics: The Search for Meaning (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994); and the most sophisticated of this group, Vanhoozer’s Is There a Meaning in This Text? (see footnote 4 above). Postmodern Biblical hermeneutics has come to expression in piecemeal fashion, more in diverse articles than in authoritative tomes. One accessible guide with bibliography is A. K. M. Adam, What Is Postmodern Biblical Criticism? (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995). Also helpful is Walter Brueggemann’s Texts Under Negotiation: The Bible and Postmodern Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993).

[7] David J. Lose, Confessing Jesus Christ: Preaching in a Postmodern World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), pp. 5–6.

[8] Especially promising in this regard are the potential gains to be made in the history of interpretation, where scholars have begun to look more closely both within and beyond traditional readings approved by ecclesial and academic authorities. For an evocative exploration of cultural and theological eddies outside of the mainstream of interpretation, see Yvonne Sherwood’s marvelous book, A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For another instructive example of history-of-interpretation scholarship, see John F. A. Sawyer, The Fifth Gospel: Isaiah in the History of Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

[9] So many essays in church magazines and theology journals “sum up” the Bible for ease of theological digestion that it would be fruitless to try to list them. Almost without exception, these sorts of articles are beautifully written, rhetorically stirring, and fatally reductionist. My allusion to a “single plot of grace” responds to the lovely but, in my view, hermeneutically misguided essay of J. Clinton McCann, Jr., “The Hermeneutics of Grace: Discerning the Bible’s ‘Single Plot’” (Interpretation 57 [2003]: pp. 5–15). An important corrective to simplistic understandings is Walter Brueggemann’s emphasis on the complex polyphony of inner-Scriptural testimony and countertestimony. See Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997).

[10] Carol A. Newsom, The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

[11] Other Biblical figures usually mentioned in this discussion are Jethro, Naaman the Syrian, and Ruth. On this, see among others Frank Moore Cross, “A Response to Zakovitch’s ‘Successful Failure of Israelite Intelligence’” (pp. 99–104 in Text and Tradition: The Hebrew Bible and Folklore, ed. by Susan Niditch; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990), p. 100.

[12] Matthew 1 names a “Rahab” in the genealogy of Jesus, Hebrew 11:31 acclaims Rahab for her faith, and James 2:25 offers that epistle’s highest praise when it lauds Rahab as “justified by works.”

[13] Clement of Alexandria, The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, XII; in The Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol. I, p. 8; similarly Justin Martyr, who reads this scarlet thread prefiguring Christ’s blood as redemption specifically for outsiders, the means “by which those who were at one time harlots and unrighteous persons out of all nations are saved” (Dialogue with Trypho, CXI; in The Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol. 1, p. 254).

[14] The term “outside the camp” mapped a place of shame and defilement in ancient Israelite understandings of holy and profane spaces. It is where the Israelites who were temporarily unclean waited to be allowed back into the community and where those afflicted with “leprosy” had their dwellings (Lev 13:46; Num 5:2–3, 12:14–15). It is where the unusable parts of sacrificed animals were burned (Lev 4:12) and where the latrines were dug (Deut 23:11–15; English vv 10–14). Sin offerings were made there and those who offered them were cleansed there before reentering the camp (Ex 29:14; Lev 4:21, 17:27–28).Those guilty of major infractions of community rules were stoned to death “outside the camp” (Num 15:32–36, Lev 24:14) or buried there after execution (Lev 10:4). Holy-war booty was kept outside the camp until it was purified (Num 31:19).The suggestion that the Rahab group’s time outside the camp was simply a kind of temporary detention would run counter to Deuteronomic legislation regarding Canaanites and is unlikely, Num 31:13 notwithstanding (note that only virgins could be spared in the Israelite raid on Midian) and pace M. A. Beek (“Rahab in the Light of Jewish Exegesis” (pps. 37–44 in Von Kanaan bis Kerala, ed. by W. C. Delsman, J. T. Nelis, J. R. T. M. Peters, W. H. Ph. Römer, and A. S. van der Woude; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1982) and Jerome F. D. Creach (Joshua [Louisville: John Knox, 2003], p. 66). A sexually viable, autonomous foreign woman represented the greatest temptation to apostasy that the Deuteronomistic imagination could construct, and the defiled status of a Canaanite prostitute could not have been remedied. As Jonathan Klawans argues regarding ancient Israelite conceptions of sexual sins and idolatry, moral impurity (a category entirely different from ritual impurity) “does not refer to a temporary contagion, but to a permanent debasement…. Ablutions … are not efficacious here…. Such [morally defiled] sinners either live out their lives in a degraded state (like the guilty adulteress) or suffer capital punishment (like apprehended murderers). The land, it appears, likewise suffers a permanent degradation” (pp. 27–30 in Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

[15] That Rahab was valorized by later rabbinic and Christian tradition is, of course, no argument against the pejorative implications of the statement in Joshua 6:23 that she was left “outside the camp.” Interpreters wrestled for centuries with the Bible’s crystal-clear identification of her as a prostitute, some (such as Josephus) suggesting the euphemistic “innkeeper.” Rabbinic commentators went to elaborate lengths to link her with Ruth via intertextual suggestions, and a rich post-Biblical tradition developed that had Rahab married to Joshua and mother to prophets and kings, including the prophetess Huldah (who played a central role in the Deuteronomic reform meta-narrative) and the prophet Jeremiah. See, for example, Larry L. Lyke, “What Does Ruth Have to Do With Rahab? Midrash Ruth Rabbah and the Matthean Genealogy of Jesus” (pages 262–84 in The Function of Scripture in Early Jewish and Christian Tradition, ed. by Craig A. Evans and James A. Sanders; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998) and Phyllis Silverman Kramer, “Rahab: From Peshat to Pedagogy, or, The Many Faces of a Heroine” (pages 156–72 in Culture, Entertainment, and the Bible,ed. by George Aichele; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000).

[16] See Josh 13:13 and 16:10. Judith E. McKinlay hears resonances of (pejorative) difference in Josh 6:25, while leaving the question finally unresolved: “The announcement in 6:25 that Rahab’s family lived in Israel ‘to this day’ might explain the presence of a group sensed as in some way different, although it may just as likely be a storyteller’s ‘happily-ever-after’ ending that sends the audience away satisfied and content.” See her “Rahab: A Hero/Ine?” (Biblical Interpretation 7 [1999]: pp. 44–57), p. 47.

[17] For that view, see Matties’ quotation of a Mennonite study guide: “… ‘God is a God who breaks through boundaries of human “in-ness” and “out-ness”, even if God’s own law is used to create them’” (“Reading Rahab’s Story,” p. 64). But one may just as readily understand the power dynamics of that Biblical narrative to be illustrating a (coerced and colonized) exception that merely underlines the legitimacy of the master culture’s dominance.

[18] Here I draw on Matties: “Reading and interpretation, therefore, [reflect] a conversational mode that looks both backward and forward — backward as a function of memory, which provides fuel for the imagination that looks forward. Embodiment of biblical truth in the present, therefore, stands at the place where memory and imagination meet” (“Reading Rahab’s Story,” p. 61).

[19] The act of reading together is not incidental but central and formative in this endeavor. John S. McClure notes that Scripture reading destabilizes such “oppositional signifiers as ‘modern,’ ‘postmodern,’ ‘postliberal,’ and so forth. These positions have a way of solidifying into our identities. They define us in relation to ourselves and in relation to others…. The function of the Bible as scripture, however, is to problematize these (and all) positions and identities, and to do so in such a way that I (we) cannot relocate myself (ourselves)…. Because of its centripetal quality as scripture the Bible refuses over and over again to close itself as a book, to secure its connotations to a single self-referential tautology” (Other-wise Preaching: A Postmodern Ethic for Homiletics, St Louis: Chalice, 2001, p. 21).

[20] Dynamic interaction is suggested by the interpretive model of Dennis T. Olson. He argues that Biblical studies should yield “more a web or network of localized interpretive communities than an authoritative pronouncement from one individual or one community of experts.” See Olson, “Between the Tower of Unity and the Babel of Pluralism: Biblical Theology and Leo Perdue’s The Collapse of History” (pages 350–8 in Troubling Jeremiah, edited by A. R. Pete Diamond, Kathleen M. O’Connor, and Louis Stulman; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), p. 357.

[21] The simple analogy of conversation seems lately to be a laudable and worthy goal. Mark G. Brett focuses on responsiveness to the Biblical text: “… a genuine conversation with the primary text [here, Genesis] requires neither full understanding nor full agreement. Disciplined understandings and agreements, however partial or unstable, are more valuable than either sweeping dismissals of canonical texts or pre-fabricated religious readings that are all-too-credulous…. Neither the holiness of the text nor the religious convictions of the reader need determine interpretative outcomes in advance. Genuine conversations are more unpredictable than that” (p. 50 in “Reading the Bible in the Context of Methodological Pluralism: The Undermining of Ethnic Exclusivism in Genesis” (Rethinking Contexts, Rereading Texts: Contributions from the Social Sciences to Biblical Interpretation, ed. by M. Daniel Carroll R.; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000). In our present circumstances, I would add an emphasis on the multivocality of the interpretive communities within which writers and readers are situated, both across time and in the contemporary moment. Indeed, literary dynamics within the Bible suggest that engaged dissent — reading and rereading with a highly conscious awareness of the Other — is constitutive of Scripture’s witness. The revoicing of earlier Biblical traditions by later Biblical texts can never succeed in placing the “other” earlier Scriptural witnesses fully under erasure.