Hermeneutics and Biblical Interpretation

Hermeneutics and Biblical Interpretation

The term hermeneutics—the theory or science of interpretation—comes from Hermes, the ancient Greek messenger of the gods. Since the words of the gods were not intelligible to mortals, Hermes had to interpret their meanings and make them accessible to human understanding. The origins of hermeneutics also is associated with Greek poetics and rhetoric. Poetics is the theory of meanings made through words or other symbols, as in the Greek poieo, “to make.” Rhetoric refers to the art of reaching prudent judgments in matters where absolute knowledge is impossible. It is therefore an art of verbal persuasion rather than of cognitive domination through definitive proof. Hermeneutics also has roots in the Hebrew interpretation of the Talmud. These various traditions of interpretive knowledge were fused in the West in biblical hermeneutics, which began when early Christian Jewish scholars of the Roman empire combined Greek poetic and rhetorical methods of criticizing texts with the Hebrew tradition of interpreting religious scripture. As religion became the hegemonic ideology in the West, biblical hermeneutics (along with revelation) became the dominant form of knowledge.

Modern hermeneutics begins with Schleiermacher, who codified traditional hermeneutics into a systematic and critical method of biblical interpretation. Wilhelm Dilthey noted that historical knowledge is akin to biblical knowledge insofar as they both depend on the interpretation of written texts. Dilthey thus developed and extended Schleiermacher's critical and systematic biblical hermeneutics to what were then called the historical or human sciences—those disciplines that studied the embodied or objectified expressions of human mind. This included history, of course, but also archaeology, literary criticism, anthropology, sociology and others. Hermeneutic theory and method was further developed by Edmund Husserl, and by Martin Heidegger, who conceived of the natural sciences as symbolic constructions of a sacral Being. Contemporary postmodernists, rhetorical theorists, cultural anthropologists, ...