Judah and Tamar (Genesis 38) in Ancient Jewish Exegesis: Studies in Literary Form and Hermeneutics.

• Author: WEITZMAN, STEVEN
• Position: Review

Judah and Tamar (Genesis 38) in Ancient Jewish Exegesis: Studies in Literary Form and Hermeneutics. By ESTHER MARIE MENN. Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism, vol. 51. Leiden: E. J. BRILL, 1997. Pp. xvi + 412. $143.50.

In recent literary studies, the "meaning" of a text is no longer regarded as simply the product of authorial intent or redactional design but is thought to emerge from a complex dialectic with readers. Menn's Judah and Tamar in Ancient Jewish Exegesis, a revised University of Chicago Divinity School dissertation, aims to illuminate this dialectic by showing how a single biblical episode, the story of Judah and Tamar, was invested with new significances in three early Jewish interpretations: the Testament of Judah, Targum Neofiti, and Genesis Rabbah.

Menn conceives of readers as collaborators in the production of textual meaning--hence her interest in how this text was read by early Jews. However, influenced by such studies as Meir Steinberg's The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1987), Menn acknowledges that the text itself seeks to shape its own meaning. Without ever truly reconciling these two approaches to textual meaning, she endeavors to apply both to Genesis 38. The first quarter of her book, running about a hundred pages, probes the narrative art of Genesis 38, its manipulation of ambiguity, perspective, and intertextual resonance. At the same time, it also seeks to explain what in the text needed to be interpreted by post-biblical Jews, with inadvertent gaps playing as large a role in triggering early exegesis as any deliberate artistry. This dual approach to Genesis 38 produces the somewhat paradoxical impression that the Bible's subtle rhetoric--its attempt to shape reader response--contributed little to its mea ning as construed by actual readers.

If the text does not determine its own meaning, what does? To answer this question, Menn adopts a response-centered approach associated with H.-G. Gadamer and S. Fish who, in different ways, argue that all readings are preconditioned by traditions of interpretation. It is not really the "traditionality" of early Jewish interpretation itself that interests Menn, however, but how early Jews creatively adapted existing interpretive traditions to exemplify an ethical point or to promote a particular religious vision--what she calls the "poetics of interpretation." Thus, according to Menn, the interpretation of Genesis 38 in the...