As far as I can tell until the advent of Modern Literary Scholarship, people made a very interesting assumption about any text that they were presented to interpret.
They assumed that the text did not mean what it says.
When it says God raised his hand he didn't really raise his hand.
When the Mishna says one thing it actually means another.
When Reuven slept with Bilha he did not actually sleep with her.
When the Gemara mentions a giant bird it doesn't actually refer to a giant bird.
The concept of taking a text at face value, of actually taking the words in a text seriously, and assuming that people write what they mean is a very modern concept. It is I believe THE fundamental difference between approaching a text in a modern way and approaching a text in a traditional way.
It's interesting that this does not seem to be intuitive at all. I cannot say at any point in my life before I was introduced to the modern approach, that it ever occurred to me to read a text as it was. I think this has to do with cultivating a sense of objectivity. Our natural inclination is to interpret any text by our standards and sensibilities. Due to almost unbridgeable cultural gap between me and a person living a thousand years ago it is almost inevitable that I will interpret a text differently than the original intent if I try to impose my own sensibilities on it.
Setting objectivity as a goal actually one of the most counter-intuitive things a person can we tend to interpret a text in light of ourselves and put ourselves into the text....
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A major thing! The worst is when people say that you can't explain a posuk this way or another because it is not mentioned in the mefarshim.
I remember in elementary school being taught to laugh at the poor goyim who thought that when the Torah said “an eye for an eye” that it actually meant an eye for an eye. We of course were superior, and knew Rashi and the meforshim who explain that OF COURSE it means to pay the value of an eye. Silly goyim, thinking that it might actually mean exactly what it says.
> Our natural inclination is to interpret any text by our standards and sensibilities.
Yes, but I think when it comes to the Chumash, gemara, etc. there’s even more of a tendency to reinterpret. Medrashum are assumed to be divinely-inspired interpretation, so the pauk MUST mean what the medrash says it means – even if it appears to say something completely different.
With the stroke of a pen....
I find it difficult to credit the notion that before the advent of "Modern Literary Scholarship" people assumed of any text presented to them for interpretation that it did not mean what it said. It seems to me that such an assumption would make all communication by writing impossible, and render the whole practice of writing futile. Surely all that you have observed is that in Jewish tradition, sacred texts are assumed to mean something other than what they say--or not even that: rather, such texts are not assumed to mean what they say. They may mean what they say and they may not: ask your local rabbi to find out. The idea is that sacred texts are, ultimately, of divine origin, and God wouldn't talk nonsense, so if there is something in the text that looks like nonsense, it must mean something other than what it says. Ancient and modern readers alike took texts to mean what their authors meant by them: the difference is that the ancient readers took the immediate or the ultimate author of certain texts to be God, and what God meant by certain words may be something entirely different from what human beings who used those words would mean by them.
>rather, such texts are not assumed to mean what they say.
You're right that would have been a better way of saying it. Obviously at times people took texts literally - what's important is that they didn't do this as a rule...
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