Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE MUSLIM SCRIPTURE t 111
tion of Scripture by those same professionals. The objective was to
keep a people in the rapidly changing post-Exilic world—even
Hebrew, the very language of revelation was disappearing—in
touch with and observant of the community’s foundation traditions.
There may have been a mimetic element at work as well: the
Israelites’ was not the only scribal tradition in the ancient Near
East, nor was the Torah the only holy book. Both Egypt and Babylonia
provided exemplary modes of how to read a sacred text.
There was a larger dose of mimesis ahead. This systematic and
chiefly legal approach to the Bible on the part of post-Exilic Jews
was confronted from the third century b.c.e. onward by quite another
exegetical tradition that read its texts as both literature and
theology; that is, it passed them through filters that focused on
either their aesthetic value or their underlying sense, a procedure
the Greeks called allegoria, or “another reading.” This allegorical
reading was at once more figured, more spiritual, and more profound
than the literal sense with which Israel’s lawyers had chiefly
concerned themselves. The Hellenic ideologues behind this “New
Criticism” were chiefly Stoics, who were much concerned with semantics,
and the later Platonists, whose visions of the distinction
between the present material appearances and spiritual realities
that lay behind them powered the search for allegoria.
It was chiefly in the academic environment of Alexandria that
Jewish exegesis, and later its Christian counterpart, began to apply
Hellenic New Criticism to Scripture. The Jew Philo (d. ca. 25 c.e.)
was the absolute pioneer in reading the Torah through the filters of
Hellenic exegesis, and he already shows the anxieties that would
thereafter haunt allegoria, whether its practitioners were Jews,
Christians, or Muslims. The texts that lay under the hands of the
pagan Hellenic exegetes were neither guaranteed nor normative,
while those of the Scripturalists were God’s and not humans’
words, and they served, moreover, as the basis of each community’s
behavioral code. That normative function of revelation lay
principally in its literal sense—“Thou shalt not kill”—and so any
movement away from the letter in the direction of allegory threatened
at worst a kind of antinomianism and at best a degradation