WIFE AND SISTER THROUGH THE AGES - Blessed Edmund Rice ...

ιι8SEMEIAa matter of method and sufficient evidence, rather than self-evident correspondencebetween textual world and interpreter's world. To establish hisinterpretation Speiser must both demonstrate the Hurrian custom andlink Israel's ancestors to it.In this matter of validation, since the Enlightenment central to interpretation,the text plays a role. Not every Hurrian custom will illuminatethe event obscurely behind the text, but only one that trades on theidentity of wife and sister. Details of the text obviously direct Speiser'sresearch and his selection of appropriate explanatory material, the realisticsubstance of his interpretation. Yet the text does not exercise completecontrol, by any means. The explicit statement of the text is that Abrahamsought to mislead Pharaoh in order to protect himself, not that heattempted to protect Sarai. Speiser has an explanation: "... it can beshown on internal grounds that the narrators themselves were no longeraware of the full import of their subject matter" (Speiser: 91). Laterauthors forgot the Hurrian past.A text that proves an unreliable guide to the event it reports demandsa scholarly commentary better acquainted than the author with the event.That demand is the legacy of the long tradition of realistic reading andone branch of its modern conventional form. Reconstructing the event,illuminating its obscurities, constitutes interpretation, but current epistemologymandates that the event now be recovered through evidenceexternal to the text itself. Neither the text nor the interpreter's own experienceconstitutes a reliable guide to the obscurities of Hurrian maritalcustoms. The demand for a via externa marks one, perhaps decisive, breakwith the exercise of earlier realistic conventions. 2The nature of the difference between pre-critical realistic and modernrealistic reading may help us understand why the text may seem indeterminate.In both forms of realistic reading the convention locates themeaning of the text in the event to which the text refers. Equating referencewith the meaning of the text has the effect of locating meaningoutside of the text itself, in a certain sense outside of the text's control. Thetext draws its meaning from the event it depicts. In pre-critical realisticreading the unproblematic assumption held that the text accuratelycorrelates with the event described. The interpreter begins with the text,which is determinate so far as it goes in reflecting the underlying event,but because the assumption is that there is more to the event than the textdepicts, the realistic convention grants the interpreter a warrant to adddetails in the manner we have seen. In modern realistic reading there is no2See Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, for historical documentation ofthe epistemological shift involved. Frei sees modern departures from pre-critical realisticconventions as radical — and radically mistaken.