Does the Bible Have Meaning Out of Context?

A dictum in the field of archaeology is “an object out of context has no meaning.” The point is that the context in which an archaeological artifact is found controls how it is dated as well as producing evidence as to how the object functioned when it was deposited, i.e. in its last usage.

Take, for instance, a standard Iron Age I chalice found in Tel Eton. Had the same chalice been found among vessels in a domestic food-preparation or consumption context, we might interpret it as a household vessel; but this was found deliberately buried beneath a building, possibly for ritual purposes, i.e., in a foundation deposit.^[1] In contrast, sometimes one finds a pottery sherd in a stratum in which it doesn’t belong, usually as a result of bioturbation, when animals move buried artifacts. Here the usage context is lost, and dating the stratum must be based on the artifacts discovered in the excavation.

A colleague of mine, a scholar of English literature who excavated with me for a decade, started applying the phrase “an object out of context has no meaning” to words, texts, and historical moments. For a long time I agreed, but in recent years I have changed my mind, and now prefer a modified form of the dictum: “an object out of context has a different meaning.” This modification may be subtle, but it is actually quite substantial.

While objects, texts, or just about anything, may mean something in their original context, they can and often do survive much longer and much later than that initial period. Their meaning may have meant one thing it its original context, but that context has changed radically and so that very same “thing” can mean something very different.

Original Context: Not the Only Way to Read

Once upon a time I worked from the starting point that, as a scholar of the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East who excavates at biblical sites, I read the text in “the original” (i.e. Hebrew or Aramaic) and the interpretation that flows from that is the “context” in which it should be understood.

This vantage point is particularly important concerning my experience as a Jew who reads the Torah in its original Hebrew. Yet, to those of us listening to the Torah reading in synagogue, the meaning of the text cannot be precisely what it was when it was first written and read aloud. It is now framed by Jewish experience, history, and interpretation through much later texts, whether the Mishnah and Talmud, Rashi’s commentary, The Guide of the Perplexed, or the Zohar. None of these interpretations is the same as the other, and none matches the likely original intent of the book.

Moreover, even just in the Jewish experience, many read the Torah in translation. In fact, the Septuagint, the first translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, was done because already in the 3^rd century B.C.E., many Diaspora Jews did not know Hebrew well enough to understand their primary religious text in its original. And it became the core biblical text for centuries of Jews, including for the great Jewish philosopher, Philo.

Christian Context

Widening the scope, since I teach primarily non-Jews, who in general do not read the Torah in Hebrew and view it as volume 1 of a larger “Bible,” one that is trumped by volume 2, I could easily view translations and interpretations that flow from that as sorely mistaken. For example, Christians primarily view the story of Adam and Eve and the fruit as “the fall” creating “original sin”, something that does not appear in the biblical text or Jewish thought.^[2]

I could suggest that the interpretative lens is problematic, as are translations that flowed from a different focal point. But they have their own legitimacy, and anyway, the reality is that the differences between those lenses are less different when viewed through the numerous Jewish interpretative texts.

The Context for Torah Always Changes

Finally, I will add that the Jewish practice of yearly Torah reading helps normalize changes in thinking. The beauty of always being in the “middle” of Torah is that we read it all year, no matter our age, stage of life, or status of the world. All those things change, I am now old enough to suggest, at a fairly rapid pace.

The lens through which one reads the text changes with one’s place in the world and the stage the world is in at any given moment. As a result, it is clear that an object’s context shapes its meaning.