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Showing posts from May, 2023

The Chosen & Biblical Interpretation

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Interpretation  is a beautifully human activity, because it's so much more than Google Translate. It's more than saying what emotions well up inside while looking at a famous painting; homicide detectives seek to cobble together a narrative+motive from the traces of a crime scene, while husbands and wives observe each other's gestures and intentions in order to interpret them (note the increasing difficulty). But all of these acts of interpreting are aimed at one thing:  finding the meaning within . “Meaning” presupposes there's another person out there who  means , and that implies communication – usually vocal or visual, involving language. But is it even possible to really get 100% of what the communicator ever  meant ? That brings us into to where the art of interpretation is at its best –as well as its most complex and hair-brained– the understanding of ancient texts like, you guessed it, like the Bible. So much so that there's an entire branch of philosophy