Most of us are aware that our individual backgrounds strongly influence how we read anything. But how often do we fall into the trap of thinking that wherever we stand is normal, with other views somehow divergent or marginal?
When it comes to the Bible, we are all reading and interpreting through many layers of influence — personal, family, communal, political, etc. How often, however, do we pause to examine our own filters and those of familiar commentaries and background sources?
Fortress Press Self-Inventories
I recently ran across the Bible Readers’ Self-Inventory in the Peoples’ Companion to the Bible:
The point of the following self-inventory is that none of us comes to the Bible as a “blank slate.” Its goal is to assist you in identifying and reflecting on some of the factors at work in the way you read or hear the Bible and to gain a stronger sense of your own voice as an interpreter of the Bible.
— p. xxix
Working through the inventory helped me articulate choices I regularly make when selecting Bible commentaries to study and cite. It also helped me better understand many of the factors at work in my reading. The self-inventory also prompted me to re-consider some habits that are not necessarily serving my own, newly articulated, reading and interpretation goals.
The self-inventory was also instructive in ways the authors probably did not intend. The Fortress Press inventories were explicitly designed for students in Christian bible or seminary studies. Some of the questions were, as a consequence, a little awkward for an older, non-student. More importantly, answering questions as a Jew required a fair amount of mental gymnastics to translate Christian assumptions about Bible and Bible-reading influences into something that reflected Jewish experience.
In the end, I found the experience worthwhile, and I recommend the basic practice. I’m also grateful to those who designed the inventories and encouraged students to consider factors at work in their Bible reading. But I think we need, for Jewish readers of the Bible, a self-inventory more in tune with Judaism and Jewish community dynamics.
Jews’ Bible Self-Inventory
Here is the PDF: Jews’ Self Inventory for Bible Readers. Jews and other interested Bible readers willing to test-drive this instrument are invited to use it, comment on it, and share results.
A copy is also posted at Academia.edu, and anyone who uses that forum is encouraged to share and/or comment there.
This DRAFT is based – sometimes closely, more often loosely – on the inventories in the Peoples’ Companion to the Bible and Reading from This Place (full citations below). The self-inventory shared here, while indebted to the Fortress Press versions, centers common Jewish encounters with Tanakh [Torah, Prophets and Writings].
If anyone knows of an existing self-inventory aimed at Jewish Bible readers, please advise.
CITATIONS:
“A Self-Inventory for [Christian] Bible Readers” appears in the Peoples’ Companion to the Bible (DeYoung, Gafney, etal., eds. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010, xxix-xxxii.) Find related resources and a link to download “Introduction,” which includes the self-inventory, at this Fortress Press product page.
An earlier version appears in “Framing [Christian] Biblical Interpretation at New York Theological Seminary: A Student Self-Inventory on Biblical Hermeneutics,” by N.K. Gottwald. (Reading from This Place, Vol. 1: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in the United States. F. F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert, eds. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995. 256-261.)
Find links to both versions and some additional information on this resource page.
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