Intertextuality Is Disorienting and Orienting

Books generally feel like a settled, "complete" thing once it is printed and bound, and fixed in language. That same expectation carries over easily to the Bible, since its printed pages look no different than any other book, so a reader naturally assumes that a single, complete, finished text stands behind whatever translation happens to be in hand. Discovering that this assumption does not hold can be unsettling. The books of the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and other related Jewish texts developed over time through shaping, editing, expansion, and reinterpretation, and what at first looked like a single finished text turns out to have been through several points of development, at different times, by different people, for different reasons. That discovery is disorienting for anyone who expects a single, unchanging text. It can also become something else, a way of seeing a text's history as a process still underway, one that a present-day reader can join rather than simply inherit.

Why a fixed text feels safer

Part of what makes this discovery destabilizing is that a single, stable text does real work for readers. It offers a single point of reference that can settle disagreements, and one original form of words that every later copy can be checked against. Communities that read a text as scripture often build a good deal of their sense of its authority on the assumption that the text goes back, without significant alteration, to the moment of its composition. Multiple forms of the same book, and an underlying process of continuous rewriting reaching back further than any single form, do not match that expectation. They suggest that whatever authority attaches to the text was recognized and passed along by particular communities of scribes and readers making choices at every stage, rather than settled once and preserved unchanged ever since.

More than one form of the same text

Manuscripts recovered from the Judean desert make clear that, in the centuries before the common era, several books of the Hebrew Bible existed in more than one form at the same time, with each form apparently accepted as scripture within its own community. The book of Jeremiah appears in a considerably shorter Greek form alongside the longer Hebrew form that later became standard, arranged differently as well as shorter, and the account of David and Goliath and several narrative chapters of Daniel show comparable divergences between manuscript traditions available in the same period. These differences are not the small errors that creep into any text copied by hand over generations. Whole sections appear in a different order, or stand in one form and are missing from another, evidence of successive editions of the same underlying material circulating side by side rather than a single original text surrounded by careless copies of it.^[1]

For a reader who assumed that one form of words lay behind every printed Bible, that finding removes solid ground rather than adding detail to it. There was no single original text waiting to be recovered underneath the variants. There was a developing text, still being shaped and reshaped, at the very moment these communities were copying and reading it as scripture.

A received text that keeps rewriting itself

The unsettling part goes deeper than differences between manuscripts. Long before any of these particular copies were made, the material itself was already the product of scribes reworking earlier material from within the text, glossing obscure language, resolving apparent contradictions, updating outdated references, and drawing earlier material into new arguments. That activity was not added onto a finished text from outside, the way a modern editor might append footnotes to a novel. It was compounded into the text by scribes who understood themselves as subject to the authority of the material they were reshaping even while they reshaped it. The received material and the ongoing work of transmitting it turn out to be one and the same thing, so closely connected that neither can be fully separated from the other.^[2] What looks, from a distance, like an authoritative deposit handed down intact turns out, once examined closely, to have been a generative process from the very beginning, with no untouched point of origin behind it.

This is where the disorientation reaches furthest. A reader can adjust to the idea that ancient copies sometimes disagree with each other. It takes more to adjust to the idea that the material being copied was, at every stage available for examination, already a revision of something earlier, so that asking for the original language behind all the revisions is asking for something that may never have existed in the form the question assumes.

The history of a text is part of the text

The same evidence supports a different way of reading it. One influential account of how a text is understood holds that the history of a text's effects on its later readers is not a layer added after the real work of interpretation has already happened, something removed in order to reach an untouched original underneath. That history is constitutive of what the text is. A passage does not sit somewhere behind its centuries of retelling, translation, and reinterpretation, waiting to be recovered once the accumulated readings are cleared away. The passage is, in an important sense, the sum of what has been done with it and understood about it across that span of time, and each new act of reading necessarily brings its own moment in history into contact with the text's own layered history.^[3] Read this way, a text's editorial and interpretive history is not evidence against the idea of an authoritative scripture standing behind it. It is a description of how scripture has always operated, from its earliest stages of composition onward.

Viewed from this angle, the close connection between received material and its ongoing reworking, which looked like an argument against any stable text ever having existed, becomes instead a description of how a text stays in use across time. Material that could never be revised, glossed, or brought into new arguments would also be material with no way to speak into circumstances its earliest form never anticipated. The very feature that unsettles the search for an untouched original is what let the material remain in active use, generation after generation, long enough to be worth arguing over in the first place.

Every reading joins an open line

This reframing changes where a present-day reader stands in relation to the text. Picking up a passage and making sense of it is already an event inside a larger, unfinished history of that passage being read, argued over, retranslated, and applied to new circumstances. Reading is not a private transaction that happens only once a text has been safely extracted from its past and handed over in finished form. Any reading of a text is itself an event within a continuing history of how that text has been received, and any account of that reception history is, at the same time, a statement about the authority the text still carries for the people engaging with it in the present.^[4] A present-day reader working through how a passage was reworked in antiquity is not standing outside that process and observing it from a safe distance. That reader is doing a version of the same thing the ancient scribes were doing, continuing a process that has not stopped.

Seen this way, the fact that later interpreters keep disagreeing with each other, and with earlier interpreters, is not a sign that the process has broken down. Disagreement of that kind is the ordinary condition of a tradition still active enough to be worth arguing about. A text that produced only one permissible reading, generation after generation, would be a text that had stopped doing the kind of work that kept the earlier revisions and expansions coming in the first place.

A practice that survives its ancient form

The clearest evidence that this trajectory keeps going comes from watching one form of the practice give way to another without the underlying activity ever stopping. Communities in the Second Temple period rewrote and expanded their scriptural texts directly, folding new material into the language of the text itself so that the revision and the text it revised became indistinguishable on the page. That particular practice eventually receded, replaced by a sharper distinction between a fixed scriptural text and a separate body of commentary written about it, a division that has held for roughly two thousand years since and describes exactly how a modern commentary, translation footnote, or study Bible relates to the text it addresses.^[5] The outward form of the activity changed. The underlying activity of working on a received text and passing on what that work produced did not stop. It moved from direct changes made to the sacred text itself to formal commentary written alongside it, and it continues today in the classroom, the translator's footnote, and the sermon, still a continuation of the same basic activity that produced the variant editions and internal revisions described earlier.