Jewish cultural scripts and the interpretation of the Bible

Abstract

Reading stories can be an exercise in cross-cultural communication-and it can involve miscommunication. When we read texts belonging to other epochs, lands, peoples, and traditions, we need to know something about the "cultural scripts" which shaped the ways of thinking and the ways of speaking reflected in those texts. If these cultural scripts are to be made intelligible to us they must be explained in terms that the culture alien to us shares with our own. The set of simple and universal human concepts which has been discovered in recent decades through empirical linguistic investigations (cf. e.g., Wierzbicka 1996c; Goddard 1998; Goddard and Wierzbicka eds. 1994 and 2002), can play a useful role in this regard, as a kind of a universal conceptual lingua franca or a universal "cultural notation" (Hall 1976), which can help to minimize miscommunication and build cross-cultural bridges between readers and writers. As Bakhtin (1979: 257) put it, in speaking "we 'pour' our speech into ready-made forms of speech genres (...) These forms are given to us in the same way in which our native language is given". Accordingly, to understand ways of speaking which belong to a culture alien to us we must learn to "hear" them in their proper cultural context and with some knowledge of this culture's ready-made speech forms; in other words, we must try to understand the underlying cultural scripts. Mainstream Anglo culture, with its cherished traditions of rationality and empiricism, and with its emphasis on science and scientific discourse, values consistency, accuracy, logical formulations, absence of contradictions (on any level), absence of exaggeration, dispassionate reasoning, and so on. As I have discussed in my book What Did Jesus Mean? (2001), these are not the values of the culture of Hosea, or the culture of Jesus, just as they are not the values of the culture reflected in the stories of Sholom Aleichem or Isaac Bashevis Singer. For the modern Anglo reader of the Bible, a cross-cultural commentary is not an optional extra, but a necessity. The cultural script model can be an effective tool for the purposes of cross-cultural understanding-in personal interaction, social life, business, politics, literature, and also in religion. In particular, it can be an effective tool for the interpretation of the Bible-as literature and as (for the believers) the Word of God.