194 Jonathan Cohen
its literary-aesthetic character. Revelation has been woven into creation;
within the world of the text, the immediacy of the “lyric” moment or of
the “anecdotal” exchange has been incorporated into the fl ow of the “epic.”
How Should the Bible Be Read and Not Read?
Such moments of revelational-dialogical illumination, wherein questions
are addressed or challenges are posed in the process of reading, can oc-
cur only if the reader of the Bible holds him- or herself open to the text
in a certain way. Buber and Rosenzweig both felt that the contemporary
reader should not approach the biblical text by way of a “hermeneutics
of suspicion.”36 Such an orientation assumes that the biblical writers are
consciously or unconsciously guileful about their motivations. For the sus-
picious reader, the self-presentation of the biblical text as the record of a
divine-human encounter is not to be trusted, and the claims of the Bible
in this regard are understood as deriving from something “deeper,” like
religious politics or mass psychology. Such a reader will consider it self-
understood that an “enlightened” modern understands the text, its under-
lying motivations, and its overall project better than the text understands
itself. On the one hand, such a reader may believe that he or she possesses
an absolute explanatory scheme that can serve as an alternative to the one
promulgated by the text (in the form of, say, Freudian psychoanalysis or
Marxism). Th is alternative perspective would be considered capable of ex-
plaining all individual and social-cultural phenomena, in contradistinction
to the false perspective with which the biblical text purports to account for
these phenomena. On the other hand, the reader may deny the possibility
of any universal, transhistorical, or transcultural perspective and interpret
the diverse teachings that can be found in the Bible as a function of diverse
historical or cultural contexts.
From the standpoint of Buber and Rosenzweig, such a reductionist ori-
entation does not permit the text to speak in its own voice. True, Buber
and Rosenzweig acknowledged the Bible’s multiplicity of views and did not
attempt to harmonize them. Th ey did not reject the evidence adduced by
biblical criticism that the Bible was written, edited, and compiled over a
long period of time by numerous scribes and editors. Nonetheless, con-
cerning what they saw as the most crucial point — whether the great spirits
of Israel and the people of Israel as a whole had experienced a “dialogue be-
tween heaven and earth” and whether the imperative to take responsibility