I n t e r p r e t a t i o n1 4 3it might be that you were invited to make your own sense of it
provided that the sense was logically coherent and seemed to fit
with the textual evidence.
If this were so, then my version of ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ would
no doubt be judged admissible. It is not an obviously valid reading.
Its correctness does not exactly cry out from the house tops. Yet on
such a theory of interpretation, it cannot be ruled out. Besides, the
rhyme may not mean this now, but it might always come to do so.
My account of it might prove to be a self- fulfilling prophecy. If it
catches on, which I am quietly confident it will, children who chant
this verse in the school playground for generations to come will
think spontaneously of rude narrators and duplicitous sheep as
they do so. My place in history will then be secure.
In the ancient Jewish practice of midrash or scriptural interpreta-
tion, it was sometimes deemed acceptable to assign new, strikingly
improbable meanings to the Bible. The word midrash means to
seek or investigate, and holy scripture was regarded as semantically
inexhaustible. It was able to confront each commentator with a
different sense each time it was studied. The Torah or sacred
Jewish scriptures was seen as incomplete, and each generation of
interpreters had to help bring it to perfection. No one of them,
however, would ever have the last word. Moreover, unless a piece
of scripture could be brought to bear on the needs and preoccupa-
tions of its time, it was judged to be a dead letter. It had to be given
life by being looked at in the light of the contemporary moment.
You did not truly understand the text unless you found a way of
putting it into practice.
My reading of ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’, as it happens, is not of this
kind. I am not doing anything as devious as appealing to midrash in
order to justify it. It is not especially influenced by the needs and