252 Marc Zvi Brettler
of explicating Ezekiel,23 and he used that method throughout his two vol-
umes on Ezekiel and in several essays.
Th is method is the result of Greenberg’s frustration at the way that most
scholars analyze texts: “As presently practiced, this method [the historical-
critical method] lacks empirically established criteria and therefore yields
results too divergent to inspire confi dence”; “its standards are drawn from
too narrow a range of literature and lack the support of extensive descrip-
tions of biblical literature in its own terms”; and the modern scholarly ax-
iom “that the primary creation was free of tension and ambiguity” is wrong.
Scholars enforce their suppositions on the text, rather than “attempt[ing]
to adjust one’s mind, through activating an appreciating-integrating critical
faculty, to the signals that emanate from the received Hebrew text taken as
a whole.”24
For these reasons, he proposes,
As an alternative . . . we propose a holistic interpretation, “emphasizing
the organic or functional relation between parts and wholes” (Webster).
As the religious person approaches the text open to God’s call, so must the
interpreter come “all ears” to hear what the text is saying. He must sub-
jugate his habits of thought and expression to the words before him and
become actively passive — full of initiatives to heighten his receptivity. For
an axiom, he has the working hypothesis that the text as he has it has been
designed to convey a message, a meaning. 25Greenberg shows the folly of various criteria that scholars propose for dis-
cerning what is secondary from the original. He also asserts that the com-
plete MT is the important text of and for the community: “Th e holistic in-
terpreter is prepared to risk failure in order to establish the claim of his
cultural heritage on its heirs.” But Greenberg generally does believe that
by “listening to it [the text] patiently and humbly,” the manner in which it
coheres eventually becomes apparent.26
In this area, Greenberg is close to those modern Jewish biblical inter-
preters who also show less interest in the prehistory of the biblical text and
concentrate on the texts’ fi nal form. Given that the search for a book’s pre-
history developed only as part of modern biblical scholarship, it is not sur-
prising that here as well Greenberg agrees with his medieval predecessors.
Greenberg, however, states that his is not a religious perspective: “Th is
is no a priori stance, but my critical assessment of the evidence — of the