gard to other things — names of places that no longer existed or histori-
cal figures or events long forgotten or social institutions that had ceased
to be.
In addition to such relatively mundane matters, however, interpreters
ultimately came to address far broader and more consequential questions.
As already discussed, the returning exiles had looked to texts from the an-
cient past in order to fashion their own present, and this way of approach-
ing Scripture asprescriptive for the presentwent on long after the return
from exile was an established fact; interpreters continued to look to these
ancient writings for a message relevant to their own day. But at first glance,
at least, much of Scripture must have seemed quite irrelevant. It talked
about figures from the distant past: what importance could their stories
have to a later day other than preserving some nostalgic memory of people
and events long gone? Why should anyone care about laws forbidding
things that no one did any more anyway, indeed, things that no one even
understood anymore? Part of the interpreter’s task was thus to make the
past relevant to the present — to find some practicallessonin ancient his-
tory, or to reinterpret an ancient law in such a way as to have it apply to
present-day situations, sometimes at the price of completely distorting the
text’s original meaning. It appears that interpreters only gradually as-
sumed these functions, but as time went on, they became more daring in
the way they went about things while, at the same time, settling into a
more important and solid niche in Judean society.
In the case of Ezra’s reading, we have no way of knowing what sort of
interpretation was involved. Was it a matter of explaining an odd word or
phrase here or there? Or were the interpreters (as one ancient Jewish tradi-
tion has it) actually translating the whole text word-for-word, presumably
into Aramaic, then thelingua francaof the Near East? Or did they go be-
yond even this, explaining how this or that biblical law was to be applied
— what was involved in “doing no work” on the Sabbath, for example?Interpretation inside the Bible
If the Bible provides no solid leads in the case of Ezra’s reading, it does of-
fer a number of other examples of ancient biblical interpretation; in fact,
the most ancient examples of biblical interpretation that we have are
found within the Bible itself, where later books explain or expand on
things that appear in earlier books. Often, the things that ancient inter-159Early Jewish Biblical InterpretationEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
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