Hermeneutics and Theology

In order to do justice to the issue of biblical hermeneutics, it is necessary to start with some observations on the interpretandum , i.e., the biblical texts. The Bible is a collection of writings in a number of distinct literary genres from almost ten centuries in antiquity. It therefore refl ects a wide range of religious cultures in Israel as well as in Jewish and Christian diaspora communities throughout the ancient Roman Empire, and it displays a great variety of intellectual and scribal traditions which emerged more or less closely in relation to institutions of cultic ritual. At the same time, the Bible is a ‘canonical,’ an authoritative book through which a number of religious communities defi ne their identity in terms of doctrine as well as practice. Whoever engages with the biblical texts in their original language is confronted with Hebrew – as well as, for a small number of texts, Aramaic – and Greek. While ancient Hebrew is mainly limited to the biblical texts themselves, related languages like Akkadian and Ugaritic have become accessible through archaeological discoveries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Greek language, which for Old Testament texts is the language of an ancient translation (the Septuagint), is the original language for the texts of the New Testament. In addition to the biblical texts, it is known through a substantial number of writings from ancient Greek and Hellenistic culture from many centuries so that linguistic features can be compared. Whereas the socalled Hebrew Bible or Old Testament was used as a sacred text in Judaism mainly in its original language, in Western Christianity the language of the Christian Bible, Old and New Testament, soon became Latin (the Vulgate). Thanks to the philological efforts of Jerome (c. 347– 420 CE) and his followers, an almost standardized Latin version of the Bible had been