Contemporary Readers as an Interpretive Community – Harash (IGEL 2023)
Channel: IGEL Conference Videos
Date: 2023-09-25

One way to conceptualize contemporary readings of ancient texts is to think of the readers as two different groups – contemporary and ancient – and as such, as members of two different interpretive communities. A reading experiment of medieval Hebrew poetry outlined the interpretive landscape that unfolded during a reading of one ancient poem. An analysis of 158 answers to a content question, revealed two main reading strategies. The first: interpreting the text based on current ideologies like pacifism, nationalism and feminism. The second: the tendency to interpret the text according to interpretative norms that were current when the poem was written.