25. Reading the Lines : A Fresh Look at the Hebrew Bible by Pamela Tamarkin Reis (2002, 213 pages, Read Mar 27 – Apr 26)

This was just tough to read. The ideas are quite good...no, more than that, they are fascinating. But I can only see it through the exhaustion of plodding through these essays.

Reis combines the literary ideas of Robert Alter with her own notion that the bible, or at least the Old Testament, is not a flawed document, but actually has come down to us as intended. This puts her in the bible-as-literature camp, but a step removed as she is turns the any science-y approach on its head. She starts with her conclusion, and then later works out the reasoning (although that is not how she presents it in her published essays).

Reis sees the Bible as human, but feels that the authors put everything together in a precise and careful manner. In other words, there are no mistakes or contradictions. What we see as errors are our mistakes, viewing an old work through 20th-century eyes and missing the original context and long-lost clues. This is faith, mind you a different kind of faith than the usual in this context. Her resulting ideas are interesting and revealing; her articles, arguing for this (citation, citation) and against this (citation, citation), are... just... really... hard... on... the... attention... span.

So, what comes out of this: Basically she digs out very subtle stuff in the text that is usually missed, has not been published and reverses the way we understand some common stories. For example, she destroys Hagar; and she exposes Tamar as a flake and then argues the rape of Tamar was not a rape, but consensual! I found the article on Jephthah's sacrifice of his daughter cited on the online Yale bible course. She gets where she gets by really thinking things through over and over again, and by picking apart the Hebrew text and finding the common translation errors and understanding errors. She also adds in a few questionable ideas and I might argue her confidence is unjustified. But regardless her ideas are good and of value to anyone with an interesting in this kind of thing.

2014
https://www.librarything.com/topic/172769#4697534 ( )

Though Reis is considered an amateur scholar, she has a fresh interpretation of Jewish scriptures and has been published frequently in the scholarly journals. I appreciated her valuable insights interpreting difficult passages, esp. the creation narratives. ( )