The interpreter's craft.

The biblical tradition resembles clay in the hands of its interpreters. Through the history of its formation, the biblical canon responded to the call of interpreters' inspiring energy, melding images from its rich narrative treasury with insights for living through whatever set of challenges that the community faced. Any history of such responsive interpretation must delve into the very process of biblical formation, since the biblical canon witnesses within itself a similar interpretative craft.

It would trivialize this dynamic interpretative skill to reduce its conditioned formulations to universal and literal truth without recognizing how embedded it is within a particular set of circumstances. Meanings inhere in life circumstances that rarely are equivocal. For this very reason, vivid interpretations often flourish then fade into the background while the tradition moves ahead.

Probing this hermeneutical process are four articles in the current issue of BTB. Vincent Pizzuto begins from the present state of international affairs to recognize the underlying fundamentalism of those who would justify murder by religious jingoisms. "Religious Terror and the Prophetic Voice of Reason: Unmasking Our Myths of Righteousness" helps to recognize self-serving fundamentalism on both sides in the conflicts that now threaten the warring denominations and sects within the Abrahamic traditions.

Hyun Chul Paul Kim references the ominous text of Jeremiah 4:23-28 as a likely prophetic metaphor for understanding the doom that natural disasters inflict upon wide-spread regions of the earth. Using such intertextual correlations of key prophetic metaphors requires hermeneutical agility to avoid reducing their applications to absurdity. "Tsunami, Hurricane, and Jeremiah 4:23-28" helps explain the workings of intertextuality in biblical interpretations.

David H. Wenkel in "Gezerah Shawah as Analogy in the Epistle to the Hebrews," examines how the rabbinic hermeneutical principle of word-referencing appears within a canonical Second Testament text. In this study Wenkel helps contemporary readers to recognize a device that was in current usage for interpreters within the canon.

Daniel Maoz in "Haggadic Midrash and the Hermeneutics of Reveal-ment" lays out the anatomy of biblical interpretation. Recognizing the complexity of the midrashic process, Maoz issues cautions in reducing its dynamics to mere exegesis.

Overall, religious readers today require instructive perspective on the ways the scriptural tradition works. It is dynamic and mercurial, open to exploitation yet powerful in its implicit moral force. Before "we" score "them" with lethal readings of scriptures, we must know better how the biblical tradition emerged within a community that afforded sacred texts a commanding yet ever-ambiguous moral force.

David M. Bossman

Editor