27/12/2024
Strategies for Resolving Ambiguities: Text and Context
Can you find the ambiguity in the following verse? Test yourself
by trying to resolve the ambiguity on your own before reading our
resolutions and see how many of the considerations that involve close reading you can anticipate.
בראשית פרק מד )כב(
וַנֹּאמֶר אֶל אֲדֹנִי לֹא יוּכַל הַנַּעַר לַעֲזבֹ אֶת אָבִיו וְעָזַב אֶת אָבִיו וָמֵת:
We said to my lord: The young man cannot leave his father;
were he to leave his father, he would die (Ge. 44:22).
Joseph threatened to imprison Benjamin. Judah, who had pledged
himself as surety for his youngest brother, approached Joseph and
reminded him that he had precipitated the crisis himself by demanding that Benjamin be brought to him despite his brothers’ plaintive arguments that to leave his father would be fatal – but to whom? Is it the young man (Benjamin) who would die, or is it his father (Jacob)?
There are two strategies we can invoke to resolve a verse’s ambiguity: textual and contextual. The textual approach utilizes the accepted rules of biblical syntax that require us to relate the ambiguous pronoun to the nearest noun with which it agrees in number and gender. The contextual approach requires us to sift through the setting and determine the likeliest referent.
-- Excerpted from Dr. Moshe Sokolow, Pursuing Peshat, p. 6
Pursuing Peshat - TOC & Sample Chapter Peshat literally means the simple, or literal, interpretation of the text. However, the definition and determination of peshat is anything but straightforward. The Sages of the Talmud and Midrash debated how to ascertain peshat. This debate continued among the....
