White space and the hidden meaning of biblical texts
Much like in poetry, the meaning of biblical texts depends on the form in which words are arranged. How a text was originally structured, grouped into units using paragraphs and indents, decides how it should be interpreted. In biblical texts, those “empty spaces” point to a very ancient understanding of the text that bible translators should take into account. Or so Jürgen Gruhler will be arguing when he defends his dissertation on the Book of Daniel this afternoon.
Happy accidents
Gruhler fell into to his PhD topic by accident, through an innocent request by one of the members of his former congregation to preach more about the Old Testament, specifically the Book of Daniel. ‘I didn’t have time to go through all the interpretation and comments on Daniel, so I took to my Hebrew Bible,’ he says. ‘There I noticed the empty spaces in the text and in the process discovered very interesting textual structures. I called up an old professor to ask: “what is this?” He wondered if it was something I wanted to study, and referred me to Klaas Spronk, who liked the pastoral background of my question and agreed to take me on.” Eleven years later, Gruhler credits his wife as the main reason he has been able to finish his PhD studies at all. ‘If I’d known it would take me this long, I might not have started,’ he says.
Delimitations: here, there, everywhere
Gruhler is not the first person at the Protestant Theological University to dive into the indents and white lines in Hebrew texts – the so called “delimitations” that group the text into units. In fact, one of the architects of the delimitation method works at the PThU: Professor of Old Testament Marjo Korpel. ‘A pioneer in the field’, Gruhler says, who he was honoured to work alongside. In the year 2000 she and Professors Johannes de Moor and Konrad Jenner took findings by theologian Josef Oesch and shaped them into a coherent method: delimitation criticism. This method pays attention to where ancient scribes put spaces, breaks, and pauses in a text, because those breaks show how the text was meant to be read, heard, and understood.
‘Delimitations are like the outline of a book,’ Gruhler says. ‘In German or Dutch or English we have headings and subheadings as an outline of the text. In the old texts we don't have that. So from translator to translator, Bible society to Bible society, interpretation changes. Sometimes every scientist makes their own outline depending on their research focus.’ This kind of “framing” can cause interpretations that are a far cry from what the original author must have meant.
An end to interpretation chaos?
Gruhler differentiates between two types of delimitations. External delimitations are the “empty” spaces like indents or paragraphs in a book – the focus of Marjo Korpel’s research. Internal delimitations are the repetition of words or even entire sentences in a piece of text, demarking the beginning and end of an argument or pointing to the most important idea. ‘To know the external delimitations helps correctly interpret the internal delimitations,’ says Gruhler. ‘The structuring of a text – and thus the question of how individual verses are grouped into textual units – is a fundamental preliminary decision.’ And that makes for a far smaller array of interpretations. ‘It can give you a different meaning. Whether it’s an angel who speaks or Daniel who speaks; whether something should be read as a blessing or a curse.’
Traditions in interpreting biblical texts
But to properly look at the meaning of the text, you can’t only look at the delimitations; you also have to look at delimitation traditions: how biblical texts have been passed down over the course of millennia and divided into paragraphs and chapters. How far have those delimitation traditions deviated from the original one, and in that way from the original meaning? This is where Gruhler’s research has taken delimitation criticism one step further. ‘I used this research to study text transmission.’
Gruhler’s research on the “transmission tradition” could also offer a breakthrough in a long‑standing debate about the Book of Daniel. ‘It has long been discussed which is the right reading of the Book of Daniel: the Hebrew or Greek tradition? In the Greek reading, chapter 3 of Daniel has an extra paragraph, that isn’t present in the Hebrew reading. These two traditions have been at a stalemate since 1800. A third reading stated that the Greek and Hebrew readings have developed in parallel, based on a single source text. In my dissertation I compare these traditions by using delimitation criticism, which lead me to the conclusion that there has indeed been a parallel evolution of these reading traditions, grounded in an older Daniel manuscript.’
No excuses
What does Gruhler’s research mean for biblical interpretation? For one, it offers pastors a quick and easy way to get to an outline of a biblical text, which on its own would be enough to satisfy him. For another – a result less practical but perhaps more significant: there no longer is an excuse to stick with an interpretation that doesn’t match the delimitations of the oldest available texts and traditions. ‘Just as it is important in social or political debates to understand a statement within its original context, the same applies to biblical texts. Of course, people are always free to hold a different opinion; however, such an opinion can only be presented in a well‑reasoned way if one has understood the original statement and what it was intended to mean.’
If he’s right, we are in for some interesting discussions.
