The Bible from within: the method of total interpretation

The Bible from Within — The Method of Total Interpretation is a revised, enlarged, and fully updated English version of the Hebrew book HaMiqra Kidemuto "The Bible and Modern Literary Theory" which appeared in Jerusalem in 1962. The aim of the work, now as then, is to present an approach to the critical study of the Bible. Even when it first appeared, it was not the first work in recent Biblical scholarship to concern itself primarily with methodology, and the large number of such works which have since appeared is sufficient evidence that the crisis in the field — and in the study of literature in general — has not abated, and is, perhaps, even more acute. For as the old adage has it, the less one understands the material, the more one speaks of methods. When paths of inquiry no longer lead to the desired goal and perplexed scholars' sense that they have perforce stumbled and taken wrong turns along the way it is then that they begin to concern themselves with questions of methodology. The Bible from Within, as was the Hebrew work that preceded it, is an attempt to set the perplexed student of the Bible firmly and securely on the right path to understanding. --