Postscript

Abstract Hermeneutics is at the essence of the vitality of Judaism from its earliest inception until the present day. To understand vitality is to understand the various ways in which Judaism re-imagines itself through various expressions of writing, imagining, and performance. As such, philology must be situated within an account of what readers, writers, and editors are doing, of what they are trying to withstand, and of how they are trying to insist on the resistance and persistence of their language and culture. Philology needs to be grounded both philosophically and also literarily so that one does not lose sight of the text in its largest form as well as in its interrelatedness to itself. Reading is about understanding the interrelational dimensions of a work, not as a work only of the past, but rather one that is life-giving to itself through internal conversation and its afterlife as a read and interpreted text. Considering how texts are heard, read, performed, and experienced further builds a path between philology and philosophical hermeneutics. Continued integration of the contributions of literature and imagination during the Hellenistic period is necessary to overcome biases embedded in the field of biblical studies with respect to supersessionism, the privileging of an original and early expression of a tradition, and the dismissing of the Hellenistic period as late Judaism.