ABSTRACT
What text are we reading, and what difference does that question make to how we read? What text are we writing, for that matter? Here questions of textuality, authorship, and “The Book,” which have been emerging throughout this volume, come more sharply into focus. What is the Bible? Is it a book? Has it a text? Where are its textual limits? What assumptions operate in contemporary thinking about this particular “book” as text and its relation to the political? When such questions are addressed to Scripture, to a body of “canonical text” with a literary history-in terms of both composition and reception-of arguably unparallelled length and complication, the problematics of textuality which infuse postmodern critical theory are compellingly compounded.
