ABSTRACT
Hermeneutics provides guidelines for scholars as they engage in the task of interpreting Scripture. An older, more traditional view of language has it representing and articulating our concepts of reality, which in their turn reproduce or reflect reality. While the word is only about two-and-a-half centuries old, hermeneutics as a disciplined approach to interpretation can be traced back to the ancient Greeks studying literature and to biblical exegesis in the Judeo-Christian tradition. For a start, hermeneutics obviously grounds the meaning of texts in more than their sheerly semantic significance. Secondly, to emphasise that hermeneutics is a sharing of meaning between communities or persons is already to indicate that it is no mere academic exercise. Dilthey is of central importance in the history of modern hermeneutics. The phenomenological hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger can, with even greater validity, be seen as a hermeneutical phenomenology.
