Hebraic hermeneutics

One Rhonda Wauhkonen discusses Nicholas of Lyra’s “Hebraic” semiotics and hermeneutics in a 1992 article on Chaucer. She begins by contrasting Augustine’s signum/res distinction to Lyra’s Hebraic viewpoint:

“In the Hebrew system as evidenced in Scripture and as adapted by
Nicholas, such stratification of signification did not exist, for the language did not permit it. Most fundamentally, Augustine’s distinction between words signifying and things signifying became unnecessary and unsupportable since within a ‘biblical’ linguistic framework, ‘word’ and ‘thing’were not customarily distinguished. Most often, they received expression through the same Hebrew term, dabar , a broadly encompassing word covering
almost all possible aspects of speech and communication. As simply
alternative formulations of dabar , a ‘word’ and a ‘thing’ could therefore be understood as equally and similarly significant within a Hebrew context: both could represent ‘things,’ objective or ideational, sequentially or simultaneously on any number of levels. Reflecting not a primitive or underdeveloped linguistic mechanism, but simply a logic and system of reference substantially different from that of Latin and of the West under Aristotle, the Hebraic sign system thus tended to streamline the process of reference and to broaden its scope: whereas in Augustine’s Latin formulation, signification proceeded via signa naturalia from verbum to res (physical reality) or (note the distinction between the two modes of signification) via signa data from res (object) to res (idea), in Hebrew, all dabarim , all words/things (including narratives, history, and human lives) were simply generic signs, ‘otot (plural of ‘ot , ‘sign’) or ‘signs’ of the same nature.”

In Lyra’s Hebraic framework, signs are personally involving, dynamic and not static pointers to things: Signs “also engaged the recipient of the signs with the will of the giver, demanding a response to complete the process of signification. Not only distinguishing one thing from another, ‘otot have an intended ethical and effective end: they had involved the reader with the sign and with its author, usually working to affirm or induce belief in something specific, such as God or His covenants (as through the rainbow,
circumcision, Torah, etc.). The bronze serpent in the wilderness, for
example, became an ‘ot , an efficacious sign, not merely by being fashioned or by being raised up. It became both a sign and effective only when it was responded to, when the individual responded in a volitional and intentional manner to the will of the Author of the sign . . . . Only the volitional act of looking, of the
individual’s reception of and response to the sign, made the bronze serpent an effective vehicle by which the will of the Author could bring about a change in the condition of the ‘reader.’”

This Hebraic system comes to its fulfillment in Jesus: “Given
a broader and typological significance in John (as in the depiction of Him as the Passover Lamb, 1:29), Jesus was also presented as the semeion (or the ‘ot ) of the New Covenant. As such, He assumed a peculiarly ‘literary’ role: being both the Sign and the Signified, the Revealer and the Revealed, He paralleled and surpassed in Himself the sign theory of the Hebrew Scriptures. At the same time, however, He transformed it from an interpretive reading of God’s works and words to an immediately interactive reading: rather than merely presenting those signs or interpretations of them which
reveal who God is and what He wills (as the Prophets had done), Jesus interpreted the word by and through Himself, reading both Scripture (e.g. Luke 4:21) and his own actions (e.g. John 5:19) in reference to Himself and His Father. In doing so, He brought together in Himself the ‘ot (the sign), what it signifies, and the right reading of it. In effect, He became the Author, the Narrator, and the Participant in the ‘Text’ of the world and of Scripture.” Hermeneutically as in every other way, “all things hold together” in Christ – sign, thing, author, text, reader.

This is the foundation of Lyra’s “double literal sense”: “Centred in Christ, this pattern enabled a reading of the Hebrew Scriptures through and in reference to Jesus as the Son of God. Making possible a ‘theory of language as a system of signs,’ such a Hebraic form of reference had obvious implications for a ‘Christian’ hermeneutic: it extended the ‘natural’ meaning of the text to include typology (or referential meaning) and brought ‘under one head, that of “signs,” the two enquiries into the literal meaning and the figurative
or typological sense of literature’ (Markus 68)—the two aspects of meaning that Nicholas brings together in his sensus literalis .

The ramifications of this model went beyond biblical interpretation, affecting theories of reading in general: “In effect, it re-defined mediaeval reading theory from a two-book concept of analogy (such as was held by Dante) wherein the things of the world (objects, texts, history, or humanity—individual or collective) were understood to parallel the things of the spirit to a one-book concept of reference wherein all things of the world were seen as but various expressions of a single underlying Truth.”