Gen 13 : Abraham discovers the land as God's gift

Abstract

How far Pope Pius XII's hermeneutical norm "qua perspiciatur et de Jiniatur, quid scriptor dicere intenderit" may still be regarded as "summam interpretandi normam?" Some approaches to the biblical text abandon this norm almost on princible: "We know, as students of literature, that the author's intention, his goals in writing for his contemporary audience, and his religious convictions, play a small role indeed in literary criticism and, more important, in the analysis of literary texts. We may be familiar with all this information, but we do not depend on it for interpretation, even with an avowedly religious poet such as Milton." Diachronical analyses tend to obscure the concept with their insistance on seeing the text as a multi-levelled reality which owes its existence to several intentiones of several auctores.