the perspective of faith this can be highly disconcerting. Many readers who believe the Hebrew Bible to be the word of God expect that ‘word’ to be obvious and definitive; they are unnerved to find that it can be interpreted in various ways and provide potentially many meanings. Scholars have tried to limit the potential meanings of a text by asserting that the real meaning is determined by the author. Reading the basic hermeneutical model from left to right, it is claimed that the