This book explores the variety of ways that the Jewish understanding of the Covenant relates to the notion of a contract or a shared grammar as developed in recent structural and post-structural theory. The book enters the debate on the relationship beween a variety of open-ended forms of text interpretation and traditional Jewish interpretive practice, expanding and deepening that debate. Until now, the discussion has focused primarily on Midrashic interpretation; these essays balance the assumption of the openness of interpretation with an exploration of the concurrent restrictions on interpretation imposed by a covenant.

Ellen Spolsky is Associate Professor at Bar-Ilan University, Israel and Director of the Lechter Institute for Literary Research.