Gaps, Ambiguity, and the Reading Process

There are all kinds of different ways of reading. What follows below is a description of a reading process that has profoundly influenced me. The material included here you should consider the work of Meir Sternberg. I have quoted him at places and summarized material at other points. The work referenced is his book, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).

Sternberg writes, “To understand a literary work, we have to answer, in the course of reading, a series of such questions as: What is happening or has happened, and why? What connects the present event or situation to what went before, and how do both relate to what will probably come after? What are the features, motives, or designs of this or that character? How does he/she view his/her fellow characters? What norms govern the existence and conduct of all?” (186).

Answering such questions enables us as readers to make sense of the world (or world view) represented in the text.

Yet often times, answers to these questions are not provided by the text itself. Sometimes, they are provided by the larger context of the text. Other times, the ambiguities are filled automatically from information supplied in the text. Still other times, we as readers supply the answers to the questions. Sometimes we offer temporary, partial, or tentative answers. Sometimes we offer whole and final answers.

As illustrated by some of the non-canonical gospels the Disciples class has been reading, ancient literary works sometimes are not much more than small pieces, sentences and fragments, placed next to each other but without a narrative to tie them together. Even when the narrative is present, the works remain constituent pieces but sewn together more coherently (at least sometimes). In either instance, stories contain gaps that must be filled. Such gap-filling may involve simple linkage of elements that we do automatically. When the gaps are larger and more intricate networks, the gap-filling requires conscious, laborious, hesitant, and constant modification (186).

Even children’s literature requires such gap-filling. Sternberg offer the Hebrew nursery rhyme, “Little Jonathan,” as an example. It goes like this:

Every day, that’s the way
Jonathan goes out to play.
Climbed a tree. What did he see?
Birdies: one, two, three!

Naughty boy! What have we seen?
There’s a hole in your new jeans!

How did the jeans get torn? We tend to automatically say the tree. Could it not also have been some fence that the boy crawled under? We prefer the tree because it lets us link the elements of the rhyme. It “offers the simplest and most probable explanation for the coexistence and unfolding of the different givens in the text” (187).


In literary works of greater complexity, the gap-filling is more difficult and requires more conscious and intentional work. For example, “what was Abraham’s state of mind while answering the questions ‘Where is the lamb for the burnt offering?’ put to him by his son Isaac?” (187).