A Semiotic Approach to Image-Text Relations in Interpretation of Ancient Near Eastern Art and the Hebrew Bible
Interpretation is a comprehensive act involving various sign systems, both visual and verbal. While viewers of images construct narratives when interpreting them, readers build interpretations of texts through related visual imagery. When images and texts thus become inseparable in interpretation, an adequate method for analyzing both within an isomorphic framework is required. In this volume, Kim introduces semiotics as a transdisciplinary method and presents two semiotic models to support a meta-critical analysis of both textual and visual interpretations. These models are applied to interpretations of two anonymous women from the ancient Near East: a nude woman depicted on an Old Babylonian terracotta plaque, and a woman described in chapter 7 of the biblical Song of Songs. For each case, Kim presents her own interpretation alongside analyses of two contemporary interpretations: those of Zainab Bahrani and Julia Assante for the Old Babylonian figure, and those of Othmar Keel and Fiona Black for the biblical text. The semiotic analysis reveals unique interpretations, each of which emerges from an interplay between the studied works’ inherent ambiguity or polysemy and the interpreters’ personal preferences. The diverse backgrounds of the latter – academic, feminist, or cultural – and their strategies for relating images to texts – whether historical, thematic, semiotic, or grotesque – fill the works’ inenarrable or invisible gaps in distinctive ways, highlighting the crucial role every interpreter plays in producing his or her interpretation. Kim emphasizes the significance of subjectivity in every interpretation: it is only when the subjectivity of any interpretation is recognized that the interpreter may become the focal point of semiotic analysis, an analysis which aims to move beyond the image-text dichotomy. Grounded in semiotic methodology, the model of a tripartite relationship between image, text, and interpreter offers a significant advance beyond the image-text binary which persists in Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near Eastern studies.
