Hermeneutics in everyday life

• A typical religious believer doesn't bother to read the sign, but if the car in front of him stops, he'll stop too.

• A serious, educated believer believes she cannot understand the stop sign apart from its interpretive community and tradition. Observing that the interpretive community doesn't take the sign too seriously, she doesn't feel obligated to take it too seriously either.

• A fundamentalist Christian, taking the text very literally, stops at the stop sign and waits for it to tell him to go.

• An orthodox Jew does one of two things:
  1. Takes another route to work that doesn't have a stop sign so that he doesn't run the risk of disobeying the Law.
  2. Stops at the sign, says “Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, king of the universe, who hast given us thy commandment to stop,” waits 3 seconds according to his watch, and then proceeds.

  Incidentally, the Talmud has the following comments on this sign:

  • Rabbi Meir says: He who does not stop shall not live long.
  • Rabbi Hillel says: Cursed is he who does not count to three before proceeding.
  • Rabbi Simon ben Yudah says: Why three? Because the Holy One, blessed be He, gave us the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings.
  • Rabbi ben Isaac says: Because of the three patriarchs.
  • Rabbi Yehuda says: Why bless the Lord at a stop sign? Because it says, “Be still and know that I am God.”

• A traditional Muslim treats the sign in accordance with the following hadiths:
  • Narrated Sharik bin ’Abdullah bin Abi Namir: I heard Anas bin Malik saying, “I was traveling with the Prophet (peace be upon him) when we approached a red painted signboard, and the Prophet (peace be upon him) immediately slowed his camel.”
  • Narrated ’Abdullah bin Zaid: “When you approach a crossroads, always slow down, and the Shaitan will pass you by.”
  • Narrated Masruq: “If a man approaches a crossroads at the same pace as the angels, all his sins will be forgiven.”

• A fundamentalist Muslim ignores the sign because God makes no mention of stop signs in the Qur’an.

So what happens when the experts get hold of a stop sign?

• An Old Testament scholar might take note of a number of stylistic differences between the first and second half of the passage STOP. For example, ST contains no enclosed areas and five line endings, whereas OP contains two enclosed areas and only one line termination. He concludes that the author for the second part is different from the author on the first part and probably lived hundreds of years later. (Later scholars determine that the second half is itself actually written by two separate authors because of similar stylistic differences between the O and the P.)

• Another Old Testament scholar judges that the stop sign would fit better into the context three streets back. Clearly, he concludes, it was moved to its present location by a later redactor. He therefore exegetes the intersection as though the sign were not there.

• Yet another Old Testament scholar amends the text, changing the T to H. SHOP is much easier to understand in context than STOP because of the multiplicity of stores in the area. The textual corruption probably occurred because SHOP is so similar to STOP on the sign several streets back, so it was a natural mistake for a scribe to make. Thus the sign should be interpreted to announce the existence of a shopping area.

• Still another Old Testament scholar weighs the conflicting exegeses and concludes that both meanings may be valid, thus making the thrust of the sign's message STOP (and) SHOP.

• A New Testament scholar notices that there is no stop sign on Luke Street, but there is one on Matthew Street and on Mark Street. He concludes that the ones on Matthew and Mark streets are both copied from a sign on a street that no longer exists, called “Q” Street.

• A scholar from the Jesus Seminar concludes that the signs reading STOP could not have been made by Jesus himself. Being the progressive Jew that he was, Jesus would never have wanted to stifle people's progress. Therefore, STOP must be a semiotic insertion belonging to stage III of the gospel tradition, when the church was first confronted by traffic in its parking lot.

• A seminary-educated evangelical preacher might look up STOP in his lexicons of English and discover that it can mean:
  1. something which prevents motion, such as a plug for a drain, or a block of wood that prevents a door from closing;
  2. a location where a train or bus lets off passengers.
  In his sermon the following Sunday on this text, the main point is: When you see a STOP sign, it is a place where traffic is naturally clogged, so it is a good place to let off passengers from your car.

• A “prophetic” preacher notices that the square root of the sum of the numeric representations of the letters S-T-O-P (sigma-tau-omicron-pi in the Greek alphabet), multiplied by 40 (the number of testing), and divided by 4 (the number of the world - north, south, east, and west) equals 666. Therefore, he concludes that stop signs are the dreaded “mark of the beast,” a harbinger of divine judgment upon the world, and must be avoided at all costs.

• A Marxist refuses to stop because he sees the stop sign as an instrument of class conflict. He concludes that the bourgeois use the north-south road and obstruct the progress of the workers in the east-west road.

• A post-modernist deconstructs the sign by knocking it over with his car, ending forever the tyranny of the north-south traffic over the east-west traffic.