05_AN_Krause_416_co_416-427 30/10/15 13:13 Pagina 426 426 JOACHIM J. KRAUSE 426 of the present paper. Here, the question is one of intertextual relationships and how to distinguish those intended by the author from those that merely lie in the eye of the beholder. In conclusion, let me sum up what can be learned from the case of Joshua 2. First of all, what seems to suggest itself to a canonical reader can serve only as an initial clue to go by. At best, it is a reasonable suspicion. Such a suspicion must be proven, and it can turn out to be either founded or unfounded. If the author of a given text wanted the addressees to under- stand it in light of another text, he or she has in all likelihood inserted fea- tures which point towards that intertext. Such features include parallel wording (lexemes and syntactical structures) as well as aspects of seman- tics. Depending on the historical communication context and the original addressees’ previous knowledge, these features may be more or less ob- vious. But, as a rule, they should be visible with the naked eye (again, there were neither concordances nor computers). Hence the feature in question ought to be significant, and it ought to be confirmed by other features. A convincing case for an intertextual reference intended by the author can hardly be built upon isolated lexemes or phrases. Rather, one should be able to demonstrate how parallel wording is integrated into the semantic structures of the two texts in question and how these structures correspond to each other. When we claim that the author of a story wanted us to understand it in light of a certain other story, it is not enough to come up with an interesting reading. Rather, we should be able to show that it was this reading that interested the author, too. A further step — and indeed, one might argue with reason, the more challenging step — would be to construct, not only reconstruct, relation- ships of a biblical text with other texts, biblical and extra-biblical, and eventually with the textual world in which we live. But this step is most certainly beyond the scope of this paper, and it is also beyond the scope of Hebrew Bible scholarship as I understand it 28. Derrida was a philosopher; I am not. Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen Joachim J. KRAUSE Evangelisch-theologische Fakultät Liebermeisterstr. 12 D-72076 Tübingen 28 This is, be it noted, a verdict neither on the study of reception history nor on productive reception itself, which is essential for religious practice in both Judaism and Christianity (one need think only of concepts like Halacha or homiletics). Rather, my argument addresses misleading applications of the category of reception where really something else is at stake, namely the quest for authorial intent in analyzing biblical intertextuality.