His book is intended as an introductory one on the main issues of biblical interpretation, and he has explained them clearly. Tate has taken a consistent track and has stayed on it. It is consistent with his hermeneutics that feminist criticisms receive only five pages, deconstruction only four pages (he uses only one secondary interpreter of Derrida), and postcolonial readings receive no space at all. This conclusion allows Tate to subsume ideological criticism to historical studies as the normative control over the reading process, and ultimately it allows him to steer his hermeneutics clear of the political and ethical implications of reading texts. The textual product is filtered through social conventions, but it neither originates there nor is determined by them. The whole (the "work") then somehow reveals "ultimate truth" or "ultimate reality." Another important (and conservative) conclusion of Tate's is that the ultimate site of a text's production is the author's individual consciousness.
With Wolfgang Iser, Tate sees the text as a potentially unified whole that a real reader actualizes by filling in its gaps. Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 298 Reviews readers (as opposed to ideal or model readers or reading communities). In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
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