What does eisegeses mean?
Eisegeses is the plural of eisegesis, a term from biblical and literary scholarship for the practice of reading one's own ideas, assumptions, or agenda into a text instead of deriving its meaning from the text itself. Where sound interpretation — called exegesis — asks what the words meant to their original audience, eisegesis makes the text serve the interpreter's prior conclusions. The word is always pejorative in scholarly use: to accuse someone of offering eisegeses is to charge them with distorting the source. It appears most often in discussions of scripture, where competing doctrinal traditions have long been accused of imposing their theology on ambiguous passages, but it applies equally to law, literature, history, and everyday misreading. For anyone interested in how texts are handled honestly or otherwise, this term names the central error to avoid.
noun (plural)The plural of eisegesis: interpretations of a text that read into it one's own ideas, biases, or preconceptions rather than drawing out its actual meaning. It denotes the act or practice of imposing an external meaning on a text, especially in biblical or literary criticism.
- Plural of eisegesis: acts or instances of reading one's own ideas or biases into a text rather than interpreting it from its own context and language.
"The commentator's eisegeses were so blatant that the original author's intent was almost impossible to recover."
"Scholars accused the sect of producing eisegeses that bent every prophecy to fit their leader's claims."
"Good hermeneutics guards against eisegeses by insisting that context governs meaning."
'Eisegeses' is itself the standard plural of 'eisegesis', following the Greek-derived -es ending pronounced /-siːz/.
"The seminar examined several notorious eisegeses of the Pauline epistles."
Flip one Greek prefix and exegesis becomes its opposite: eisegesis is what happens when you stop listening to the text and start making it say what you want.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of eisegeses
Eisegesis was coined in modern English from Greek elements: 'eis' meaning 'into' and 'hegeisthai' meaning 'to lead', deliberately modeled as the opposite of exegesis ('ek', 'out of'). The term arose in the nineteenth century among English-speaking biblical scholars who needed a name for interpretation driven by preconception. Its cognate exegesis shares the same Greek verb root, which also gives us such words as 'strategy' (through related Greek compounds of 'agein', to lead).
Related word forms
How eisegeses is actually used
Formal and technical, used chiefly in biblical studies, theology, and literary criticism. Almost always carries a negative connotation, implying careless or self-serving interpretation. The singular is 'eisegesis'; the plural follows the Greek-style '-es' ending, pronounced with a final /-siːz/.
Easily confused with eisegeses
Exegeses are interpretations that draw meaning out of a text based on evidence, whereas eisegeses read the interpreter's own ideas into the text.