Beliebigkeit in meaning is the great demon for "historical" critics. All varieties of postmodern thinking are suspect because they seem to make the meaning of texts beliebig. The text means whatever you like, or perhaps it even means whatever you don't like, so that you can attack it—so that you can give the text a bad name and hang it. At any rate it doesn't mean what it means. The suspicion that "Derrida's Bible" will be just whatever Derrida chooses to make it, whether that is something Derrida likes or, deliberately, something he doesn't, is what provokes unreconstructed historical critics such as me to write sarcastically and even flippandy about postmodernism. Yvonne Sherwood has been ultra-generous in giving me an opportunity to revisit my sarcasm in Reading the Old Testament (Barton 1996) without specifying that I have to recant. I do, at least partially, but I begin by explaining why anyone might think that the deep seriousness of postmodernist interpretation is itself flippant or at least frivolous. The suspected frivolity does not lie in any trivialization of the text, but in what looks like a refusal to accept that it constrains the interpreter, a playfulness about what words can mean, an inability to look the text straight in the eye. To us it seems that you can make all the right noises about the profundity of a text and yet be deeply frivolous so long as you think its meaning is, ultimately, beliebig. So my sarcastic comments were not made casually or simply from a failure to see that Derrida et al. are serious; they were principled, a reaction to a perceived betrayal of the text.