Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (30 page)

1. Babylonian Talmud, loc. cit
   .
   

2. Peter Steiner, "On Semantic Poetics: O. Mandel'stam in the Discussions of the Soviet Structuralists,"
   Dispositio
   I (1976), p. 344. The quotation is from Mandel'stam's "Slovo i kul'tura," Sobranie
   socinenij v dvux tomax
   , vol. 2 (New York, 1966), p. 266.
   

3. Hannah Arendt, introduction to Walter Benjamin,
   Illuminations
   (London: 1970), p. 47 (emphasis mine). It is not unreasonable to suggest that Benjamin, probably more than Freud and Derrida, was influenced in his practice by a knowledge of Jewish textuality. His closeness with Scholem and his kabbalistic research is well known. He may also have very well had some knowledge of midrash, at least through the medium of the German translation of Bialik's famous essay, "Halaka and Aggada." See also George Steiner's introduction to Benjamin's
   The Origin of German Tragic Drama
   (London, 1977), p. 21, where he explicitly draws the connection between Benjamin's "hermeneutic of and by citation" and Jewish textuality on the one hand, and modernist textuality on the other.
   

4. Morawski, p. 691.
   

1. Bruns, "Midrash and Allegory," pp. 626–627.
   

2. The classic statement on this issue is now Meir Sternberg's chapter entitled, "Gaps, Ambiguities, and the Reading Process," in his
   Poetics of Biblical Narrative
   , pp. 186–229.
   

3. See the excellent discussion of this issue in Robert Polzin,
   Moses and the Deuteronomist
   , (New York, 1980), p. 17. See also Sternberg,
   Poetics
   , p. 227.
   

4. Among many others, the incisive description in Joel Rosenberg,
   King and Kin
   , (Bloomington 1986), pp. 4–5 well describes this school of biblical scholarship.
   

5. Geoffrey H. Hartman, "The Culture of Criticism,"
   PMLA
   99 (1984), p. 386.
   

6. At least when backed up by some real documentary evidence (scarce enough in the case of the Bible, as Meir Sternberg emphasizes) and not merely invented in the scholar's own imagination;
   

   cf. John Livingston Lowes's classic,
   The Road to Xanadu
   (London, 1978).
   

7. For an example of the practice that Hartman's theory engenders see his "The Struggle for the Text," in Hartman and Budick, pp. 3–19.
   

8. Sternberg,
   Poetics
   , p. 32.
   

9. This claim is not, to be sure, entirely original. Indeed, it has been recognized by Sternberg himself, ibid, pp. 188–189. As a matter of fact, the example cited by him there is considered "illegitimate gap filling." While the point
   may
   be well taken visàvis that particular case, I will try to show in the texts to be discussed here that there are many more cases in which midrash provides exciting and rich interpretive hypotheses to fill the gaps of the biblical narrative. This reading of midrash as an answer to the reductiveness of certain ways of studying the Bible provides us also with a powerful mode of reading midrash itself, a mode which allows it to speak in much richer and more nuanced tones of the heterogeneity and ambiguity of the process of reading, and indeed of life itself.
   

1. Iser,
   The Act of Reading
   , is one classic statement. The work of Menahem Perry and Meir Sternberg on the Bible, going back to the 1960s, is another. Much of that work has been embodied in and recast in Sternberg's book.
   

2. The usual rabbinic term for the Prophets and Writings.
   

3. Cf. my "Analogy vs. Anomaly in Midrashic Hermeneutic,"
   Journal of the American Oriental Society
   , 106.4 (1986), pp. 659–667.
   

4. Merkevet Hamishneh, ad loc
   .
   

5. HorowitzRabin, ad loc.
   

6. As in the interpretation of Meir Friedmann [=Meir Ish Shalom] in his Mekilta commentary,
   Meir, Ayin
   (Vienna, n.d), ad loc.
   

7. Cf., however, Rashi in Deuteronomy
   ad loc.
   who apparently had a different reading in the Mekilta, which could not have contained, at any rate, the words, "to honor Aaron," which are clearly positive in connotation.
   

8. In spite of various attempts to emend one or another of the attributions the text is certain. Both are cited in the name of R. Eliezer. It may be that there are two traditions of R. Eliezer's statement, as claimed by IshShalom, or it may be, as I have suggested by my paragraphing, that R. Eliezer himself made only the exegetical remark per se that in this case, as in all others, God led the people. His gloss would then be perfectly parallel in form and scope with R. Yehoshua's. Two different commentaries, as it were, on R. Eliezer's exegesis have been appended to two citations of his statement. In any case, it is as we shall see, no accident that these two directly contradictory statements are placed here in juxtaposition.
   

9. I wish to emphasize the plausibility of this reading of the Nehemiah verse, if only we are prepared to read it strictly, since it says "and made them a chief to return to their work," that is, to return to Egypt and resume their former lives;
   

   then
   "they made a golden calf . . . . " The verse from the Torah tells us that this incident came after the golden calf.
   

10. I realize that I am going out on a logocentric limb here, but I think that the context and the allusion discussed above make this interpretation so persuasive that it can be referred to as "correct."
    

11. "Stating first one side of a proposition, then the other, with equal vigor." A. Lanham,
    Handlist of Rhetorical Terms
    (Berkeley, 1968), p. 11.
    

12. The inspiration for this formulation is M. Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel," in
    The Dialogic Imagination, Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin
    , ed. Michael Holquist (Austin, Tx., 1981 ), pp. 259–423. Bakhtin's theories of prose narrative deserve a much more serious consideration in application to the Bible than I can give them here in the scope of this essay. Robert Polzin has done eyeopening work by applying Bakhtin's ideas to biblical studies, as demonstrated by the following quotation, certainly relevant in this context:
    

When we reflect upon the disjointed nature of many biblical passages and upon precipitous explanations of widespread editorial activity within it, it is worthwhile to remember that, whatever the historical process that gave rise to the present text, the compositional technique used to analyze these texts should be judged and evaluated primarily by the results it achieves. One can of course assume that wholesale editorial activity is the origin of most of the complicated shifts in perspective so obvious at many points in

the biblical

text. If, on the other hand, we assume that many gaps, dislocations, and reversals in the biblical text may profitably be viewed as the result of the use (authorial or editorial) of several different viewpoints within the narrative, then, whether the present text is the product either of a single mind or of a long and complicated editorial process, we are still responsible for making sense of the present text by assuming that the present text . . . does make sense. A particular biblical passage "makes sense," if it repeats compositional patterns already encountered in what precedes it and foreshadows perspectives that lie ahead. (Polzin, pp. 17–18).

1. Note that this tension exists even within Jeremiah, the great prophet of the positive reading of the desert period. See, for instance, 2:17.
   

2. The rabbinic expression for the paradoxical truth of two contradictory positions. My interpretation of the midrash as representation and thematization of inner textual tension as hermeneutic dialectic is explicitly marked by the following text from the Babylonian Talmud:
   

   It is written, "And his concubine betrayed him" [Judg. 19:2]. Rabbi Aviatar said, He found a fly [in the food she prepared him]. Rabbi Yonatan said, He found a hair. Rabbi Aviatar met Elijah and asked him, "What is the Holy One doing?" He answered, "He is studying the text of the concubine of Giv'ah." "And what does He say?'' He said to him, ''Aviatar, my son, says thus, and Yonatan, my son, says thus." He said, "God forbid, is there doubt before Heaven!?" He said to him, "These and these are the words of the living God."
   

   We have here, in my view, a metamidrashic comment which marks the indeterminacy of the biblical text as inherent in it—even its Author cannot resolve it. To be sure, the story concludes with a weak harmonistic rendering: "Indeed, he found a fly and did not get angry, but when he found a hair, he got angry," but this retreat (which may even be a later gloss on the text) can hardly rescind the radical implications of the whole narrative. I owe the reference to this source to my student, Dalia Hoshen.
   

3. Cf. Sternberg,
   Poetics
   , Chapter 11, "The Structure of Repetition: Strategies of Informational Redundancy," pp. 365–440. The repetition which the midrash reads here is, in my opinion, a baroque and sophisticated variant of the forms analyzed by Sternberg. See also above, n. 17.
   

4. That is the opinion expressed in the Babylonian Talmud, Arakin 15b.
   

5. Rabbi Moses ben Nahman,
   Commentary on the Torah
   , ed. C. Chavel (Jerusalem, 1959), p. 366.
   

6. George Coats,
   Rebellion in the Wilderness
   (Nashville, 1968), pp. 99–100. Cf. also, Brevard Childs,
   Exodus: A Commentary
   (Philadelphia, 1974), p. 274: "The relation of the manna to the quail seems strikingly different from Num. 11, but again with evidence of a complex, inner relationship between the stories."
   

7. Sternberg,
   Poetics
   , p. 376. A possible objection must be answered here. When critics speak of repetition in the Bible, they are, of course, speaking of obvious repetitions, i.e., situations in which the repetition is unquestionable. Now, many interpreters have managed to explain the two occurrences of the giving of the quail in such a way
   

that there is no repetition at all, i.e., as referring to two distinct events in the "real world." It is possible to claim, then, that the rabbis here are not "reading" the repetition, but creating it out of whole cloth, as it were. My claim is that the rabbinic reading, which takes these two texts as two versions of the same story, is the most plausible one
on the exegetical level
, that is, at the level of plausible narrative logic, and that the reason that commentators have refused this move is because of the gaps and contradictions that obtain between the two versions.

1. Lauterbach II, p. 107.
   

2. That is, to be sure, the rabbis of this pericope of the Mekilta. It seems fairly certain that the tanna quoted in TB Arakin 15b saw these as two incidents (contra Meir Ish Shalom in his Mekilta commentary, ad loc.).
   

3. Using the Peircean taxonomy of signs into "icons," which resemble the signified (as a map does the territory), "indices," which point to its existence by some sort of causal connection (as smoke does fire), and ''symbols," which indicate the signified by a conventional assignation of meaning, which has no natural basis.
   

4. Babylonian Talmud Yoma 75b.
   

5. I am making the fairly strong assumption that the talmudic text is a rewriting of the midrashic one in this instance, an assumption which has no support except that the talmudic text reads like a simplification of the midrashic one. It makes no difference to the reading, however, if the opposite be true.
   

6. This type of intertextuality will be discussed at much greater length in chapter 5, where it is applied to the mashal (midrashic parable.) For the nonce, it is interesting to compare Susan Wittig's formulation visàvis the Gospel parable:
   

The structure of this duplex semiotic gains its energy and effectiveness from the nature of the semantic relationships which link its components. The first order linguistic sign vehicle is linked
conventionally
and
arbitrarily
to its denotatum, as are nearly all linguistic signs;

the secondorder material sign vehicle, however, is linked
iconically
to its object in the same way that the structure of a diagram formally exemplifies and exhibits the structure of its object. ("Meaning and Modes of Signification: Toward a Semiotic of the Parable" in
Semiology and Parables
, ed. Daniel Patte [Pittsburgh, 1976], p. 324.)

For further discussion of Wittig's analysis and contrast with the semiotic structure of the midrashic mashal see below chapter 5.

1. Michael Riffaterre,
   Semiotics of Poetry
   (London, 1978), p. 82. See also John Hollander,
   The Figure of Echo
   (Berkeley, 1981), p. 92.
   

2. Michael Riffaterre,
   Text Production
   (New York, 1983), pp. 64–65.
   

3. This is bad English, but necessary for understanding the midrash below. What we have here is typical Hebrew construction in which the infinitive is given before the finite verb for various kinds of focusing and emphasizing.
   

1. As shown in my "Analogy vs. Anomaly in Midrashic Hermeneutic: Tractates Wayyassa and Amaleq of the
   Mekilta
   ,"
   JAOS
   106.4 (1986), pp. 659–667.
   

2. R. Eliezer, however, believes that it is always possible to dig for water, so the literal meaning of the text is not sufficient. His interpretation is, however, somewhat cryptic, and must be unpacked as: therefore God must have made it impossible for them to find water in order to exhaust them (and thus to test them, as the
   Mekilta of R. Shim'on
   reads explicitly). For this motif of exhausting the people to refine and test them, cf. again R. Eliezer in the
   Mekilta Wayhi
   , par. 1 (Lauterbach I, p. 173): "
   But God led the people about, by the way of the wilderness, by the Red Sea
   . What for? . . . R. Eliezer says: 'By the way' indicates that it was for the purpose of exhausting them, as it is said: 'He weakened my strength in the way' [Ps. 102:24];
   

   'of the wilderness' indicates that it was to refine them . . . 'by the Red Sea' indicates that it was to test them". So also here, the same R. Eliezer holds that not finding water was a miracle for the purpose of exhausting them. Moreover, since in the continuation of our story, the Torah says explicitly, "and there He tested them," we can certainly understand R. Eliezer's interpretation here. Finally, it should be pointed out that in Deuteronomy 8, where the story of the manna is rehearsed, we read the following, "And you shall remember the whole way which the Lord your God led you for forty years in the desert, in order to mortify you and to test you to know what is in your hearts, whether you will keep his commandment or not. And He mortified you and starved you and fed you the manna, which you did not know nor your ancestors, in order to make known to you, that not by bread alone does man live, but by that which comes out of the mouth of the Lord will man live" [vv. 2–3]. Now, it can very plausibly be understood that the story of Mars here is a close parallel to that one: God has
   prevented
   them from finding water [=mortified them], in order to exhaust them, so that He may test them, and they will learn ''law and justice" [=by what comes out of the mouth of the Lord].
   

3. Wayhi 5
   , Lauterbach, I, p. 224. For the whole text of which this is a part, see ch. 2 above.
   

4. Who are the
   dorshe reshumot
   ? The question is much debated. In a Hebrew paper ("Dorshe Reshumot Have Said,"
   Moshe Held Memorial Volume
   [Beersheva, Israel, 1988], pp. 23–38) I have dealt with this question. To summarize my results there: There is no evidence from rabbinic Hebrew for the term
   rashum
   meaning allegory, and therefore, no warrant for regarding the
   dorshe reshumot
   as allegorists, as Lauterbach had claimed. Moreover, this conclusion is consistent with the fact that most of the interpretations cited in the name of this group have no allegorical elements whatsoever. The term apparently means, "the interpreters of sealed texts," i.e., cruces or obscurities. As to the interpretation itself, see above in the body of this chapter.
   

5. Umberto Cassuto,
   A Commentary on the Book of Exodus
   , trans. I. Abrahams (Jerusalem, 1967), p. 183.
   

6. While the text is certain here, the translation and interpretation are highly uncertain. We may read '
   leqabbel
   ' meaning "to receive" or '
   liqbol
   ' meaning "to complain." Moreover, the syntax is not clear. Are the righteous the subject or object of the infinitive, i.e., does it mean that the righteous are not difficult to accept or to be accepted, to complain or to be complained to? All of these options have been maintained by some commentator or another. Now, one relevant textual point must be emphasized. Most readings, including the Oriental texts unanimously and some European texts, take this as a gloss on "And he cried out unto the Lord" alone and not the continuation of the verse. This must mean, at least, that it is Moses's action which is being interpreted here