Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (33 page)

lent discussion in Benjamin Uffenheimer, "Myth and Reality in Ancient Israel," in
The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations
, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt, (Albany, 1986), p. 165, who identifies the processes by which it is accomplished as "reduction, depersonification, ironization, allegorization and antiquarization."

1. This point was suggested to me by Prof. Uriel Simon. Even this reading does not exhaust the highly overdetermined figure of the two gardens.
   

2. Shir Hashirim Rabba
   , ed. S. Dunansky (Tel Aviv, 1980), p. 5.
   

3. It is often the case that later midrashic texts begin with earlier ones. That is, the midrashic expansion of the earlier text leaves its own gaps, which are then filled by the latter midrashic reader,
   using precisely the same methods as the earlier one
   . Our text here is an excellent example of this phenomenon.
   

4. Cf. Weiss, p. 375, who senses this dialectic within the psalm itself: "The description of the natural phenomena as independent, selfwilled activity in verses 3–6 is surprising, according to the interpretation that the idea intended to be conveyed by the description is the dominion of God in nature." The midrashic reading is, in my view, precisely an evocation of this dialectic.
   

5. Weiss could well have referred to the Mekilta to support his contention that "the psalm is not a hymn of praise to God Who revealed Himself in the exodus from Egypt by choosing Israel;
   

   it rather expresses the idea that the choice of Israel was a revolution in Creation, or, more exactly, a new Creation" (p. 374).
   

6. Louis Ginzberg in his
   The Legends of the Jews
   (New York, 1954), vol. III, p. 19, translates "a semblance." The Hebrew word, which appears here spelled
   m'yn
   

   is completely ambiguous between these two readings;
   

   however, it seems to me that "a fount of strength" is more idiomatic for Hebrew.
   

7. The narrative expansion of this midrash is exploiting yet another sense of the root
   hll
   of the verse, namely "hollowness" and thence "channels." This is the source of the sea's request to the earth to make channels for him.
   

8. I. Heinemann,
   Darke ha'agadda
   , p. 19.
   

9. Emphasis mine.
   

10. It is striking how often in the first book of "The Prelude" the issue of labor is raised. The poem can be read as a verse version of an apprenticeship novel with all of the social and historical implications of that genre. But that is not my text. Cf. Kristin Ross, "Rimbaud and the Resistance to Work,"
    Representations
    , 19 (1987), pp. 62–87.
    

11. Gershom G. Scholem,
    Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism
    (New York, 1961), p. 8.
    

12. Babylonian Talmud, Yoma, 69b.
    

13. Lieberman notes that "the Rabbis never directly and explicitly assailed the heathen rites of mysteries. They simply had no reason to engage in such attacks. Unlike the earlier Hellenistic Jews the Rabbis were no longer struggling with gentile paganism. They mostly preached to Jews. To Judaism the mysteries represented no danger. A Jew had to become an idol worshipper before he could be initiated into the mysteries. In the first centuries C.E. the Jews were so far removed from clear cut idolatry that there was not the slightest need to argue and to preach against it." Saul Lieberman,
    Hellenism in Jewish Palestine
    , pp. 120–121. See also Ephraim Urbach, "The Laws of Idol Worship and HistoricalArcheological Reality,"
    Israel Exploration Journal
    9 (1959), pp. 149–165 and 229–245.
    

32. Fredric Jameson,
The Political Unconscious
(Ithaca, 1981), p. 213.

1. The Five Scrolls with Various Commentaries
   , ed. and trans. [from Arabic into Hebrew] Joseph Kafah (Jerusalem, 1962), p. 26.
   

2. Gerald L. Bruns,
   Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Understanding in Literary History
   (New Haven, 1982), p. 31.
   

3. This, of course, does not preclude the mashal's requiring some interpretation or even remaining partially (or wholly) obscure. Other factors than an original genetic "darkness" may lead to obscurity, and a text whose "intention" was to be crystal clear may only appear to us through a glass darkly.
   

4. Song of Songs Rabba
   , p. 6.
   

5. Bruns, "Midrash and Allegory," p. 637. I wish to thank Prof. Bruns for making this paper available to me before its publication.
   

6. In spite of the title of Bruns's essay, he does not discuss the relationship of midrash to allegoresis, but rather discusses the midrashic and allegorical methods separately as early hermeneutic techniques. Bruns's discussion of allegoresis is as insightful and sympathetic as his discussion of midrash.
   

7. See, for example, Marvin Pope, "
   Song of Songs," Anchor Bible
   (Garden City, N.Y., 1977), p. 19: "It is clear that Akiva must have understood the Song allegorically . . . ."
   

8. See E. E. Urbach, "The Homiletical Interpretations of the Sages and the Expositions of Origen on Canticles, and the JewishChristian Disputation,"
   Scripta Hierosolymitana
   XXII (1971), pp. 247–275.
   

9. I am using the English translation of R. P. Lawson,
   Origen, The Song of Songs: Commentary and Homilies
   (Westminster, Md., 1957), book 3, section 12, p.
   

218. The citations below are to this edition Cf. Jon Whitman,
Allegory
, p. 63.

1. A reference to Deut. 8:15. For a midrashic reading of this verse which points up by contrast precisely the difference between the midrashic and allegorical methods, cf. chapter 2 above.
   

2. For the closest we get in early midrash to an allegorical reading of "thirst," see above, ch. 4.
   

3. Lawson, p. 223.
   

4. Whitman writes that it is "Origen, who first conceives of the different kinds of interpretation as a simultaneous tripartite 'depth' within a given passage, rather than simply alternate strategies for various passages" (p. 63). It may be that Origen first articulated such a theory explicitly, but surely Philo denied the literal sense of neither the historical nor legal passages of the Pentateuch, while at the same time giving them an allegorical reading.
   

5. Lawson, introduction, p. 9. Whitman (p. 63) identifies this tripartite division as Stoic. (But see p. 41, where the Platonic soul itself is identified as tripartite.) See his discussion (pp. 62–63) for a scriptural source for the triple reading as well.
   

6. Lawson, p. 9.
   

1. Song of Songs Rabba
   42.
   

2. "Revelation is never something over and done with or gone for good or in danger of slipping away into the past;
   

   it is ongoing, and its medium is midrash, which makes the words of Torah rejoice 'as when they were delivered from Sinai' and 'as sweet as at their original utterance.' " Bruns, "Midrash and Allegory," p. 637.
   

3. The last point was already made by the medieval commentator, R. A. Ibn Ezra in the introduction to his commentary on the Song of Songs.
   

4. Song of Songs Rabba
   , pp. 72–73.
   

5. The very opening of this midrashic text makes it clear that its hermeneutic focus is the Exodus passage, and indeed, plausibly, its very origin was in the midrash on that book (see below immediately), which strengthens my reading that the Song is the interpreting, the Torah, the interpreted, text.
   

6. In this sort of context, this term always means the Prophets and Writings. See discussion above, chapter 3.
   

7. Lauterbach I, p. 211.
   

8. See Michael Fishbane,
   Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel
   , pp. 403–408 for discussion of this issue as well as literature cited there.
   

9. Notice that that text very nearly does without the mashal altogether, beginning to quote the verses from the psalm even before the mashal is begun, thus strengthening the argument that the mashal has a secondary function. In my earlier analysis of the text in
   Prooftexts
   5, I argued that the mashal is almost completely superfluous here;
   

   that it would be almost enough merely to juxtapose the psalm to the verse in order to make the hermeneutic points. However, I believe that claim was exaggerated. First, there is no question that the mashal sets up the
   dramatis personae
   , the buyer, the king, and the guard, in a way that would not be possible without its narrative. Second, the mashal of the ambiguous sale
   does
   contribute to the meaning of the text, as I have tried to show in the previous chapter.
   

   Nevertheless, the exegetical revelation created by the juxtaposition of the two texts is nearly independent of the mashal. It should be pointed out that in modern editions of this text, the first citation of the verse from Psalm 114 is deleted, obscuring the point I have just made about the relative significance of the psalm and the mashal in doing the hermeneutic work of this text.
   

10. Midrash on Ps. 17:1, quoted in Fishbane, p. 404. The quoted phrase is from Nahum Glatzer,
    Untersuchungen zur Geschichtslehre der Tannaitin
    (Berlin, 1933), pp. 45–61.
    

11. The entire next chapter will be devoted to a Mekilta text which describes this moment.
    

12. "The Teaching of Song of Songs" [Hebrew], in Gershom Scholem,
    Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition
    (New York, 1965), pp. 118–127, and especially p. 123. Lieberman even claimed that the rabbis held that the Song was actually recited at Sinai or at the crossing of the sea and not by Solomon, but see my "Two Introductions to the Midrash on the Song of Songs" [Hebrew],
    Tarbiz
    56 (1987), pp. 479–501, where an alternative reading is
    

    developed claiming that they indeed held that Solomon wrote the Song, but as an interpretation of the Exodus events.
    

13. It is remarkable how unwilling commentators are to take this explicit marking seriously, e.g., Lauterbach, who here and always translates this perfectly clear expression as, "Of them it is declared in the traditional sacred writings."
    

29. A not unproblematical interpretation in its own right.

1. Dominick LaCapra,
   Rethinking Intellectual History
   (Ithaca, 1983), p. 26.
   

2. See Pierre Bourdieu, "Flaubert's Point of View,"
   Critical Inquiry
   14:3 (1988), 539–545 for a recent restatement of this dichotomy. However, in truth the differences between the New Criticism and Russian Formalism are greater than their similarities. This is true also of "Deconstruction," which is often dubbed "formalist" by its detractors. See Tony Bennet,
   Formalism and Marxism
   , for an excellent demonstration of how unformalist ''Formalism" is.
   

3. Dominick LaCapra,
   History and Criticism
   (Ithaca, 1985), theorizes this issue very clearly.
   

4. Of the American variety! Susan Handelman,
   The Slayers of Moses
   , is the most extreme example of this approach to midrash.
   

5. I will cite the works of some representative midrashic scholars of the "old historicist" school below.
   

6. I have generally followed here the elegant translation of Goldin,
   The Song at the Sea
   , pp. 115–117, only modifying it where my manuscripts have a better reading.
   

7. It is this feature which has led many scholars to define "midrash" as the "other" of the "plain interpretation" of the Bible. See Gary Porton, "Defining Midrash," pp. 59–60. However, as Porton has argued, ''The distinction between 'hidden' and 'plain' is often a result of our present view of Scripture." Moreover, in the present state of literary theory, the very concept of 'plain' meaning is often called into question. See Frank Kermode, "The Plain Sense of Things," pp. 179–195.
   

8. As this text demonstrates, William Scott Green ("Romancing the Tome: Rabbinic Hermeneutics and the Theory of Literature,"
   Semeia
   1987, p. 160) exaggerates when he claims, "Thus, in rabbinic Judaism the writing and discourse of scripture had to be inherently separable from, and could be neither merged nor confused with, the commentary upon them. To mix the two would have deprived the rabbis of an artifact to control and violated the basic levitical distinction between the sacred and the profane. In rabbinic writing, therefore, passages and words of scripture are almost always identified as such by an introductory formula, such as 'thus scripture says,' 'as it is written,' or 'a scriptural tradition says.' " Thus, while there is much in Green's paper with which I agree, our text shows the error of this claim, as many (if not most) of the scriptural citations are merged with the discourse of the midrash with no mark of their scriptural origin—the references are, of course, not in the text. As Goldin has already remarked, "Note how the Midrash amalgamates the biblical statement with its own" (
   The Song at the Sea
   , p. 116, n.). Moreover, textual scholarship on midrashic manuscripts has shown that the earlier the manuscript and the more reliable it is, the
   less
   often it marks the citations with the formulae that Green quotes. The claim for the identification of text and reading made by Handelman and others is, therefore, supported strongly by the philological rigor in the name of which Green is speaking.
   

9. Urbach, "The Homiletical Interpretation of Canticles," p. 250 (emphasis mine).
   

1. Isaac Baer, "Israel, the Christian Church, and the Roman Empire" [Hebrew],
   Zion
   21 (1956), pp. 2–3 (emphasis mine).
   

2. Gedaliah Alon,
   The History of the Jews in Eretz Israel in the Days of the Mishna and the Talmud
   [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv 1956), p. 327, n. 25.
   

3. Joseph Heinemann,
   Aggada and Its Development
   , p. 75.
   

4. Note that even were we to grant the first assumption, that the text does have a univocal, original meaning, the second would still be questionable. See on this R. Loewe's fine study, "The 'Plain' Meaning of Scripture in Early Jewish Exegesis,"
   Papers of the Institute of Jewish Studies
   I (1964), pp. 140–185.
   

5. Hartman and Budick, introduction, p. xi. I would perhaps rephrase this as "between the text and the interpreter."
   

6. The words are of R. Ishmael (the contemporary and colleague of R. Akiva), as preserved in the Mekilta. In Goldin's volume,
   Song at the Sea
   they are on p. 113.
   

7. For an extensive and deep analysis of the midrashic reading of the deictic, see Betty Roitman, "Sacred Language and Open Text," in Hartman and Budick, pp. 159–179.
   

8. Porton, p. 83, completely misses the import of this passage. He remarks that "we have several different comments on the verse. . . . all of the comments are not really related to one another." But of course they are, and that is precisely the issue. The questions raised by R. Shimeon and answered by R. Eliezer only arises because R. Akiva reads the "this" as deictic and takes the verse to refer, therefore, to God's pointing out the new moon to Moses.
   

9. Goldin,
   Song at the Sea
   , p. 112. Lauterbach, vol II, p. 24.
   

10. Although this is obviously not the only possible way to read the pronoun, it does seem typical of the midrash;
    

    in several other cases in the same midrash, the pronoun read as excluding others (at least partially). Thus, on the previous verse we read: "Another interpretation of
    My strength
    ['
    zy
    ]: Thou art the Helper ['
    wzr
    ] of all the inhabitants of the world, but mine above all!
    And the Lord is my song
    : Thou art the theme for song for all the inhabitants of the world, but for me above all!" (Goldin,
    Song at the Sea
    , pp. 108–109). The very equivocation of the midrash here seems to me to support my reading. The midrashist is uncomfortable with the suggestion that God is the helper of Israel alone and the "theme for song" of Israel alone, but that is what the pragmatics of the pronoun suggest very strongly. In my judgment, this is what generates the formulation, ''of all the inhabitants, etc."
    

11. James Clifford, "On Ethnographic Authority,"
    Representations
    2 (1983), p. 133.
    

12. See the classic article of my teacher, Saul Lieberman, "The Teaching of Song of Songs" [Hebrew], in Gershom Scholem,
    Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition
    , pp. 118–127, and especially p. 123. See also my "Two Introductions to the Midrash on the Song of Songs," pp. 479–501, and previous chapter above.
    

13. See M. D. Herr, "Persecutions and Martyrdom in Hadrian's Days,"
    Scripta hiersolymitana
    , xxiii (1972), p. 13.
    

14. This was emphasized to me by Jonathan Boyarin. Indeed the very passage of Song of Songs itself here is a very eloquent representation of feminine desire, and the description of the beloved, with its enumeration of his beautiful parts, is nothing if not a blazon, traditionally in Europe a representation of masculine desire and reification of feminine