Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash

DANIEL BOYARIN

Herbert Marks and Robert Polzin, general editors

Daniel Boyarin

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS BLOOMINGTON & INDIANAPOLIS

First Paperback Edition 1994

© 1990 by Daniel Boyarin All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

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Boyarin, Daniel.

Intertextuality and the reading of Midrash / by Daniel Boyarin.

1. cm.—(Indiana studies in biblical literature) Bibliography: p.
   

   Includes index.
   

   ISBN 0253312515 (alk. paper) 1. Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael—Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2. Bible. O.T. Exodus XIII–XVIII— Hermeneutics. I. Title. II. Series.
   

   BM517.M43B69 1990 8945409 296.1'4—dc20 CIP
   

   ISBN 0253209099 (pbk.)
   

   2 3 4 5 6 99 98 97 96 95 94
   

1. Contents
   

   Acknowledgments vii
   

   Introduction viii
   

   Note on the Translations xiii
   

   1. Toward a New Theory of Midrash 1
      

   2. Reciting the Torah: The Function of Quotation in the Midrash 22
      

   3. Textual Heterogeneity in the Torah and the Dialectic of the Mekilta: The 39
      

      Midrash vs. Source Criticism as Reading Strategies
      

   4. Dual Signs, Ambiguity, and the Dialectic of Intertextual Readings 57
      

   5. Interpreting in Ordinary Language: The Mashal as Intertext 80
      

   6. The Sea Resists: Midrash and the (Psycho)dynamics of Intertextuality 93
      

   7. The Song of Songs, Lock or Key: The Holy Song as a Mashal 105
      

   8. Between Intertextuality and History: The Martyrdom of Rabbi Akiva 117
      

Notes 130

Index 159

This book is dedicated in loving memory to my sisterinlaw, Varda, taken before her time.

There are several people whom I would like to thank for the help that they have rendered me in generating the ideas expressed here. First of all, my colleagues at Yale University in 1984–85, with whom I spent hundreds of hours in good talk: Ken Frieden, Jill Robbins, and Shira Wolosky. Next, my teacher during that year, Geoffrey Hartman, who steered me away from paths too easy. Then, my colleagues in midrashic research, Devora Dimant, Menahem Kahana, James Kugel, Chaim Milikovsky, and David Stern, all of whom have read parts of the manuscript and rendered valuable criticism. Wolfgang Iser, Dimitry Segal, and Ellen Spolsky carefully read several chapters of the work and made serious, trenchant and useful comments. Herbert Marks's work as editor was of extraordinary value. I am especially indebted to Meir Sternberg who read two entire drafts of the manuscript and devoted himself to my work as a good teacher to a student, even though I have never been formally his student. I have tried to take all warnings into consideration when I have been able to understand them and when the gain seemed greater than the loss. More and more, from my own experience I am convinced that literary production is a social practice and not an individual creative act. My brother Jonathan Boyarin has been very helpful over the years of thinking, writing, and talking that went into this book, and also has read a near final draft and made many useful comments. Ken Frieden also read the final draft and benefited me with many excellent editorial interventions. Only I am responsible for the results.

The research for this monograph was made possible in part by various grants. I would like to thank Yale University for awarding me the Horace Goldsmith Fellowship in 1984–85, the American Philosophical Society for a research grant in the same, the American Council of Learned Societies for a grant enjoyed in the Summer of 1985, and the Littauer Foundation for a grant in the fall of that year, during which period (collectively) the major research for the book was completed.

Several parts of this book have been published in earlier versions in journals or volumes, which I list here:
Prooftexts
;
Poetics Today
;
Revue Biblique
;
Bucknell Review
;
The Book and the Text
, ed. Regina Schwartz;
Representations
. I thank the editors of all of these for permission to reprint.

One would perhaps expect that a book of this sort would begin with a definition of the subject matter of its discourse—in this case, midrash. That would be impossible here, since the definition of midrash is precisely the issue at hand. In a recent article, "Defining Midrash," Gary Porton has listed the different approaches to this topic, ranging from that of W. Wright, who considers it to be a literary genre, to that of R. Le Déaut, who defines it as an "attitude."
1
Porton's article does not offer a more satisfactory answer to the question of the definition of midrash than any of the other contradictory approaches. As James Kugel has remarked, "since these studies have already not defined midrash in ample detail, there is little purpose in our not defining it again here.''
2

The object of inquiry can, nevertheless, be delimited without any definition. For the purposes of this book, "midrash" is the type of biblical interpretation which is found in the Jewish biblical commentaries which the Jews call " midrash." The interpretations found in these several works are manifold in nature, but all of them are more or less different from the commentary of the European traditions in that they do not seem to involve the privileged pairing of a signifier with a specific set of signifieds. It is perhaps this characteristic that has rendered midrash so fascinating to some recent literary critics. However, beyond that common feature, there is much that divides the several texts known as midrashim from each other. After careful delineation of the dissimilarities and similarities between the types of interpretation found in the several midrashim and other ways of commenting on texts, we can begin to ask more perspicaciously how to define midrash, and whether or not it can be found in other types of texts than those designated by the term "midrash."

The task of this book is to examine a particular portion of a particular midrash in some detail. The claims made about the nature of midrash in this book are to be understood as shorthand for claims made about the type of midrash found in this particular text and perhaps others of its particular time and place. The name of this midrash is the Mekilta. It is the earliest midrash on Exodus, having been largely compiled of materials which belong to the Tannaitic period, the time of the rabbis who produced the Mishna, from about the first to the third Christian centuries.
3
The section of this text that I examine here deals with the adventures of the children of Israel from the Exodus until Sinai, interpreting Exodus 13–18. I intend to articulate a theory of this text which will explain its hermeneutic moves as hermeneutic—i.e., without reduc

ing them to some other species of discourse. I have read this text with the foreunderstanding that midrashic discourse is interpretation and then asked, "What in the Bible's text might have motivated this gloss on this verse? Can I explain this text in such a way that this gloss makes sense as an interpretation of the verse?" The key to this inquiry is literary theory and its questions: What does it mean to interpret a text? Is there stable meaning in texts? If so, how is it discovered and disclosed? If not, then what is there? The fact that such questions are asked in the literary discipline opens up the possibility that other types of interpretation, types with which we are not familiar, may have something to teach us about how we read and interpret. Critics convinced that we know exactly what is meant by texts and that there are sound methods for getting at their meaning will have no use for a sympathetic study of midrash as an interpretive model. At most they will allow its fine ethical and spiritual content, aside from or notwithstanding its alleged inauthenticity as a reading practice.
4

Since one of the underlying premises of this book is that all interpretive discourse is positioned—situated in a historical and ideological position—I would like to begin by situating my own work. I am a twentiethcentury Westerneducated Jewish intellectual. That means that I am positioned between two cultures. On the one hand, I believe in
5
and am comfortable with the discourse of Orthodox Judaism. I study the Talmud and midrash as a part of my religious life and find that these texts make eminent sense within the context of Jewish faith. They embody and communicate values that are largely my values. At the same time, however, another part of me finds these discourses puzzling—midrash more so than Talmud. That part could be defined as the Platonic, Aristotelian, or perhaps logocentric pole of my own inner dialogue. Questions arise for me in the reading of midrash which I am impelled to answer.
6
How is it possible that the Hebrew Bible can be represented as having so many meanings? Why do the meanings which are represented often seem so distant from what appears to be the "simple" or "literal"
7
meaning of the text? These questions are not simply posed rhetorically: in the first place, the effort of understanding in which I am engaged here is directed at myself. I wish to have a way of reading midrash which will make sense for me as a member of a Western culture. In the terms of the late Hans Frei, I am ethnographer and native at once:

"Meaning" in a culturallinguistic and intratextual interpretive frame is the skill that allows ethnographer and native to meet in mutual respect; if they happen to be the same person, it is the bridge over which (s)he may pass from one shore to the other and undertake the return journey; if they are natives from different tribes, it is the common ground that is established as they learn each other's languages, rather than a known precondition for doing so.
8

For me, the bridge has been literary theory. Literary theory today is not focused on beauty but on meaning. In a sense, literary theory is the discourse where fundamental issues, once part of theology and other branches of philosophy, are being thought through: language, the Subject, the very definition and understanding of humanity. Accordingly, literary theory takes a place for me analogous perhaps to the place that Scholastic philosophy had for an interpreter of Bible and midrash in the Middle Ages. Contemporary theory opens up possibilities for reunderstanding midrash. Roughly—very roughly—speaking, the theoretical context in which this essay is undertaken is the philosophical project of Jacques Derrida.
9
Among other contributions, Derrida has demonstrated that the conception of univocity and transparency of meaning is none other than a philosophical possibility—indeed, a quite problematic possibility, not a logical necessity. I would say that this questioning of the PlatonicAristotelian (ultimately Enlightenment) understanding of language makes possible a space for a more sympathetic reading of midrash as an interpretive act, because it puts into question all interpretive acts. Once we no longer assume that there is a single correct interpretation of the text, however difficult to achieve and prove it, then we can begin to answer the questions posed in the previous paragraph. Yet this is not a deconstructive work. The terms of reference are rather semiotic and structural. I do not speak here of ''traces" and "différance," but of "signifiers" which imply (even in denial) "signifieds". The reader will realize, I hope, that the opposition between signifiers and signifieds
is
being interrogated at every point in this essay, even as the terms are being invoked. What I am attempting here involves not doing away with the sign but shifting our understanding of its structure in the light of Derrida's writing, such that a less ethnocentric semiology may be generated.