Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (7 page)

Midrash provides a particularly special and interesting case of the intersection of the allusiveness of poetic
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text and the quotations of critical text. This point requires a bit of explanation, as it is crucial to understanding the present thesis about midrashic narrative. My claim is that poetic texts are understood to make free use of pre existing linguistic material without any
necessary
responsibility to the original context in which the linguistic material appeared. That is, while the literary text may often be illuminated by reference to the context from which a quotation is taken or to which an allusion is made, no one would claim against a later poet that he/she had been somehow dishonest in quoting an earlier poet and changing the meaning of the anterior text. On the other hand, the critical text cites previously existing linguistic material openly and, at least as a convention of the genre, claims that the context of the citation reproduces and illuminates the original context. However, as we shall see, this distinction is very difficult to maintain on the theoretical level.

As has been shown in the previous chapter, according to Maimonides' theory of midrash, as well as in Isaak Heinemann's, midrash is a type of literary creation, of poetry. Poetry also creates new discourse out of fragments of quotation, allusion, and transformation of earlier discourses. The explicit claim of poetry is that it creates
new
discourse; any violations (and preservations) of the "original meaning and context" are legitimated by that authorial claim to be speaking in his/her own voice.

However, various recent accounts of intertextuality have shown how constrained literary discourse is by the "discourse of the other". Bakhtin has expressed this with a biblical reference:

The dialogical orientation is obviously a characteristic phenomenon of all discourse. It is the natural aim of all living discourse. Discourse comes upon the discourse of the other on all the roads that lead to its object, and it cannot but enter into intense and lively interaction with it. Only the mythical and totally alone Adam, approaching a virgin and still unspoken world with the very first discourse could really avoid altogether this mutual reorientation with respect to the . . . discourse of the other, that occurs on the way to the object.
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Since Adam, then, all discourse is dialogue with the past and all literature is therefore intertextual and doublevoiced. Even those texts which most insistently claim to be the voice of the subjectivity of the author recording his or her

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personal experience and vision are socially and historically conditioned. The literary text in its intertextuality both continues and breaches the literary tradition of the culture; it preserves the signifying practices of a culture precisely by transforming them.
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Midrash, which is a stipulated postAdamic literature, represents in this sense only a more open intertextuality than other literatures. Midrash, however, explicitly claims to be hermeneutic discourse; to be representing in its discourse the discourse of an earlier (and authoritative) text. It is not sufficient, therefore, to compare midrash to poetry; it must also be studied as a species of hermeneutic discourse. If literature often tries to hide its intertextuality by the projection of an authorial voice, the critical text typically presents the opposite fiction of voiceless subservience to the anterior text. The function of quotations in interpretation has been analyzed by contemporary theoreticians, who have shown the illusoriness of the objectivity of quotation therein. One of the most useful analyses for the study of midrash is that of Stefan Morawski. In his taxonomy of functions of quotation in modem texts, he has described

a particularly fascinating phenomenon which deserves separate analysis, namely the selection and interpolation of quotations in such a way that they make for a reinterpretation, for instance, of the philosophical tradition on to which the investigator has fastened. . . . This phenomenon can be explained in terms of the hermeneutic interpretation of the classical texts of each school of thought. Every period of history approaches its heritage anew. By rearranging and regrading the basic elements of this legacy, it also gives it a slightly altered meaning. In such a restructuralization of a particular philosophical theory the quotation plays a double role:
it both continues and breaches the tradition
, that is, uncovers angles of inquiry which were unknown or forgotten. Hermeneutics is a corroboration and fulfillment of the vitality of the theory involved; hence quotation operates in this context equivocally. At one level it encapsulates accepted philosophical propositions, but, above all, it performs in a new whole designed to modify this acceptance.
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According to Morawski, then, even a philosophical hermeneutic operates equivocally, at one and the same time reproducing and radically altering the previous texts. This same equivocation, this doublevoicedness, is characteristic of midrash as well. Precisely by being composed largely of quotations it both affirms and transforms the biblical text. In a sense, it is exemplary of both species of discourse, for as we have seen, the same double movement of "continuing and breaching" a tradition is found in both poetic texts and philosophical hermeneutics. The quotations of previous poetry in the poetic text cannot but maintain the tradition while openly claiming to breach it, while the quotations in the hermeneutic text cannot but breach the tradition, while openly claiming to maintain it. What is interesting, then, about midrash in this regard is that it openly takes a position between (actually never really "between," but sometimes one, some

times the other, usually both) "freely" using the preexisting linguistic material and quoting it with reference to its "original" context. This intersection in effect undermines the distinction that we habitually make between literary creation and hermeneutic work, by showing that all literary creation is hermeneutic and all hermeneutic is creation. Our study of the Mekilta will bear out this view that explicit intertextuality carries with it both "disruptive" and "reconstructive'' features; I will argue that with reference to midrash, at least, this double movement of disruption and regeneration is precisely its
raison d'être
. I will illustrate this point with a text from our midrash:

And they went out into the desert of Shur
[Exod. 15:2]. This is the desert of Kub. They have told of the desert of Kub that it is eight hundred by eight hundred parasangs—all of it full of snakes and scorpions, as it is said, "Who has led us in the great and terrible desert—snake, venomous serpent, and scorpion" [Deut. 8:15]. And it says, "Burden of the beasts of the DrySouth, of the land of trial and tribulation, lioness and lion, . . .
ef'eh
" [Isa. 30:6].
Ef'eh
is the viper. They have told that the viper sees the shadow of a bird flying in the air; he immediately conjoins [to it], and it falls down limb by limb. Even so, "they did not say, 'Where is the Lord who has brought us up from Egypt, who has led us in the

Land of drought and pits, land of desolation and the deathshadow?'" [Jer. 2:6]. What is deathshadow? A place of shadow that death is therewith. [Lauterbach, II, pp. 87–88]

This brilliant rhetorical piece combines scriptural and folkloristic materials to increase the vividness of the point that Israel was blindly faithful to God in this time. The passage begins by identifying the wilderness mentioned only here with a wellknown desert, so well known, in fact, that there is a folk tradition of its immense size. Not only is it immense, it is also terrible, completely filled with venomous snakes and scorpions. Moreover, in the verse from Isaiah, we are told that one of the reptiles is called
ef'eh
, identified as the viper. Another folk tradition is cited indicating how terrible this viper is indeed, and even so, the Israelites did not doubt; they did not say, "Where is God," but followed Moses faithfully. This is the general meaning of this passage.

Let us look now at the very complex structure of citation in this text, for indeed it is made up entirely of quotations. First, let us note the two quotations of folk traditions, which are explicitly marked as such by the rubric, "They [i.e., the people] have told." The folklore is
quoted
: "They have told," and is accordingly part of the intertextual structure of the text.
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The snakes and scorpions, however, are not folklore; they are explicitly signified in the verses from Deuteronomy and Isaiah, but the terrible nature, the fearfulness of the viper is greatly enhanced by the quoted legend of what happens to birds by the snake's conjoining with their shadows.
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We have here, accordingly, a composite text whose mosaic structure is indicated openly on its surface.

The use of the verse from Jeremiah, however, most powerfully manifests the

paradoxical nature of intertextuality in the midrash, for it is used here in a sense opposite to that of its original context. In Jeremiah, it is "what fault did your ancestors find in Me that they have grown far from Me, and they follow nonsense; and did not say, 'where is God who took us up,'" i.e., "they did not say" means there that they should have said it; they should have sought God. However, in the midrash, "they did not say" is to their credit, i.e., they trusted and didn't say where
is
God who took us up, now that we need Him? This placing of a verse into a new context with a different meaning is emblematic of midrash. The tradition has been breached, but at the same time, this reading of the verse is consistent with Jeremiah's own theology of the desert period. It is, after all, that prophet who says, ''I have remembered for you the faithfulness of your youth, your going after me in the desert" [2:2]. In short, what is, in the context of Jeremiah, an attack on his generation, is made in the midrash an approbation of the generation of the wilderness, a sentiment with which the prophet would be in complete sympathy. The tradition is, therefore, also preserved.

Only the rhetoric is new, not the ideology. The local (''original") meaning of the verse is disrupted, but the meaningsystem to which it belongs, the ideology as a whole, is vivified and confirmed.

We might sum up the difference between midrashic quotation and poetic allusion by saying that while midrash is exegesis of an authoritative text, a specific type of interpretation, poetic allusion is interpretation which is not exegesis. At least the text being read is always explicitly marked in midrash by being quoted at its outset, even though the cotexts being cited are not always so. This is ultimately the difference between the intertextuality encoded in Scripture itself and the intertextuality of the rabbis as well.
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In the next section, we will begin to see the mechanics of the hermeneutics of citation as a disruption and preservation of meanings.

Midrash performs its hermeneutic work by quoting. The quoting and resituating of texts from the Torah and the Prophets and Writings, the creation of new strings of language out of the pearls of the old, is accomplished through the placing of collections of quoted verses into set structures. These structures seem to fall into two types, which I call paradigmatic and syntagmatic.
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In the first kind, verses of the Bible are associated by features in which they are the same or different, that is to say they are substitutable one for the other as tokens of a type; hence they are shown to form a paradigm. In the second kind, verses are replaced into a new narrative structure. Let us have a brief look at an example of each of these types of midrash, beginning with the paradigmatic:

The Lord is a man of war, the Lord is His name
: Rabbi Yehuda says: Here is a verse made rich in meaning by many passages, [for] it declares that He revealed Himself to them with every manner of weapon:

He revealed Himself to them as a warrior girt with his sword, as it is said, "Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, O warrior" [Ps. 45:4]; He revealed Himself to them as a cavalry officer, as it is said, "And He rode upon a cherub, and did fly" [Ps. 18:11];

He revealed Himself to them in coat of mail and helmet, as it is said, "And He put on righteousness as a coat of mail," etc. [Isa. 59:17]; He revealed Himself to them with a spear, as it is said, ''At the shining of Thy glittering spear'' [Hab. 3:11], and it says, "Draw out also the spear, and the battleax," etc. [Ps. 35:3];

He revealed Himself to them with bow and arrows, as it is said, "Thy bow is made quite bare," etc. [Hab. 3:9], and it says, "And He sent out arrows, and scattered them," etc. [2 Sam. 22:15];

He revealed Himself to them in buckler and shield, as it is said, "His truth is a shield and a buckler," etc. [Ps. 91:4], and it says, "Take hold of shield and buckler," etc. [Ps. 35:2].
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This text is particularly interesting to us, because it is one of the few places where we find a comment by the rabbis on their hermeneutic method.
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We have here an explicit statement on the nature of midrashic reading. It is founded on the idea that gaps and indeterminacies in one part of the canon may be filled and resolved by citing others. R. Yehuda says that the way to interpret our verse is to consider it in the light of many other verses. This is a reflex of the general rabbinic principle that the "words of Torah are poor in their own context [lit., in their place] and rich in another context.''
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Far from being limited to interpretation in its context,
the verse is considered as impoverished in meaning when read only there
. As Goldin has put it, "the idiom and idea of this verse are made concrete and are illuminated by a number of verses in other parts of Scripture.''
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Or to put it in other terms, a metaphor describing God's nature or activities is explicated by reference to other verses from the Prophets and Writings in which the metaphor is made more specific or concrete. The collected verses form a paradigm, the paradigm, that is, of God's weapons.
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