Abstract
Despite their variety, the schools of biblical scholarship which have developed in the Western world share certain formal and thematic expectations, which they take for granted as natural and necessary. Textual order is assumed to coincide with the relations of cause and effect and chronological sequence; where it does not, justification must be sought. Temporal and logical incongruities are treated as merely apparent, accidental blemishes, or as resolvable into a higher unity of meaning. In any case, the interpretative act attempts to uncover the fully coherent order and significance of the text. Historical biblical criticism tends to consider those elements which resist integration into the dominant logical and chronological order of the text as flaws. It posits an ideal text, free of inconsistency of any sort, and sees the incongruities of the actual text as fortuitous mishaps: errors of transmission, clumsy compilation of various documents, scribal mistakes, ideological prejudices, and so on. Violations of the expected order are treated as flaws which must be removed in order to reveal the true text. Once removed, these violations are assumed to leave no residual marks on the ‘corrected reading’.
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Notes
The term ‘Midrash’ is often employed in a loose way, and has, in fact, not been delimited definitively. We use the term here to refer to (1) an exegetical method, (2) the corpus of texts which employ this method, and (3) to a single midrashic sequence. The main division within the Midrash is between Midrash Halakhah (legal Midrash) and Midrash Aggadah (expository or homiletic Midrash). We shall be dealing here with the expository genre. The texts in which Midrashim are to be found are varied and appear in documents of different sorts, such as the Babylonian and the Palestinian Talmud, and the collections of midrashic material (e.g. Midrash Rabbah) composed between the second and the seventh century CE. For systematic discussions of Midrash see H. L. Strack, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash (New York: Meridian; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1931) pp. 202–34.
I. Heinemann, The Methods of the Aggadah (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1970).
J. Heinemann, Aggadah and its Development: Studies in the Continuity of a Tradition (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Keter, 1974).
English tr. of ch. 1 in G. H. Hartman and S. Budick (eds), Midrash and Literature (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1986) pp. 41–55.
A. Steinsaltz, The Essential Talmud, tr. from the Hebrew by C. Galai (New York: Basic Books, 1976).
D. Weiss Halivni, Midrash, Mishna and Gemara: The Jewish Predilection for Justified Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).
For works which reflect the recent literary and theological approaches to Midrash, as well as the dispute surrounding this approach, see D. Stern, ‘Rhetoric and Midrash: The Case of the Mashal’, Proof texts, i (1981) 261–91.
S. Handelman, The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982).
S. Handelman, ‘Jacques Derrida and the Heretic Hermeneutic’, in M. Krupnick (ed.), Displacement: Derrida and After (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983) pp. 98–129.
J. Goldin, ‘From Text to Interpretation and from Experience to Interpreted Text’ (1982), in J. Goldin, Studies in Midrash and Related Literature (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1988).
J. Faur, Golden Doves with Silver Dots: Semiotics and Textuality in Rabbinic Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).
J. L. Kugel, ‘Two Introductions to Midrash’, in Hartman and Budick, Midrash and Literature pp. 77–103; J. Neusner, Midrash as Literature: The Primacy of Documentary Discourse (Lanham: University Press of America, 1987).
E. New, ‘Pharaoh’s Birthstool: Deconstruction and Midrash’, Substance, xvii, no. 3 (1988) 26–36.
Peshat: plain or simple sense. See R. Loewe, ‘The “Plain” Meaning of Scripture in Early Jewish Exegesis’, in J. G. Weiss (ed.), Papers of the Institute of Jewish Studies, London, i (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1964) 141–85.
For a discussion of the problematics of the concept of plain sense see M. Breuer, ‘The Study of the Plain Sense of Scripture — Dangers and Prospects’ (Hebrew), in U. Simon (ed.), The Bible and Us (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1979) pp. 153–66; F. Kermode, ‘The Plain Sense of Things’, in Hartman and Budick, Midrash and Literature pp. 179–194; Faur, Golden Doves pp. xv–xxix.
It is instructive to note that even an author such as Dante, who prescribes that ‘poets, on request, must be able to divest their verses of their figurative garment’, proves, in his praxis, unable to convert his figures into a literal meaning (proprium). See G. Elata-Alster, ‘Gathering the Leaves and Squaring the Circle: “Recording”, “Reading,” and “Writing” in Dante’s Vita Nouva and Divina Commedia’, Italian Quarterly, xxiv no. 92 (Spring, 1983) 5–26.
Some contemporary literary theorists (deconstructionists) do not share these presuppositions. For a full discussion see G. Elata-Alster and R. Salmon, ‘Midrashic Interpretation and the Discourse of Paradox: The “Two Creation Stories” — Genesis 1–2:4a and 2:4b-3:24’, Amsterdamse cahiers voor exegese en bijbelse theologie, Winter 1990.
For more on deconstruction see C. Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London: Methuen, 1982).
J. Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983).
For a recent application of deconstructionist method see B. Johnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).
For a description of the ongoing debate between those who find an affinity between deconstruction and Midrash, and their opponents, see New, ‘Pharaoh’s Birthstool’, Substance xvii, no. 3. See further (in addition to the literature mentioned in notes 1 and 4) G. L. Bruns, Invention: Writing, Textuality and Understanding in Literary History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986).
M. Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).
This seems to be what Franz Rosenzweig, in ‘Der Stern der Erlösung’, is getting at when he speaks of the pure, non-responsive listening to the recitation of the Written Torah by the worshipping community; the words are heard as words only, not as voice or meaning. F. Rosenzweig, ‘Der Stern der Erlösung’ in Der Mensch und sein Werk. Gesammelte Schriften, xi (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976) 342–4.
S. R. Driver, An Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament (New York: Meridian, 1956) p. 8.
C. Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947; London: Methuen, 1968) p. 170.
R. Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981) pp. 145–7.
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© 1992 Ann Loades and Michael McLain
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Salmon, R., Elata-Alster, G. (1992). Retracing a Writerly Text: In the Footsteps of a Midrashic Sequence on the Creation of the Male and the Female. In: Loades, A., McLain, M. (eds) Hermeneutics, the Bible and Literary Criticism. Studies in Literature and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21986-5_10
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