Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (19 page)

And the angel of God, going before the camp of Israel, moved and went behind them. And the pillar of cloud moved from before them and went behind them
[Exod. 14:19]. R. Yehuda said: This is a Scripture enriched from many places. He made of it a mashal; to what is the matter similar? To a king who was going on the way, and his son went before him. Brigands came to kidnap him from in front. He took him from in front and placed him behind him. A wolf came behind him. He took him from behind and placed him in front.

Brigands in front and the wolf in back he [He] took him and placed him in his [His] arms, for it says, "I taught Ephraim to walk, taking them on My arms" [Hos. 11:3]. The son began to suffer; he [He] took him on his shoulders, for it is said, "in the desert which you saw, where the Lord, your God carried you" [Deut. 1:31].

The son began to suffer from the sun; he [He] spread on him His cloak, for it is said, "He has spread a cloud as a curtain" [Ps. 105:39]. He became hungry; he [He] fed him, for it is said, "Behold I send bread, like rain, from the sky'' [Exod. 16:4].

He became thirsty, he [He] gave him drink, for it is said, "He brought streams out of the rock'' [Ps. 78:16].
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A semiotic analysis of this text will reveal how far it is from the description of the Gospel parables we have been summarizing. Let us begin by questioning "mashal" itself The term translates as "likeness" in English, a translation expanded as well by the phrase, "to what is the matter similar?" in the introductory formula to the midrashic mashal. The very semantics of the mashalic terminology seem therefore to support at this level Wittig's analysis of the parable as an iconic sign. However, this support is only apparent, because the mashal is not iconic of an abstraction, of a
designatum
which is not present in the text itself as in Wittig's account, but precisely of other signs which are present and even primary. Moreover, that of which the mashal is a sign is itself a narrative, and indeed a narrative which is
more
concrete in reference than the narrative in the mashal. There seems to be some kind of a reversal of structure here. While in the parables of the Gospel, a story is told which, in Wittig's words, does or could have real reference in the world and designates another meaning which is not referential, in the midrashic text, it is the biblical narrative which is being interpreted by the mashal. Now, the biblical narrative certainly makes referential claims—much more strongly than that of the denotatum of a parable. It not only claims that something could possibly have happened out there in the world, but that it certainly
did
happen. Moreover, the mashal makes no such claim in ks discourse that something did or even really could have happened. It usually, in fact, is either quite schematic in its characterizations and plot or even quite unrealistic. Finally, the mashal, as an interpretive structure, is anything but indeterminate. There is indeed hardly any room for interpretation at all of the mashal. Its meaning is rigidly controlled by its textual form. Insofar as any text can be dosed, the mashal is a dosed text, not an open one.

Let us see then what this text actually does. The narrative in the verse upon which R. Yehuda is commenting is gapped. The motivation for the movement of the angel of God which was accustomed to go before the people is not made clear. Moreover, there is a doubling in the verse. "The angel of God who was accustomed to go in front of the Israelite army, moved and went behind them. And the pillar of cloud shifted from in front of them and took its place behind

them." The Higher Critics identify a juncture between J and E in the middle of this verse.
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R. Yehuda puts in his story. The story which R. Yehuda puts in and which answers to the gapping in the verse is built up entirely out of materials drawn from other parts of the biblical canon itself. The mashal provides a structure (genre/code) which enables and, at the same time, constrains the possibility of the production of new narrative to fill in the gap. This point requires further discussion.

The midrash has itself described the function of mashal as interpreting the hermetic Torah, not by any means of being hermetic itself. The Torah is encoded; the mashal is the code book by which it was encoded by its Author, as it were, and through which it may therefore be decoded. In the introduction to the midrash on Song of Songs, which the rabbis read as a mashal itself,
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we read:

Another interpretation: Song of Songs. This is what Scripture has said: "And not only that Kohellet was wise" [Eccles. 12:9]. Had another man said them, you would have had to bend your ears and hear these words; "and not only that"—it was Solomon who said them. Had he said them on his own authority, you would have had to bend your ear and hear them; ''and not only that"—he said them by the Holy Spirit. "And not only that Kohellet was wise, he moreover taught knowledge to the people, and proved and researched, and formulated many
meshalim
"—"and proved'' words of Torah; "and researched" words of Torah; he made handles
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for the Torah. You will find that until Solomon existed, there was no
dugma
.
13

Kohellet is, of course, Solomon. According to biblical tradition, that wise king wrote three books—Song of Songs, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes [
Kohellet
].
14
Therefore, the verse of Ecclesiastes that tells us of his intellectual activity in general is appropriately referred to all three of his works. Now, this activity is characterized as "teaching knowledge to the people," which for the rabbis ineluctably means teaching Torah. It follows that he "proved and researched" the words of Torah. And this interpretive activity is designated by the verse itself as "making of many
meshalim
," this last glossed by the midrash as
dugma
, that is, figure, simile, or paradigm.
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The interpretive activity which Solomon engaged in was the making of figurative stories that are "handles to the Torah"—stories, as I shall argue, which render the axiological meaning of the narratives of the Torah accessible.
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We see, therefore, that on the rabbis' own account, the mashal is not an enigmatic narrative. Its central function is to teach knowledge to the people, to make "handles" for the Torah, so that the people (not an elect) can understand. The filling in of gaps as a major force in midrashic reading has been documented above and certainly seen before me. My claim here concerns the role of intertextuality in this process. The material for the filling in of the gaps in midrash is generated by the intertext in

two ways. First of all, as we have seen, the narrative

material is created often (if not always) OUt of other scriptural materials having a more or less explicit reference to the narrative at hand. Second, as already pointed out, the plot—the narrative action—and the characters of the narrative gapfilling are also given in the intertext. They are the mashal. The mashal provides the connections which enable the rabbis to associate texts from different parts of the canon by assigning relations to these texts, by allowing them to be placed into a plot together. This is what the midrash above means when it characterizes the mashal as
dugma
, paradigm, an icon of a narrative.

In order to understand better the function that I am claiming for the mashal I would like to discuss it in the light of Frank Kermode's
The Genesis of Secrecy
, although not with reference to his chapter on parable, but rather to the one in which he discusses the generation of the Gospel narrative. In an extraordinarily elegant and lucid discussion which I can hardly hope to reproduce well in shortened from, Kermode presents something like the following model by which the Gospel story has been generated. There was or is a primitive fable underlying the
récit
as we have it today. Kermode discusses the Passion narrative as having been generated from such a primitive fable. His theory is that originally (diachronically or synchronically understood) the fable existed. The fable is a series of actions—a plot:

The primitive "ado" must, insofar as it is a series of actions, have agents, and these agents, insofar as ado or fable acquires extension, must transcend their original type and function, must cease to be merely Hero, Opponent, and so on, and acquire idiosyncracies, have proper names. The more elaborate the story grows—the more remote from its schematic base—the more these agents will deviate from type and come to look like "characters.''
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The fable underlying the Gospel has, according to Kermode, an appearance quite similar to the deep structure of the folk tale as told by Propp or Greimas. "Let us then presuppose a
fabula
, progressively interpreted: first by Mark, then by Matthew and Luke using Mark, and by John, who perhaps used a not dissimilar but not identical original." Kermode calls this process of narrative elaboration interpretation because "the redaction of an existing narrative was, in these circumstances, a pre exegetical interpretative act; instead of interpreting by commentary, one does so by a process of augmenting the narrative.''
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This primitive gospel fable had the following narrative acts: Leavetaking, Arrest, Trial, Execution, and Reunion. Now, this narrative sequence requires that there be a betrayer. In Kermode's words:

The necessity, in a circumstantial and historylike story, of having a character to perform the Betrayal is obvious enough. Depending how one looks at it, he plays the role of Helper or Opponent; by opposing the Hero he serves the logic of the narrative, as Satan did in Job. Satan's name means "adversary" or "opponent"; so here, when, as Luke and John report, he entered into

Judas, we have a case of a character being possessed by his narrative role. Of course by opposing he helps; his evil act, like Satan's, is permissive, ultimately a means to good.

So Betrayal becomes Judas. . . . And for Mark, that is the end of Judas. He has done his narrative part. So in this gospel there is not a great deal to distinguish Judas from a more abstract agency—he might be called simply "the Betrayer," or "Betrayal," as in some morality play . . .
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For Kermode, then, the characters of the narrative are fleshingsout of underlying narrative functions which are the province of the underlying fibula. I propose that in the midrash text which includes the Written Torah story, the mashal, and the narrative filling which the midrash provides, the mashal itself (the schematic story) is the (necessarily synchronic)
fabula
underlying the narrative elaboration of the biblical text together with its midrashic expansion. The mashal accomplishes its work by assigning a deepstructural description to the elliptic narrative of the Torah, which enables the completion of its syntactic structure. Moreover, since structural description on the syntactic level is also semantic description, this assigning of an underlying structural description to the narrative declares its meaning as well. In order to make this point clearer, I would say that the relation of the schematic story—the mashal proper—to the "real" story, is analogous to that of deep structure to surface structure in syntax. That is to say, surely, that the "real" story is
not
by any means to be understood as the solution to the mashal, but almost the opposite. The mashal allows for the structuring of this ''real" story in the sense that it prescribes what kinds of characters and narrative functions will be appropriate in filling out the ellipses of the biblical text, and, moreover, it assigns value to these characters and events by assimilating them to a cultural icon which incorporates the culture's values. The mashal, on my view, corresponds, then, to what Wittig has called "the 'meaning system,' the organized stable gestalt of beliefs and values held by the perceiver,"
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except that I would prefer to locate this system not in the individual perceiver but in the cultural code. The mashal proper, that is, the schematic story of the king and his retainers, when combined textually with the "real'' story which the midrash weaves out of the Torah's narrative and other biblical texts, creates a powerful twofold semiotic object. The mashal gives to the Torah narrative a clear ideological value, without reducing the vitality and vividness of the representation of character and event in it. Both the complication and interest of the narrative surface and the clarity of meaning of the narrative deepstructure are combined and embodied in one textual system. We have here historical interpretation at its very intersection with fiction. As Hayden White has taught us:

A historical interpretation, like a poetic fiction, can be said to appeal to its readers as a plausible representation of the world by virtue of its implicit appeal to those "pregeneric plotstructures" or archetypal story forms that

define the modalities of a given culture's literary endowment. Historians, no less than poets, can be said to gain an "explanatory effect"—over and above whatever formal explanations they may offer of specific historical events—by building into their narratives patterns of meaning similar to those more explicitly provided by the literary art of the cultures to which they belong.
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In White's view, then, there is a stock of "archetypal story forms," which are the bearers of the ideology of the given culture. When a historian, including the most modern and "scientific" of historians, reconstructs the past, this is always done in conformity to the plots which the intertext of the culture allows. This is what endows the narrative he or she creates with both plausibility and significance. What is the mashal if not such a narrative pattern of meaning?

We see this semiotic structure in another text from the Mekilta, where the authoritative and axiological power of the mashal is explicit:

And Amaleq attacked
[Exod. 17:8]. R. Yehoshua and R. El'azar Hasama say, This scripture is unclear
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and it is interpreted by Job, where it says, "Can the rush grow without a swamp; can reeds wax large without water?" [Job 8:11 ]Is it possible for the rush to grow without a swamp; or is it possible for the reed to grow without water? So it is impossible for Israel to exist unless they busy themselves with the words of the Torah. And because they separated themselves from the Torah the enemy came upon them, because the enemy only comes because of sin and transgression. [Lauterbach, II, p. 135]