Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (22 page)

Let us have a look now at the psalm itself, a text well known for its personification of natural entities:

[1] When Israel went out from Egypt; the house of Jacob from a foreign nation. [2] Judah became His holy one; Israel His dominion.

[3] The sea saw and fled; the Jordan turned back.

[4] The mountains danced like rams; the hills like lambs.

[5] What has happened to you, O sea, that you flee; O Jordan, that you turn back? [6] O mountains, that you dance like rams; O hills, like lambs?

[7] From before the Master, tremble earth, from before the God of Jacob.

The midrash projects a world in which the Red Sea is not a personification, but a personality; not a metaphor, but a character. It will be easier to sense the

radicality of the midrashic reading of the psalm by considering first a road not taken. As read by Sir Philip Sidney, the personifications of nature in David's psalm are a figure, an
enargeia
of the God who cannot be seen by eyes of flesh: "[David's] handling his prophecy . . . is merely poetical. For what else [are] . . . his notable
prosopopeias
, when he maketh you, as it were, see God coming in his majesty, his telling of the Beasts' joyfulness and hills' leaping, but a heavenly poesy: wherein almost he showeth himself a passionate lover of that unspeakable and everlasting beauty to be seen by the eyes of the mind, only cleared by faith?"

Commenting on this passage in Sidney, Murray Krieger remarks:

The prosopopeia is a form of personification which gives a voice to that which does not speak and thereby gives presence to that which is absent. Through this figure, Sidney argues, God enters David's poem (we are made to "see God coming in his majesty"). It is as if this figure is made to serve the larger objective of
enargeia
, the verbal art of forcing us to see vividly. Through the "eyes of the rnind"—an appropriately Platonic notion—we are shown the coming of God and his ''unspeakable and everlasting beauty." Here, then, are words invoking a visible presence, though, of course, to "the eyes of the mind" alone. Though God's may be only a figurative entrance through His personified creatures, the poet makes us, "as it were," see this entrance. He is there, in His living creation, and absent no longer.
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In Sidney's/Krieger's reading, then, the personification of the sea, the rivers, and the hills in the psalm is not truly a representation of nature at all, but a poetic means of making the reader see the coming into the world of the unrepresentable God by evoking the reaction of imaginary witnesses to this event. Nature—that is, that which is properly apprehended as a
res
—is
personified
; the very terminology of trope reveals the reification of nature implied and assumed. As Jon whitman has remarked, "it is only when the 'personality' is a literary fiction separate from the actual condition that we have a personification."
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The midrash, in contrast, reads the psalm as literal, i.e., as the record of an actual colloquy which took place at a specific moment in history, that moment being the moment suspended between the two halves of our verse in Exodus. The psalm completes perfectly the gap of the Torah text. The speaker addressing the sea is Moses and not (as has been suggested) some anonymous Jewish poet wondering at the miracles of the Exodus and evoking the presence of God.
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Nor is the sight which the sea perceived and from which it fled left as the unspoken/unspeakable presence of God, but the actual selfrevelation of God.
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The rhetorical question and answer of the psalm—"What has happened to you O sea that you flee? Before the Lord, Creator of the Universe, tremble earth"—is turned in the midrashic text into an actual colloquy between Moses and the sea.
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That is to say, the figurative usage of the poem, the personifica

tion of the sea, is contextualized historically and dramatized. This minidrama is then correlated with the verse in Exodus which is the subject of the midrash, and that verse is situated dramatically as well. Out of the two texts is created a third, a new text, which has qualities, both semantic and aesthetic, which neither had alone. The verse in Exodus is now motivated. An answer has been given to the question of why Moses stretched out his hand, if God was to be the motivating force behind the movement of the sea. Furthermore, the text of the psalm has been sharpened. We now understand what the sea saw. It saw God! The halfhidden memory of this event is recorded also in Ps. 77:17, "The waters saw You, O God, the waters saw You and
trembled
." Instead of a vague "When Israel went out from Egypt," we have a specific moment. Instead of the somewhat enigmatic "What has happened to you, O sea?'' we have a more specific question: Why did you flee now and not before?

It is important to note that visàvis the earlier ancient traditions of biblical interpretation, this rabbinic sea as an actual sentient subject represents a reversal of a conventional historicalcultural development. The earliest interpretive tradition, and very likely the Bible itself, had already arrived at a rationalized perception of the world as nonsentient and wholly different from man. While the Bible, as Cassuto has shown, contains allusions to the ancient myth of a primeval battle between God and the sea, these allusions are all reduced from their narrative fullness and have only figurative force.
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The prophets and poets of the Bible, we may imagine, were very wary of even suggesting that the sea had a personal nature because of the real danger that, with the polytheistic world around them, they would be misunderstood, and the misunderstanding would lead to polytheistic belief.
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Sidney's interpretation, then, is solidly in the older mainstream of interpretation of the psalm, and also seems dose to what may have been originally meant by the psalm, as far as that can be guessed. The rabbinic reading therefore seems at first a sort of step backward in history. Midrash reverses all of these processes of demythologization. In our example the relevant process is "depersonalization," which is, according to Benjamin Uffenheimer, "to alter myth in such a way as to remove

the personal nature of its protagonists. The sea and other depths became geographical concepts . . ." In our midrash, the "geographical concept" becomes once again a person. Inserting the psalm into the historical context of a dialogue with Moses reanimates its meaning and by doing so reanimates the sea. In short, metaphor becomes myth.

The gap in the text of the Torah corresponds to a fault line between ideologies. One half of the verse represents God as the only controlling force over nature in the world, while the other half allows that there may be human intervention in nature. The ambivalence of the verse is thematized in the midrash in the ambivalence of the sale of the garden to the king's friend. On the one hand, the Torah tells us that Moses has been given power over the sea to

subdue it and split it; the inner garden has been sold to him. I read this not as magic, but as a reduction of the status of the universe to a willless nonsubject, a mere object of human desire, the reification of nature. On the other hand, owing to the contradiction in the verse and the "evidence" of the psalm, we see that will was not taken away from the sea. He still had the power, and perhaps the right to resist; the outer garden was not sold. The garden which is sold and not sold then can be read as representing a kind of liminal moment in cultural history (indeed, in materialist terms, in economic history). However, it also plays a concrete function in the interpretation of our biblical narrative. It represents a deepseated inner contradiction in the very situation of Moses's having been commanded to split the sea. One who sells an inner garden without selling the means of access to it is, after all, creating a selfcontradictory moment. This selfcontradiction parallels the contradiction between God's placing "an
eternal
border for the sea from which it will not pass" [Jer. 5:22], and His command to Moses to now make the sea pass from that very border.
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On my reading of the Mekilta's story of the encounter between Moses and the sea, there are really two conflicts being enacted within this textual gap, one between two characters and one between two ideologies. The first is the conflict between Moses and the sea and the second is the conflict between monotheistic myth and polytheistic myth, and the two conflicts are perfectly isomorphic in the midrashic text. On the one hand, we have the sea realized as a fully conscious and freewilled creature, a person—not a personification, a person who can resist the person Moses. This is, I submit, a reflection of a mythlike view of the landscape, one in which nature has not yet been reified. However, the moment
God
appears the sea does begin to flee. There is no battle between the sea and God. The conflict between Moses and the sea, then, is paralleled in the midrash by the conflict between a monotheistic myth and a polytheistic one lurking, as it were, in the intertextual unconscious. The mythic dimension is evoked by the conflict between Moses and the personal sea, and the defeat of polytheism by the absolute dominance of the presence of God over the sea. Were the sea to have any power to withstand God, we would no longer have Judaism at all, but a polytheistic regression. Accordingly, our midrash—notwithstanding its personal sea and oncemore visible God—makes it, nevertheless, absolutely unambiguous that the sea has power against a man, but only against a man. The unquestioning and immediate capitulation of the sea to the revelation of God is at the same time, then, an enactment of the defeat of the
myth
of the battle between a god of heaven and a god of the sea, the famous hydromachia. This point is underlined heavily by the mashal in which the sea is figured as an employee of the king and no more, one who is bound upon hearing the king's word to immediately obey. When God appears, there is no contest; the sea immediately obeys, like a faithful servant and no more. The fact that the sea could be insubordinate (and there is no reason to

suppose that it could not happen again) verifies the mythic reading of the landscape which is still alive for the rabbis, but at the same time the text renders it crystal clear that the sea is not a god or a rival to God. The mashal, then, serves as an aid in the interpretation of the ''dangerous" material by containing it within safe limits, a function the rabbis themselves figured by comparing the Torah to "a pot full of boiling water, which had no handle to carry it, and someone came and made it a handle [the mashal], and it began to be carried by its handle."
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A later midrash on our midrash
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brings to full explicitness both the mythic and dialectical
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conflicts which are latent in the earlier one:

Thus, when Moses came and stood against the sea, he said in the name of the Holiness, God has spoken to you, make a path and the redeemed ones will pass. The sea answered and said to Moses, Ben Amram, behold, Adam was not created first, but at the end of the six days of creation, and I was created before he was. I am greater than you; I will not be split for you. Moses answered to God, Thus and so said the sea; Master of the Universe, he is right; the sea will not be split before me; rather You speak to him with Your word, and he will be split. The Holiness, blessed be He, said to Moses, if I speak to the sea and he is split, he will have no healing for ever and ever,
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but indeed, you speak to him and he will split, in order that he will have healing by your hand. Here is a fount
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of strength with you. Immediately, Moses came with strength going on his right side, as it says, "He causes His glorious arm to go on the right of Moses, splitting the sea before them, to make him an eternal name" [Isa. 63:12]. When the sea saw the strength, standing to the right of Moses, he said to the earth, Earth, make me channels and I will enter into your depths, before the Master of Creation, may He be blessed, for it says, "The sea saw and fled." And when Moses saw the sea fleeing before him, Moses said to him, All day I have been speaking to you in the name of the Holiness, and you did not yield; I showed you the staff and you did not yield; now ''what has happened to you, O sea, that you flee?" The sea answered and said to Moses, BenAmram, BenAmram, do not give greatness to yourself; I flee not from before you, but from before the Lord of Creation, may His name be made sanctified in His world, as it says, "From before the Lord, Creator of the earth/Make channels,
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O earth, from before the God of Jacob." [
Exodus Rabba, ad loc
.]

This text makes explicit much that is implicit in the earlier version, and again we have the same double movement: revivification of the mythic universe simultaneously with the neutralization of its polytheistic content. On the one hand, the claim of the sea against Moses has a very human note; it is not an abstract philosophical or theological argument that would signal an allegorical reading of our text, but a claim of priority and seniority. We are still here in the realm of what I have called the mythic. Moreover, the mythic potential of "He causes His glorious arm to go on the right of Moses" is vividly realized, again by literalizing Isaiah's metaphor and rendering it a necessary element in the logic

of the narrative. But on the other hand, the very content of the sea's response ("I was created first"), emphasizing its and the man's mutual status as creatures of God, enacts once again the total defeat of polytheism. The process of a monotheistic mythic reading of the landscape is thus continued and deepened in the midrash on the midrash.

Reading the landscape in this way is of great cultural significance, as it implies a certain situation of the human subject as one among many in nature, and not as qualitatively and absolutely unique. Isaak Heinemann has already noted this fundamental ontological reorientation of the rabbis, their "primitivity" both with regard to what came before them and what came after them as well:

The medieval philosophers, with Rabbi Saadya Gaon at their head, depended on figures, such as "the eye of the earth," the "mouth of the earth," to prove that the Torah, even where it spoke of the eye of God and His mouth, "spoke in human language," that is, in metaphor. They assumed, therefore, as selfunderstood that all that was said about the bodily parts of the earth, was not intended literally. And indeed in all of the Apocrypha and certainly in the ancient philosophical literature, there is no sign of anyone who understood these verses literally. The midrash is entirely different: ''All that God created in man, He created similarly in the earth. Man has a head and the earth has a head, as it says, 'the head of the dusts of the earth'; man has eyes and the earth has eyes, as it says, 'and it covered the eye of the earth.' " . . . To all of these anthropomorphic metaphors, we can apply the dictum, "A metaphor is none other than a reduced myth.'' And even if the rabbis did not go so far as the realm of real myth, which sees the earth as a woman and a goddess, . . . for the rabbis there functioned the anthropocentric necessity to find "our brothers" even in nonhuman nature and to bring it close, therefore, to our senses and understanding.
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