Mythopoetic Imagination and the Hermeneutic Bridging of Temporal Spacing: On Michael Fishbane's Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking

Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking (Oxford University Press, 2003) is a capacious examination of the mythic potential in the Jewish hermeneutical imagination expressed in biblical, rabbinic, and kabbalistic sources. As we have come to expect from Michael Fishbane, this monograph is replete with exacting analyses of primary texts that serve the aim of grounding larger theoretical assumptions that pertain to Jewish textual practices in particular and to the mythopoeic sensibility in the history of religions more generally. The author himself instructs the reader early on that the purpose of the book is "an attempt to retrieve, study, and even reconstruct the phenomenon of monotheistic myth over the course of two millennia—focusing on its first literary articulations in the Hebrew Bible and continuing through the increasingly intensified process whereby mythmaking occurs in classical rabbinic Midrash and the medieval Kabbalistic book of Zohar, by means of hermeneutical reformulations of scriptural myths and language" (p. 13).

Prima facie, the locution "monotheistic myth" may strike the ear as an oxymoron, but Fishbane is one of several contemporary scholars who have challenged the older antiquated depiction of ancient Israelite monotheism as a rejection of pagan mythology. On the contrary, from Fishbane's perspective, not only is it inaccurate to view monotheism in this light but Scripture should be seen as the wellspring of "the cultural forms and the concrete expressions of a vital mythic imagination, found in classical texts of the Jewish monotheistic tradition." These myths, accordingly, "do not occur either as private or inchoate musings, but as processed and particular statements made at specific times and passed on as part of a vast cultural enterprise. We may say that the myths do not occur in the abstract, but always as bound forms—bound to a given genre or occasion or citation from Scripture" (p. 308). The "motor that makes the many myths of Scripture manifest" is identified as exegesis, for the interpretive gesture "extends and transforms older motifs . . . In ever artful ways, new myths and narratives are produced; and in ever creative ways, the resources of tradition (Scripture, Midrash, and Kabbalah) are integrated and projected into transcendental domains" (p. 305). It follows, therefore, that the "exegetical bond between Scripture and myth," which comes to light in the homiletical dicta of the rabbis and the theosophic ruminations of the kabbalists, "implies that this canonical source conceals a deeper dimension about the acts and nature of God, and thus the language of the readable text is but the surface of another narrative about divine deeds or divine feelings hidden from immediate view. To know how to read rightly is thus to know that the historical character of Scripture is but the verbal outcropping of another narrative—not an account of Israel but of God, and not of the events of the earth but of the hidden acts of the Lord in heaven" (pp. 308–09).

In Fishbane's reconstruction of the exegetical trajectory, there is a crucial difference between the rabbis and kabbalists: the former considered Scripture to be the "measure of myth," whereas the latter, and especially the Castilian circle responsible for the zoharic anthology, maintained that "Scripture is itself the myth of God." Alternatively expressed, the aggadic explication of Scripture on the part of the rabbis was inspired by the hope of finding "exegetical proof or warrant for God's sorrows and sympathies, and for His decision to share in the fate of Israel." To be sure, the kabbalists shared this goal as well, but they went beyond it as their "ceaseless scriptural exegesis and interpretation of its mysteries" constituted "a mode of mythical living, for there is no separation between living the truth of Scripture and living within the truth of God . . . Scripture suffuses all; for it is the real myth of God, insofar as this is ever or at all sayable in human speech or accessible to the human imagination. God's truth is refracted in fragments of myth bound by the syntax of Scripture" (p. 309). It is not always clear that this distinction can...