Drawing Water from Miriam's Well: Women and Midrash

158 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, No.1 creation account looks bizarre when considered as a natural extension of the biblical account. Only in context (and in light of then-popular notions of creation drawn from Plato's Symposium) do the rabbinic alterations to the story come to make sense. Again, Bronner is aware of the importance of such context, but it is most clear in her chapter endnotes, rather than in the text. From the beginning ofFrom Eve to Esther, Bronner acknowledges the presence of the many non-rabbinic strains ofJudaism, as well as the work of such important scholars of late antique Judaism as Ross Kraemer, Shaye Cohen, Bernadette Brooten, and Lee Levine. Again, her footnotes offer an avenue for a close reader to pursue this issue of diversity, although this issue is not central to her project. The project of separating biblical narratives from their later rabbinic interpretations-one of the concerns of From Eve to Esther-is an important one: it reminds us of a diversity within Judaism that has been masked in different ways by traditional assumptions as well as by standard scholarly practices. It further reminds us that the rabbinic stories on gender, society, and the Bible were not the only stories told and retold within ancient Judaism. Critical re-readings of all those stories-both rabbinic and otherwise-are a necessary element for understanding the diversity of ancient Judaism and the rabbinic Judaism that ultimately came to be seen as the norm. Drawing Water from Miriam's Well: Women and Midrash by Mary Potter Engel MFA Program for Writers Warren Wilson College Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach, by Ilana Pardes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. 194 pp. $12.95 (P). Review Essays 159 Out of the Garden: Women Writers on the Bible, edited by Christina Buchmann and Celina Spiegel. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994. 354 pp. $23.00 (c). The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions, byAlicia Susan Ostriker. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994. 260 pp. $22.00 (c). Reading Ruth: Contemporary Women Reclaim a Sacred Story, edited by Judith A. Kates and Gail Twersky Reimer. New York: Ballantine, 1994. 386 pp. $23.00 (c). Stories are not built out of words; they are formed out of silence-a silence full of sound and meaning. Good stories mean as much by what they don't say as by what they do say. Powerful storytellers, like a'ccomplished musicians, play the silence, not the notes. This is especially true of the stories in the Bible, whose style is distinctively laconic.1 Experts in the art of reticence, the biblical authors do not describe landscapes or provide us with details in scenes. Instead, they weight their stories with characters and they present those characters tersely: showing them to us primarily through their words and actions; telling us little about their appearance and less about their motivations and internal rumblings. What was Sarah feeling and thinking while Abraham led Isaac up the mountain? Why did the midwives Shiphrah and Puah disobey Pharaoh's command to kill all newborn Hebrew males? How did Job's wife respond to bearing seven more sons and three more daughters to "replace" the seven sons and three daughters ripped away from her? These and many other questions arise out of the silence of the text, and they are never answered by the text. It is as if the biblical authors used the silence to invite readers to raise their own questions and to seek the answers for themselves. Our ancestors' economy of style is our wealth of interpretation. The rabbis were well aware of this, as the tradition of midrash (from the Hebrew root "to search out") shows. Seeking guidance in solving problemS-implicit or outright contradictions in the Torah, halakhic questions, and contemporary crises in the community-the rabbis entered the silences of the biblical texts and drew forth midrashim, imaginative commentaries focused on verses, phrases, or single words. 'Robert Alter, The Art ofBiblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981), pp. 12, 27, 114-30. 160 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, No.1 Midrash, though not without its problems, appears to be a...