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| 91 6 Conclusions The Signifying Creator We have seen that ancient Jews looked not only to the Torah for meaning but to the created world as well. As a consequence they saw a complex world of images, animate and inanimate beings, and events as potential signifiers. We must consider this conception in light of the tendency to see classical Judaic thought as inherently pantextual. The alternative creation myths provided a metaphysical and theological rationale for seeing the physical world as intentionally meaningful; the priestly vestments were understood to constitute a complex system of communication between Israel and the divine realm; and the technical level of divination manuals attests as well to a well-developed and systematic hermeneutic of the natural world, which reflects a worldview expressed in legends regarding the agency of natural elements , animals, and plants and their willingness to act out the historical roles set out for them by God. At the same time, each of these phenomena manifests a complex relationship between textuality and nontextuality. The midrashim that attest to the idea of the precreation of the Tabernacle and Temple and its ritual system stand in parallel to the myth of the precreated Torah. In fact, a few of those sources take as their exegetical basis the same association with Proverbs 8. The myth that these sources reflect, however, is based on the ancient idea of the Temple as a microcosm of the celestial abode of the god, a paradigm of the function of humankind in serving the gods. This idea is at least as old as the idea of primordial wisdom that informs the pantextual myth of the Torah as the blueprint for the world. Likewise, the complex systems of signification associated with the vestments of the high priest in midrash and synagogue poetry are based on the garments as described in Exodus 28 and 39. Behind these extensive discourses on the beauty, function, and meaning of the vestments stands a memory of the high priest in his dazzling garments as one of the most visually striking features of the Temple. This memory is pre- 92 | Conclusions served in Greco-Jewish sources such as Philo and Josephus and the book of Ben Sira and the Avodah piyyutim influenced by it. Jewish divination traditions range from those based explicitly on visual sources, objects, or events, such as the flight patterns of birds, visions obtained by looking into liquids, and the arrival of ferries; to orally based manifestations of textuality, such as the recitation of verses by schoolchildren, to bibliomancy. The relationships between textual and divinatory hermeneutics also serve to show the pedigree of nontextual systems of meaning in antiquity. Finally, legends like the story of the boiling blood of the prophet Zechariah are nominally based on biblical episodes but go well beyond them in their conception of the agency of substances, animals, and objects and their willingness to carry out the divine plan. These phenomena are therefore not limited by the boundaries of textuality and can be seen to stand outside the text. The association of divinitory and textual systems of meaning is not new. As Jonathan Z. Smith argues, both textual canons and divinitory lists require hermeneutical traditions, personnel, and sensitivity to a community’s needs.1 No less cogent is Zvi Abusch’s remarkable demonstration of the consonance between the Akkadian term Alaktu, meaning “oracular decision,” and the rabbinic term halakhah, “legal procedure or decision.”2 For Akkadian literature , as he puts it, the course of the planets or stars, the signs or the writing of the heavenly gods, represent the cosmic will . . . the examination undertaken and the decision announced by astral gods and divination priests constitute the act of drawing out and making known that will. And the way of life one leads as a consequence of the decision is the final outcome.3 The will of heaven, then, has varying manifestations in the two cultures, but the need to interpret the signs and act on their consequences is common to both. This study has been an effort to show that in ancient Judaism, methods of interpretation and discourse on the nature of signs were not confined to scripture and its interpretation but extended to the world of celestial, terrestrial , and ritual things and occurrences. In Context Most of the sources cited in this study, especially the midrashim and piyyutim , date from the fourth to the sixth centuries. It is precisely these centuries, [18.191.211.66] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 07:13...

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