From Tradition to Commentary: Torah and Its Interpretation in the Midrash Sifre to Deuteronomy

2 Re-Presenting Revelation

2 Re-Presenting Revelation Introduction The title of this chapter is intended doubly. Its subject is both the re-presenting of the received text of Scripture, rabbinically understood to have been divinely revealed, through the practice of rabbinic commentary to that text, and the re-presenting of the past event of God's revelation of Torah to Israel at Mt. Sinai, rabbinically understood to be the signified subject of several verses of Deuteronomy, again through the practice of rabbinic commentary to those verses.' In particular, I will focus on the Sifre's commentary to Deut. 33:2-4,2 which verses introduce Moses' final poetic blessing ofthe twelve tribes before his death and their entry into the Land of Canaan (33: I: "This is the blessing with which Moses, the man of God, bade the Israelites farewell before he died',): [2] He said: The Lord came from Sinai; He shone upon them form Seir; He appeared fro Mount Paran, And approached fro Ribeboth-Kodesh, Lightning flashing at them from His right. [3] Lover, indeed, of the people(s),3 Their hallowed are all in Your hand. They followed in Your steps, Accepting Your pronouncements. [4] When Moses charged us with the Teaching [= Torah] As the heritage of the congregation of Jacob.4 The mention of Sinai, the "lightning flashing," the people's acceptance of God's pronouncements, and of Moses'charging them with the Torah are all suggestive of God's revelation ofthe Torah to Israel at Sinai, and it is in relation to this event, broadly speaking, that the other more open and enigmatic scriptural expressions of these verses are rabbinically understood , often in multiple ways, in the course ofcommentary. Put differently, it is with respect to the sign of Sinai in the opening clause that all the others are interpreted. 25 26 From Tradition To Commentary But these verses, although the principal focus of the section of the Sifre's commentary here to be considered, do not constitute the principal biblical description of the event of sinaitic revelation. Rather, they themselves may be considered to be a poetic allusion to, and an intrabiblical interpretation of, the fuller narrative account of the event of revelation found in Exod. 19-24, which our commentary will cite or presume. Still other biblical verses are rabbinically understood to refer to that revelatory event and hence will similarly be woven exegetically into the Sifre's commentary to Deut. 33:2-4: Judg. 5:4; Hab. 3:3; Ps. 29:4-11; 138:4.5 Thus, our commentary's refiguring of the biblical text of Deut. 33:2-4 in relation to the event of revelation is achieved, at least in part, through the lifting of scriptural verses from other scriptural contexts and their refiguring in the newly created context of commentary to Deuteronomy. In this way the Sifre's mode of commentary, like that of rabbinic commentary more generally, may be said to be "inter- (or intra)textual": it interprets Scripture with interpreted Scripture. But the matter is not nearly so simple. For whoever-and we may be speaking of a succession of whoevers-created the commentary before us was not just the heir to a manifold biblical text, but to a manifold tradition of biblical interpretation, apart from which the biblical texts themselves could no longer be read, which is to say, understood. Were we to imagine the creator of commentary sitting in his workshop, as it were, we would have to picture that his malleable raw materials were not just the principal biblical text upon which he worked, nor other biblical texts that he exegetically worked into it, but a rich body of extra-biblical traditions (largely exegetical but not soley so), the origins and preliterary forms of which we are generally unable to reconstruct. On the one hand, these traditions predisposed and therefore constrained our commentary maker in his reading of the verses before him. Yet on the other hand, paradoxical as it might seem, by recombining and subtly reshaping such traditions in relation both to each other and to his biblical texts, our commentary maker could exercise the freedom to re-present revelation-both as received text and as past event-in ways that were simulataneously familiar and fresh.6 How do we know this? We will see that many of the same traditions that have been creatively combined in the present commentary to Deuteronomy are also found, but differently positioned and shaped, in the approximately contemporaneous commentary of...