The Prophetic Law: Essays in Judaism, Girardianism, Literary Studies, and the Ethical

The End of Sacrifice

95 The End of Sacrifice Reading René Girard and the Hebrew Bible A t a moment when René Girard’s work is beginning to be known by a significantly larger public, a number of us who have been his students or colleagues for a number of years have begun to ask about the dimensions of its impact upon us, in particular, the way it has shaped our own approaches.1 For me, the question has discernible and entirely practical implications. In 1983, as an assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan (and recent PhD student of René Girard in the Department of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo), I was invited to speak at Cerisy-la-Salle at a week-long seminar in his honor. Learning that he would speak (for one of the first times) of his relation to Christianity (and deciding that I should speak similarly about Judaism), I began reading in preparation the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, Maurice Blanchot, and others whose writings on Jewish topics had begun circulating to a wider audience. The paper I delivered on the Joseph story (and its staging of the mimetic, sacrificial, and anti-sacrificial structures from which it derives) was something of a departure from the teaching and writing I had been doing on Greek tragedy and Shakespeare, and a first step along the path I have followed since. As Girard delineated the ways in which the Girard and the Hebrew Bible 96 The Prophetic Law Christian Gospel, in his view, completed the analysis of the sacrificial that had been opened in what he deemed the “Old Testament,” I explored the ways the Hebrew Bible already comprehended in full, within its language of antiidolatry , the revelation of the sacrificial origins of culture. The analysis of the prophets from the sixth century bce onward, it seemed to me, was little else. Much of the work I have done since has continued that examination, working out the details of a theory of literary and biblical reading consonant on the one hand with the insights Girard developed, and on the other with the understanding of the rabbis. How might we read the Hebrew Bible from a Girardian perspective, I asked myself. To read from a Girardian perspective is to read anti-sacrificially. In the language of the Hebrew Bible, that means anti-idolatrously. But reading anti-idolatrously may be more difficult than it appears.Take,forexample,Genesis3.Girardhaswrittenthatincontrastwith mythological treatments, the theme of expulsion has surfaced here within the text, although it is not man expelling God but God expelling man; the expulsion of God by man in his view awaits the texts of the Christian Passion. What would the rabbis say? That the “idolatrous” is to be understood diachronically rather than synchronically (as a “moment” rather than as one “thing” in contrast with another); that the particular moment it describes is already the moment when the sacrificial and the violent have become inextricably confused; and that the idolatrous shows up within the text “as” the text, that the text, in short, is a “scene of instruction.” After the destruction of the Temple (and the end of sacrifice), the rabbis say, we pray and read. In what follows, I would like to examine this opening passage of Torah and ask how precisely it might be read as a scene of instruction. In my conclusion , I will return to my initial questions. ◆ ◆ ◆ By the beginning of Genesis 3, God has completed the setting in motion of creation, including the creation of human beings. A commandment has been issued to the human (ha’adam) concerning the eating of the fruit from one of the trees. A “side” of the human is extracted and built up to form a woman (ishah). And now a new development ensues (Genesis 3:1). Now the snake was more shrewd than all the living things of the field that yhwh, God, had made. Girard and the Hebrew Bible 97 It said to the woman: Even though God said: You are not to eat from any of the trees in the garden . . . !2 This is the first appearance of “the snake” (ha-nachash). Fox’s translation of the Hebrew as “snake” rather than as “serpent” (which is how many commentators translate it) emphasizes its quotidian quality, its non-mythological , non-startling features. In the biblical text, at least, this...