Making and Living Myth: On Michael Fishbane's Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking

It is a delight and honor for me to respond to Professor Michael Fishbane's magisterial work, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking and, additionally, to do so within the pages of The Jewish Quarterly Review. Anyone who cracks the covers of his book will be humbled and also ennobled by Fishbane's breadth of learning and depth of insight. Of course, this also means that any response, especially a relatively short one, will never plumb the wealth of his work. What is more, I am not a biblical scholar or a scholar of Jewish thought and tradition, so the distinct pleasure of response brings with it special trepidation. Happily, given the richness of his work there is sufficient intellectual overlap to allow a theological ethicist like myself to isolate topics of common concern. Rather than storming disciplinary gates, my interest is to learn from and to engage this fascinating book and also, hopefully, make some addition to its scholarly assessment.

The structure of Fishbane's book is clear enough. The three parts of the volume move from myth in the Hebrew Bible, through rabbinic mythmaking as a kind of exegetical activity, to, finally, the Zohar and mythmaking in the Middle Ages. Through this massive historical sweep, Fishbane traces a set of "myths" of God's action and personality, like God's struggle with primordial waters and the divine pathos for the suffering of Israel. These paradigmatic myths provide a template upon which the author charts permutations in mythmaking across periods of Jewish history. In the process of this history, if I read Fishbane correctly, there is increasing intensification such that, by the time of the medievals, "the myth itself, as an inward and spiritual reality of divine Being, is unsayable and unknowable on its own terms; and only becomes knowable and sayable in the terminology of Scripture—when this is properly understood" (p. 301). Stated most pointedly, God is mythologized, the myths are inscribed in exegetical practice, and, what is more, reality itself is theologized, as it were. This theological intensification, if I can call it that, is correlated, as we will see, to an intensification and interiorization of human action. What is disclosed in this complex historical process, according to Fishbane, is the texture and tenure of Jewish monotheism as well as the articulation of a distinctive way of life, a way of being religious humanly. So Fishbane concludes near the end of the book that "monotheism is consonant with this comprehensive view of the Godhead, and it is variously expressed through myth . . . The two repeatedly intertwine and are mutually reinforcing" (p. 304).

One could dig into each of the moments of tradition that Fishbane isolates and note, as he does, changes in mythmaking. Rather than summarizing the text, which would in any case be a paltry thing on my part in comparison to the richness of the actual work, I am more interested in its Sache, the thing or subject matter of the book. By carefully parsing the question of myth and mythmaking, I submit that one can grasp the scholarly, human, and religious reach of Fishbane's work. So at the far end of these reflections I will pose questions not about living myth but, rather, the living or inhabiting of myth, mystically and morally. In the final analysis what Fishbane's book provokes is the question of the shape and orientation of religious understanding and the possibilities, if any, for contemporary appropriations of very traditional religious forms. Stated otherwise,monotheism and the intensification of human action and consciousness are thedeepest concern of this work. Fishbane aims to show the ways in which exegetical practices as distinct forms of mythmaking enable those living in profoundly different times and places than the those of the biblical texts to enact and to encounter the reality of God. The question will then become the extent to which there are constraints...