The Scent of the Rose: Drama, Fiction, and Narrative Form in the Zohar

Since the emergence of modern scholarly research on the Kabbalah, the Zohar has been studied primarily through the methodology of the history of ideas—its place in the development of Jewish religious and philosophical thought, as well as its situation in the broader history of the Jewish people. But far less attention has been devoted to the literary dimensions of the zoharic text, to formal appreciation of its status as one of the great works of religious literature the world over. For, in addition to the masterful homilies and the sparkling depictions of divinity that fill its pages, the Zohar is distinguished by its use of narrative, fictionality, and storytelling—major features of this classic text that are highly unusual in the broader context of kabbalistic creativity. Scholars of the Zohar have made several important gestures toward a better understanding of this dimension of zoharic discourse, but the field is ripe for a full-scale study of this phenomenon—an inquiry that will consider the Zohar through the lens of narrative poetics and dramatic form. This article adopts a form-critical approach to zoharic narrative, seeking to elucidate the interplay between fictional discourse and mystical exegesis. I argue that the zoharic narrative must first and foremost be understood as a work of the fictional imagination, a representation of a world and reality invented by the thirteenth-century authors of the text. My core claim with respect to narrative form suggests that the text functions as a kind of dramatic literature, one in which the power of revealing the mystical secrets is demonstrated and dramatized for the reading audience.