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VoLume 9,·No. 2 Winter 1991 99 Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash, by Daniel Boyarin. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1990. 161 pp. $27.50. Boyarin possesses impressive credentials in both the study of rabbinic texts and in modem literary criticism. And it is refreshing to find a literary study of midrash by a scholar who has an established reputation in the philological study of rabbinic texts, who reads these documents in their original languages, who is at home in American, European, and Israeli scholarship in the area, and who is well-versed in contemporary literary theory . Boyarin places himself between the world of Orthodox Judaism and the world of Western intellectual discourse, and IntertextuaLity and the Reading of Midrash bridges the gap between the two. For Boyarin literary theory "takes a place ... analogous perhaps to the place that Scholastic philosophy had for an interpreter of Bible and midrash in the Middle Ages" and allows him to remain faithful to the rabbis' enterprise while at the same time providing "a way of reading midrash which will make sense for ... a member of Western culture" (p. ix). Boyarin sees himself achieving "the valorization of midrash as interpretation and indeed as a model for interpretation" and the "[revoicing of] ... a Jewish discourse in the discourse of the West" (p. xi). Literary theory makes midrash comprehensible and useful to the Western intellectual, while at the same time not detracting from its function within the discourses of the Jewish People. Midrash is to be understood "first and foremost as reading, as hermeneutic, as generated by the interaction of rabbinic readers with a heterogeneous and difficult text, which was for them both normative and divine in origin" (p. 5). Midrash begins with the biblical text and then reads it "through the cultural, socio-ideological matrix" of the rabbis' world and culture (p. 12). Against Handelman and others, Boyarin correctly argues that the rabbis were not free to interpret a biblical verse in infinite ways. Their choices were constrained by the biblical text itself as well as by the totality of Jewish discourses. The "ideological intertextual code of the rabbinic culture" provided the rabbis with the "text" they needed to fill in the gaps in the Bible through their midrashic activity (p. 16). Boyarin's assertion that the rabbis interpreted the Bible within the constraints of the totality of Jewish culture and ideology is undoubtedly correct, as Neusner, Vermes, and others have demonstrated over the past decade. Boyarin repeatedly demonstrates that the Bible itself provides the majority of texts through which it is interpreted. He writes: "The verses of the Bible ... are a repertoire of semiotic elements that can be recombined into new discourses, just as words are recombined constantly into new discourse" (p. 28). This is an essential element in Boyarin's understanding of midrash lOQ SHOFAR (p. 31), and he devotes a good deal of his book to describing how verses are brought together to create new meanings. But few today would doubt Boyarin 's claim that the rabbis interpreted given parts of the Bible in light of other parts, or that they combined verses from various books in the Bible into new narratives, stories, or midrashim. Other than explaining this phenomenon by recourse to the jargon of literary criticism, Boyarin has not told us much that the rabbis themselves did not tell us, as Boyarin himself notes (p.27). This is not to say that Boyarin has not told us anything new. In fact, the interpretations he offers of the passages from Mekhilta in chapters 3, 4, and 6 are clever and no doubt correct. He has succeeded in shedding new light on some passages. While there may be other ways to read these texts, Boyarin's suggestions are interesting, well-argued, and convincing. On the other hand, while his comparison of the rabbinic mashal to the mas/wi in the NT is suggestive, it is too simplified. One of the major problems with the book is that Boyarin builds a lot of theory on very few examples , like a mountain suspended by a strand of hair. Although Boyarin's discussion of the parable raises some interesting points, he has not presented enough...

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