Dialogical Reading in the Rabbinic Exegetical Narrative-Poetics Today

Dialogical Reading in theRabbinic Exegetical Narrative

Joshua LevinsonHebrew Literature, Hebrew University, Jerusalem

Abstract This article investigates the reading dynamics of the rewritten Bible or the

exegetical narrative in rabbinic literature of late antiquity. The exegetical narrative

is composed of a story which simultaneously represents and interprets its biblical

counterpart. Its singularity resides precisely in this synergy of narrative and exege-

sis. As exegesis, it creates new meanings from the biblical verses, and as narrative,

it dramatizes those meanings by means of the biblical story world. The concurrent

presence of two distinct voices, biblical and rabbinic, as well as two distinct types

of discourse, narrative and exegetical, that navigate between these voices, creates a

unique type of reading dynamic that I call dialogical reading. It is this dynamic that

enables the midrashic text to create new meanings from old and highlights the chal-

lenge this genre presents to the theory of reading.

It is the unwritten part of books that would be the most interesting.

W. M.Thackeray

Earlier versions of this article were presented at colloquiums at the Department of Religious

Studies at Yale University and the Divinity School and Center for Jewish Studies of Har-

vard University. I want to thank all of the participants for their comments and criticisms and

especially Steven Fraade and Gary Anderson for their kind invitations. I am especially grate-

ful to the anonymous referees of Poetics Today, who made valuable comments, and to MeirSternberg for his many astute criticisms and suggestions.

Poetics Today 25:3 (Fall 2004). Copyright © 2004 by the Porter Institute for Poetics and

Semiotics.

chf

498 Poetics Today 25:3

1. Rewriting the Bible

‘‘Each reading of a book,’’ said Jorge Luis Borges (1980: 76), ‘‘each re-

reading, each memory of that re-reading, reinvents the text.’’ This could

be a succinct description of rabbinic midrash in late antiquity and of the

genre of the exegetical narrative in particular. In this article I would like to

explore certain aspects of the reading dynamics generated by the rabbinic

genre of the rewritten Bible, which I call the exegetical narrative.

Let me begin with a few telegraphic remarks about this genre.1 The exe-getical narrative is composed of a story which simultaneously represents

and interprets its biblical counterpart. As a hermeneutical reading of the

biblical story presented in narrative form, its defining characteristic lies

precisely in this synergy of narrative and exegesis.2 As exegesis, it createsnew meanings from the biblical verses, and as narrative it represents those

meanings bymeans of the biblical world. As exegesis, it is subservient to the

biblical narrative, but as a story in its own right, it creates a narrated world

which is different from its biblical shadow. It is obvious that the combina-

tion of these two elements creates a certain dissonance. Narrative and exe-

gesis are two very different methods of persuasion, based upon divergent,

if not opposing, presuppositions of ‘‘author-ity.’’ It is specifically this ten-

sion between sameness and difference, subservience and creativity, which

establishes the genre’s identity.

Undoubtedly, this genre is but one specific historical manifestation of the

general cultural phenomenon of rewriting canonical texts, which is a fasci-

nating topic in its own right but much too wide to tackle here. Suffice it to

say that any rewriting both acknowledges and challenges the authority of

the canon. Even if we confine ourselves to the rewriting of the Bible, the list

of works includes not only a vast array of biblical and postbiblical texts—

like the Book of Chronicles, Jubilees, and parts of the rabbinic corpus—

but also the Christian biblical epics of the late antique and Byzantine peri-

ods, such as that of Juvencus,3 as well as works by John Milton, ThomasMann, Joseph Heller, Stefan Heim, and even the film Moses the Prince ofE�pt. In spite of the fact that wemight think that the canonical status of theBible would render it immune to any incursion, whether by supplementa-

tion or by deletion, the history of its reception indicates the opposite to be

1. An important formal study of this genre was first presented by OphraMeir (1987) and fur-

ther expanded byYonaFraenkel (1991: 287–322).Neither study explores the reading dynamics

generated by the specific parameters of this genre.

2. David Stern (1991: 67, 238) was the first to explore the importance of this synergy for

understanding the hermeneutics of rabbinic discourse. See also Meir 1987: 63, 70.

3. See Jerome, Letters, LXX.5 (in Fremantle 1989 [1892]: 151); Curtius 1973: 147; Roberts1985: 68, 161; Nodes 1993: 130.

Levinson • Dialogical Reading in the Rabbinic Exegetical Narrative 499

the case. From themoment the canonical text defines a textual community,4

it is continuously retold. Paradoxically, it is precisely the canonical status

of the text—that which acts as the foundation for its cultural legitimacy—

that invites its constant transformation, violation, and appropriation.

Lubomír Doležel has called this phenomenon ‘‘literary transduction,’’

and his comments on the semantic potential of rewriting have particu-

lar relevance to my project here. In his discussion of postmodern rewrit-

ings of classical works, he remarks that these rewritings both rejuvenate

and challenge the past, ‘‘they confront the canonical protoworld by con-

structing a new, alternative fictional world’’ (Doležel 1998: 206). There is

an uncanny resemblance between the rabbinic exegetical narrative and the

type of transduction he calls expansion, which ‘‘extends the scope of the

protoworld, by filling its gaps, constructing a prehistory or posthistory, and

so on. The protoworld and the successor world are complementary. The

protoworld is put into a new co-text, and the established structure is thus

shifted’’ (ibid: 207). In spite of the many and obvious differences between

the postmodern rewrites that he discusses and the texts of late antiquity

presented here, of particular interest is his insight that ‘‘the complexity of

the rewrite’s meaning and its challenge to semantic interpretation is due

precisely to the fact that it refers not only to its own fictional world but also,

in various ways and degrees, to its source, its protoworld’’ (ibid: 222). The

reader of the exegetical narrative reconstructs its fictional world by activat-

ing as cognitive background the fictional encyclopedia of the biblical text.

Clearly, not all motivations are equal, and the above-mentioned authors

who rewrote the Bible weremoved to do so for different and even contradic-

tory reasons. At times, rewriting originates in a feeling of distance from the

canonical text or perception of a deficiency therein that invites completion

(Fishbane 1985: 282), while at others the opposite is the case, and rewrit-

ing derives from a feeling of the overwhelming presence of the text in the

cultural consciousness, making it impossible to create legitimate meaning

without it (Bloom 1975: 19). No less important than the attitude toward the

text is the position of the rewriter within his or her textual community. One

may ask to whom the story belongs, who is given a central role, and who is

moved behind the scenes in order to tell it.Whoever does not find himself or

herself represented in the canonical text may be impelled to introduce his

or her point of view between its lines.Thus, rewriting may be an act of sub-

versive appropriation or even cultural mimicry (Bhabha 1994: 86–88). On

the other hand, the desire to rewrite may derive not from an awareness of

4. ‘‘Textual communities are microsocieties organized around the common understanding

of a script’’ (Stock 1990: 23).


difference but rather froman inability to acknowledge it.This position leads

to an almost obsessive involvement with the canonical text in an attempt

to suppress difference as a mechanism for creating cultural legitimacy.

1.1. The Rabbinic Exegetical Narrative and Postbiblical LiteratureThe uniqueness of the rabbinic genre can be perceived most strongly from

a diachronic perspective. Although rewriting the canonical text may be as

old as the text itself, there is no doubt that the greatest cultural debt of the

rabbinic exegetical narrative is to the postbiblical genre of the rewritten

Bible, which also retells the biblical text, incorporating many supplemen-

tary and implicitly interpretive elements.5 There is little doubt that thesetraditions, or parts of them, were known and influential in Rabbinic circles

(Kugel 1990, 1998; Kister 1994). In spite of these affinities, there are three

important differences germane to my topic here: the discursive relation to

the biblical text, the status of exegesis, and the authority of the narrator.

Firstly, unlike the rabbinic midrash, the rewritings do not distinguish on

the discursive level between the old and the new, between the verse and its

rewriting. Therefore, they lack the tension between the narrative and the

exegetical dimensions. Irrespective of the intentions of the authors of the

Second Temple texts, the final outcome is a composition that is indepen-

dent of the biblical narrative. Both Jubilees and the Genesis Apocrypon,

for example, despite the significant differences between them, can be read

andunderstood as autonomous literary creations. As StevenFraade (1991: 2)

has succinctly remarked, ‘‘It is as if the biblical text itself is replaced by its

interpretative retelling.’’

Secondly, while it is certainly true that there is a much larger measure

of implied exegesis in these rewritings than was previously assumed (Kugel

1998), the fact remains that this exegesis is precisely that—implied and

covert.The readermay, of course, create a silent dialogue between the Bible

and its rewriting, but the important point is that the rhetoric of the text

does not demand this of him. In contrast, the overt exegesis in the rabbinic

texts precludes the reader’s divorce from the Bible. Here there is a dialogic

dimension where the reader is confronted with two texts that must be read

together.

A third important difference between the rabbinic exegetical narrative

and its postbiblical precursors is the authority of the narrator. Many, if not

5. Most of the texts categorized as the rewritten Bible in postbiblical literature were com-

posed in the period between the early second century b.c.e. and the first century c.e. The

literature on this genre is extensive. For a convenient summary of some of its features and

problems, see Brooke 2000.More in-depth studies areVermes 1973; Alexander 1988; Nickels-

burg 1984; Charlesworth 1987.


all, postbiblical works anchor their authority in revelation, as in Jubilees or

in the autobiographic ‘‘I’’ of the main character, as in the Testament of the

Patriarchs, or both, as in the Temple Scroll. The authority of the rabbinic

text is anchored in what can be called the dignity of exegesis, and this is

a different game altogether. Nothing is more characteristic of midrash in

general, and this genre in particular, than the quotation of what has already

been said in order to express something new. It is this connection which

bestows upon the exegetical narrative the cultural authority to be both the

same as and different from the verses it represents. The type of exegesis

this structure engenders is best summed up in the words of Michel Foucault

(1972: 221): ‘‘Commentary must say for the first time what had nonetheless

already been said. . . . It allows us to say something other than the text

itself, but on condition that it is this text itself which is said, and in a sense

completed.’’

One could say that, by means of these three characteristics, rabbinic cul-

ture appropriated for its own uses this preexistent literary form.Whilemany

scholars have pointed out these differences, their hermeneutical ramifica-

tions have yet to be fully investigated. In sum, exegesis and narrative, sub-

ordination and creativity are in a continual tension.This doubleness creates

a special version of the hermeneutical circle: the narrative created from the

verses it claims to represent also reinterprets the verses that nurtured it, and

the axis that joins these aspects is the reader.

2. Reading Readers Reading

If, as Jonathan Culler (1983: 35) has said, ‘‘to speak of the meaning of the

work is to tell a story of reading,’’ this statement is doubly true of the exe-

getical narrative, which is itself an interpretive reading of the biblical text.

I will argue that the double nature of the exegetical narrative creates a par-

ticular type of reading dynamic that can be called dialogical reading. It is

this dynamic that enables the midrashic text to create new meanings from

old and that highlights the challenge which this genre presents to the theory

of reading.

It is notoriously difficult to describe that which transpires between the

text and the reader.The theoretical world of the reader has expanded expo-

nentially in the last decades, and I will not enter here into the fray. For my

purposes here, I refer to the implied reader as a construct of the text, a net-

work of response inviting structures implied in the rhetoric through which

the narrative world is reconstructed (Iser 1978: 34). ‘‘It is the position the

text asks us to occupy—the preferred vantage point from which to observe

the world of the text’’ (Allen 1987: 89).


While many descriptions of the dynamic of reading have emphasized

how the reader creates the text, with greater or lesser autonomy, less atten-

tion has been paid to how the text creates its reader. On the obvious level,

no author can begin to compose before imagining a competent or implied

reader who is able to realize the semantic structures of the text. He is not

able to begin to write without positing a myriad of assumptions concern-

ing the knowledge, prejudices, opinions, and expectations of his implied

reader.What has not been sufficiently stressed is that themeeting of text and

reader is always historically contingent and intertextual. In the words of

Terry Eagleton (1983: 12), ‘‘All literary works are ‘rewritten,’ if only uncon-

sciously, by the societies which read them; indeed there is no reading of a

work which is not also a ‘re-writing.’ ’’ The reader creates the meanings of

the text as the text creates its reader. Tony Bennett (1987: 70, 75) has suc-

cinctly described this phenomenon as the ‘‘reading formation’’:

By reading formation I mean a set of discursive and inter-textual determinations

which organize and animate the practice of reading, connecting texts and readers

in specific relations to one another in constituting readers as reading subjects of

particular types and texts as objects-to-be-read in particular ways. . . . Texts exist

only as always-already organized or activated to be read in certain ways just as

readers exist as always-already activated to read in certain ways: neither can be

granted a virtual identity that is separable from the determinate ways in which

they are gridded onto one another within different reading formations. . . . Dif-

ferent reading formations produce their own texts, their own readers and their

own contexts.

For my purposes here, the concept of a culturally activated reader creating

meanings in a given historical reading formation is especially important.

By stressing the reciprocal process by which readers and texts are mutually

produced and mutually productive, we move from the textual immanence

of an ‘‘Iserian’’ model toward a restoration of a dialogical agency to the

reading process (Dimock 1963; Slawinski 1988). Because of the connection

between narrative and exegesis, this double dynamic creates the narrative

situation of dialogical reading.

3. Dialogical Reading

To speak of dialogical reading is to invoke the name of Mikhail Bakhtin.

While Bakhtin did not develop any theory of reading, his works do con-

tain numerous references to a listener who functions in a uniquely active

capacity (Shepherd 2001 [1989]). Considering his definition of the dialogi-

cal as ‘‘the coexistence in a single utterance of two intentionally distinct,


identifiable voices’’ (Bakhtin 1984: 6),6 it is not surprising to find that he criti-cized the ideal reader who is no more than ‘‘a mirror image of the author’’:

He cannot produce anything of his own, anything new, into the ideally under-

stood work or into the ideally complete plan of the author. He is in the same time

and space as the author or, rather like the author he is outside time and space,

and therefore he cannot be another or other for the author, he cannot have any

surplus that is determined by his otherness. (Bakhtin, 1986: 165)

The dialogical reader must achieve an ‘‘active understanding’’ of the text,

‘‘one that always creates something that had not been before, that is always

new and nonreiterative’’ (Hirschkop 1989: 11). This comes very close to

Bennett’s reading formation, which destabilizes both points of reference—

the text and its reader—and leads beyond the confines of a ‘‘putative self-

contained encounter between an individual person and an individual text’’

(Shepherd 2001 [1989]: 147). By its very form, the exegetical narrative

embodies in a single utterance two intentionally distinct, identifiable voices,

the biblical and the rabbinic. As an active understanding of the biblical text,

its combination of the exegetical and narrative modes creates negotiated

readings that result from the meeting and mixing of two different cultural

formations. There are a number of aspects to dialogical reading that have

a direct bearing on the dynamics of the exegetical narrative and so require

attention.

3.1. Narrative SituationEvery genre creates a unique narrative situation, and the inherent belated-

ness of the exegetical narrative creates a situation that is different from the

normal narrative contract. Usually, the relationship between the narrator

and reader is asymmetrical, to the advantage of the former.The narrator is

at liberty to create a narrated world at will, and generic conventions aside,

the reader becomes aware of its rules and properties only in the process

of reading. In the exegetical narrative, however, the situation is more bal-

anced. Not only is the narrator confined by the nature of the material when

he begins to retell the biblical story, but he is limited also to a specific cul-

tural repertoire of plot structures: he can transform Joseph into a saint or

a sinner but not into Don Juan.7More importantly, the narrator must con-tendwith the expectations and foreknowledge of his audience, whatDoležel

6. Bakhtin’s use of this term is notoriously ambiguous among several distinct senses. On

these and other issues of definition, see Hirschkop 1989: 6–9; Morson and Emerson 1990:

130–35.

7. This does not preclude precisely this development in a different reading formation; see,

for example, Kugel 1990.


called ‘‘the fictional encyclopedia of the biblical text.’’ The reader can read

between the lines, fill in the gaps, and, like two people gazing at the night

sky, draw different lines between the stars, but he cannot change the stars

themselves.8

3.2. Canonicity and BreachThe problem that confronts the narrator of the exegetical narrative is how

to tell a story twice. Given the balance between exegesis and narrative,

every reader or listener to an exegetical narrative knows two things for sure:

that the canonical story world must be modified (otherwise it would merely

repeat the biblical text) and that the narrative must end by reintegrating

itself into the biblical framework (otherwise it would create a new narra-

tive and not explicate an existent one). If the midrashic narrative begins,

for example, with Abraham receiving the divine command to sacrifice his

son Isaac (Gen. 22:2), then it must end with the angelic intervention that

prevents its fulfillment (Gen. 22:12). Given the fact that the narrative must

move from A (command) to B (intervention) but cannot do so directly (for

that would constitute canonicity without breach), the narrator has two com-

plementary options. He may interrupt this progress by creating obstacles

that impede the development of the biblical script, or he can suggest an

alternate narrative trajectory so as almost to tell a different story, thus

threatening to subvert the biblical telos. In either case, themoment of trans-

gression initiates the ‘‘three universal narrative effects/interests/dynamics

of prospection, retrospection, and recognition—suspense, curiosity, and

surprise’’ that Meir Sternberg (1985: 259, 2001: 117) sees at the heart of

narrativity.

In addition, many researchers have pointed out that ‘‘narrative imagin-

ing always takes place against a background consisting of representations

of things that might have happened in the storyworld but did not’’ (Herman

2002: 56; see also: Labov 1972: 381; Prince 1988). One of the essential com-

ponents of any action sequence is not only the initial and end state but also

the state in which the world would have been had it not been for the action

in question (see vonWright 1966: 123; Ryan 1991: 129; Herman 2002: 55). In

other words, every narrative consists not only of an actual world but also a

virtual one, that is, the prevented (or anticipated) events: ‘‘This didn’t hap-

pen but could have—this could’ve happened but did not’’ (Prince 1988: 3).

These virtual narratives ‘‘provide a way of evaluating events by placing

them against the background of other events which might have happened,

8. This image comes from Iser 1974: 282.


but which did not’’ (Labov 1972: 381).9 The exegetical narrative, we couldsay, threatens to derail the biblical telos by making these virtual narratives

actual, by giving narrative form to what might have happened if events did

not unfold according to the canonical actuality: if, for example, Jacob had

known of Laban’s treachery or if Abraham had refused to desist from sacri-

ficing his son. In short, if Frank Kermode (1979: xi) has defined midrash in

general as ‘‘a way of finding in an existing narrative the potential of more

narrative,’’ the exegetical narrative could be seen as a way of heightening

the narrativity of a preexistent narrative.

3.3. Two Tales as OneThe fact that two texts, the biblical and themidrashic,must be read together

enjoins a particular reading strategy. This simultaneity of two narratives

is at the heart of dialogical reading. The reader not only interprets the

midrashic narrative against the background of the biblical story, but also

reinterprets the biblical story against the background of the midrash. The

reader must navigate between two narratives which are ever-present, each

acting as the context for the other.This double hermeneutic engenders two

structures of reading: A syntagmatic reading that stresses the new narra-

tive continuum forms the narrative plane, and a paradigmatic reading that

highlights the relation between the two plots forms the exegetical plane.

Two tales are seen concurrently, and this movement between them both

undermines old meanings and engenders new ones.10

Seen from this perspective, a reading of the exegetical narrative is itself

also a rereading of the biblical text, adding a circular twist to an otherwise

dominant linearity. And like any rereading, it consists of both a sequen-

tial, end-oriented movement and a reflective type of attention whose aim

is to perceive the text ‘‘as a construction with certain clearly distinguish-

able structural properties’’ (Calinescu 1993: 19).11 Thus, this genre overtlyrealizes what Peter Brooks (1984: 110) has said of narrative in general: ‘‘It is

the role of fictional plots to impose an end which yet suggests a return, a

new beginning: a rereading. Any narrative, that is, wants at its end to refer

9. There are, of course, important differences between the ‘‘disnarrated’’ and ‘‘virtual em-

bedded narratives’’ that I cannot discuss here; see Ryan 1991: 148–74; Prince 1999; Herman

2002: 100–4.

10. Stern (1991: 86) has richly discussed a similar shuttling back and forth between narrative

and exegesis in the genre of the rabbinic parable.

11. There is much to be said on the exegetical narrative and the dynamics of rereading that I

cannot discuss here. Suffice it to say that Matei Calinescu’s (1993: 41) assertion that ‘‘the con-

cept of a virginal first reading, so appealing to our naive intuition, cannot withstand critical

reflection’’ is particularly relevant for the exegetical narrative.


us back to its middle, to the web of the text: to recapture us in its doomed

energies.’’

The midrashic text is situated in a constant tension between sameness

and difference, the old and the new, between art and artifice. Since the

exegetical narrative is both a new story and an exegetical rewriting of an

old one, it is positioned on the fault line between sameness and difference,

between received and innovative meanings. FollowingWolfgang Iser (1989:

237), we could say that each exegetical narrative creates a dialogical situa-

tion wherein every semantic field is doubled by another:

Whatever the relationships may be like, two different types of discourse are ever-

present, and their simultaneity triggers a mutual revealing and concealing of

their respective contextual references. From this interplay there emerges seman-

tic instability that is exacerbated by the fact that the two sets of discourse are also

contexts for each other, so that each in turn is constantly switching from back-

ground to foreground. . . . Through this double-voiced discourse every utterance

carries something else in its wake, so that the act of combination gives rise to

a duplication of what is present by that which is absent—a process that often

results in the balance being reversed and the present serving only to spotlight

the absent. The double meaning engendered by the act of combination opens

up a multifariousness of interconnections within the text.

We could view this dynamic from a slightly different perspective. Peter

Rabinowitz has pointed out the dual function of any reader. This duality

follows from seeing the text in its mimetic aspect, as a representation of

reality, and also in its fictive nature, as an artifact. A dual aesthetic experi-

ence results: the reader must accept the conventions of mimetic represen-

tation but maintain a certain distance that proceeds from the awareness of

the illusory or constructed aspect of the aesthetic experience. As Rabino-

witz (1980: 243, 1987: 94) has remarked, if someonewatchingHamlet jumps

onto the stage to warn the Prince, we will say that he or she is not respond-

ing properly. However, if that same viewer refuses to mourn for Ophelia

because she is only acting, that viewer also is reacting improperly. Likewise,

the reader of the exegetical narrative must adopt a dual perspective—nar-

rational and hermeneutic. In order to react properly, the reader must play

themimetic game according to its conventions but, simultaneously, without

forgetting the exegetical movement of the hermeneutical circle from verse

to narrative and back again.


4. Reading Strategies

There are a number of reading strategies employed by midrash to navi-

gate these tensions. Different relationships between the narrator and the

reader create different dynamics. A plot where the reader has to discover

what is already known to the characters is different from one where the

reader knows what the characters do not. Given the fact that the exegetical

narrative is always a second reading of the biblical text, a kind of retro-

spective prospection, there is an inherent bias toward what Sternberg (1985)

has called a ‘‘reader-elevating’’ structure, which endows the reader with

the advantage of foreknowledge and creates a perspectival tension with the

characters who have yet to learn.Within this configuration, ‘‘the discrepan-

cies in awareness are manipulated in our favor at the expense of the char-

acters.We observe them and their doings from a vantage point practically

omniscient. The narrator’s disclosures put us in a position to fathom their

secret thoughts and designs, to trace or even foreknow their acts, to jeer or

grieve at theirmisguided attempts at concealment, plotting, interpretation’’

(Sternberg 1985: 164).

This structural predisposition creates both a challenge and a source of

empowerment for the narrator. On the one hand, as I mentioned, it is diffi-

cult to arouse anticipatory suspense or tension in a narrative whose denoue-

ment is a foregone conclusion. On the other hand, precisely because this

configuration creates for the reader a certain horizon of expectations—

about certain events or reactions on the part of the characters—the exegeti-

cal narrator may manipulate, trick, or lead the reader down false trails.

Here lies an additional aspect of this genre’s narrative strategy: it will

often create alternative plotlines or narrative possibilities that compete with

the canonical precedent. Usually, at the beginning of any given narrative,

anything is possible, and the range of possibilities narrows as the reader

proceeds. At the end, only a small number of outcomes are acceptable as

making the story a coherent whole.The audience’s projective sense of tele-

ology, of closure, gradually becomes retrospective as more and more of the

story passes into the audience’s past.The exegetical narrative interrupts this

process, as I mentioned earlier, either by creating obstacles or by suggesting

the possibility of an alternative narrative trajectory. In either case, narra-

tive closure is forestalled or disrupted. Every point becomes the potential

beginning of another and competing story.This produces a certain tension

and surprise precisely because readers know, or think they know,where they

are going. In the remainder of this article, I want to examine a number of

ways by which the exegetical narrative exploits and navigates these infor-

mational and perspectival gaps.


5. Fraternal Fractures: The Reunion of Jacob and Esau

The first text I would like to consider concerns the reunion of Jacob and

Esau as recounted in Genesis 33. Jacob is journeying home from his ex-

tended but profitable sojourn in Haran when he hears that Esau is travel-

ing to meet him with a band of four hundred men. When they last met,

Esau had vowed to kill his brother for having stolen their father’s blessing

(Gen. 27:41). Therefore, in preparation for their reunion, Jacob sends him

a conciliatory message accompanied by gifts. It is on the night between the

sending of the gifts and the meeting of the brothers that Jacob wrestles with

the ‘‘angel.’’ The biblical account contains an ambiguous analogy between

Jacob’s angelic encounter and his meeting on the morrow with Esau. As

Gerhard von Rad (1985: 327) has remarked, ‘‘this strange parallel becomes

clearest in Jacob’s daring statement that seeing Esau’s face was like ‘see-

ing the face of God’ (Gen. 33:10), which is precisely an allusion to Penuel

[where he wrestled with the angel]. But one must remember here that the

narrator barely touches on the correspondence of the two events. He does

not explain the mystery of the inner relation of the two encounters, the

direction of the threads which tie the two together.’’

The midrash transforms the biblical reticence into narrative, construct-

ing its represented world upon this analogy in order to explain the unex-

pected change in Esau, who confronts Jacob with four hundred men and

then falls weeping on his neck in a brotherly embrace (Gen. 33:4). In

the rabbinic reading formation, the cultural presupposition of everlasting

enmity between the brothers impeded a reading which would accept Esau’s

behavior as an expression of fraternal affection (see Sifrei BaMidbar 69):

And he asked, ‘‘What do you mean by all this company which I have met /

fought?’’ 12 (Gen. 33:8)

The whole of that night the ministering angels formed into bands and compa-

nies [kittim kittim] and kept assailing Esau’s troops. When they asked them to

whom they belonged they said, ‘‘To Esau.’’ They [the angels] exclaimed, ‘‘Give

it to them!’’ [They said] ‘‘We belong to Isaac’s son!’’ They said, ‘‘thrash them!’’

‘‘We belong to Abraham’s grandson,’’ they said, ‘‘thrash them!’’ But when they

pleaded, ‘‘We belong to Jacob’s brother,’’ they responded, ‘‘Let them go for they

are of ours.’’ In the morning he [Esau] asked him: ‘‘What do you mean by all

this company which I have met [fought]?’’ [Jacob replied] ‘‘Did they say any-

thing to you?’’ ‘‘I was beaten by them,’’ he said. ‘‘He answered: ‘To gain my

Lord’s favor.’ ’’ (Gen. 33:8)13

12. Theword used here, pagash, which in biblicalHebrewmeans ‘‘meet,’’ assumed in rabbinicHebrew additional meanings of ‘‘fight’’ or ‘‘struggle’’ (see Yalon 1971: 97).

13. Genesis Rabbah 78:11 (Freedman 1983: 722). All translations of rabbinic materials are my


The new story world of this exegetical narrative takes place between two

halves of one biblical verse (Gen. 33:8) and remotivates their contiguity.

This prevalent technique of literally ‘‘writing between the lines’’ enables the

exegetical narrator both to preserve the canonical text and to create from it

newmeanings.This practice, based on the perception that the author some-

times implies that an event occurred even when not specifically mentioned

in the narrative, received in the literary criticism of antiquity the wonder-

fully apt and striking name of ‘‘figures of silence’’ (Kamesar 1994: 54).

The opening of the narrative places its events on ‘‘that night,’’ which is

also the time of Jacob’s nocturnal struggle with the angel. This exposition

is not intended merely to define the parameters of the fictional world but

creates a demand upon the reader to interpret this midrashic story in rela-

tion to the previous biblical scene. This is a typical example of dialogical

reading, wherein the reader must navigate between two simultaneous nar-

ratives.The narrator has created a dramatic situation by playing off against

each other the two meanings of the verb to meet/to fight (pagash) in bib-lical and rabbinic Hebrew, thus underlining how both brothers strive with

angels on the same night. Not only did both struggles take place at the same

time andwith the same type of adversary, but they even concerned the same

theme—each brother was engaged in a struggle to define his identity.While

Jacob is transformed into Israel, Esau loses his primogeniture and becomes

a secondary character in this family saga—Jacob’s brother. Both characters

strove with God, but only one prevailed.

We can see here the combination of the narrative and the exegetical

modes. Not only is the obscure biblical analogy given new content, but

the unexpected change in Esau’s disposition is explained. Most likely, these

newmeanings are generated in connectionwith another biblical verse, from

Hosea 12:5—‘‘He strove with an angel and prevailed, the other had to weep

and implore him.’’ While the prophetic verse refers only to Jacob’s struggle

with the angel, I suggest that a covert midrash relates each half of the verse

to one of the brothers—while Jacob strove with his angel and prevailed,

Esau wept and implored.

The dialogical simultaneity created by situating the exegetical narrative

‘‘on that night’’ restructures the relationship between the different agencies,

thus creating an informational disparity between the reader and the charac-

ters.Unlike the reader of the biblical story who, like Jacob, cannot fathom

Esau’s intentions, the dialogical reader has a distinct advantage over the

own. For the convenience of the reader, I have cited the appropriate reference in the Soncino

translation (Epstein 1961). Biblical translations are according to Tanakh: A New Translation ofthe Holy Scriptures (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society 1985).


characters. He knows that at the same time that Jacob sends his offerings

to appease his brother, Esau himself is receiving gifts of another kind. It is

this gap which enables the new meanings of the verses to come to the fore.

More importantly, how does the narrator manipulate the reader’s new-

found knowledge in order to create these new meanings? At this juncture,

we must remember what each of the characters knows, does not know, or

thinks he knows. The dialogical reader knows more than any of the char-

acters. He knows that Esau arrives at the reunion already a defeated and

changed man. Esau himself is cognitively inferior to the reader: although

painfully aware of the messengers and their message, he is ignorant of the

fact that Jacob did not send the band who defeated him. Last and least

is Jacob, who is totally ignorant of his brother’s nocturnal defeat by the

ministering angels. Ironically, Jacob in the midrash remains as unaware,

and therefore as anxious, as his biblical counterpart. It is these cognitive

discrepancies between the characters themselves and between them and the

reader that create new meanings in their conversation and the ideological

pleasure of the reader.

When Esau arrives at Jacob’s camp on the morrow and asks, ‘‘What do

you mean by all this company which I have met/fought?’’ (Gen. 33:8)—to

whom is he referring? The narrator creates a pun based upon the change in

meaning of the verb (pagash) in rabbinic Hebrew from ‘‘met’’ to ‘‘fought’’ inorder to create a disparity in consciousness between the characters. Esau,

of course, is referring to the angels who assaulted him. However, Jacob,

unlike the reader, knows nothing of his brother’s nocturnal contest, being

involved in a struggle of his own at the same time. He assumes that Esau

is referring to the appeasing emissaries he had previously sent him.There-

fore, when he replies, ‘‘Did they say anything to you?’’ he is referring to

the conciliatory message and gifts he sent in Genesis 32:18–19—‘‘Whenmy

brother Esau meets you and asks you, ‘Whose men are you?’ . . . You shall

answer, ‘Your servant Jacob’s; they are a gift sent to my lord Esau.’ ’’ Note

that the belligerent angels in the midrash and the appeasing servants in the

bible use the same terms of identity through association—‘‘Whose men are

you?’’—but their implications are reversed.

Their entire conversation takes on a double meaning. However, only

the reader is positioned to appreciate the ambiguity, the ironic double-talk

where each character refers to different events with the same words. Esau

understands Jacob’s query, ‘‘Did they say anything to you?’’ not as referring

to the obsequious message but rather to the unfortunate exchange where

he is forced to admit to his subservient status as Jacob’s brother.While the

reader of the Bible awaits the outcome of the reunion without knowing

Esau’s intentions, the midrash creates an ironic clash of perspectives by ele-


vating the reader to the cognitive level of the narrator. Esau arrives at the

reunion already vanquished and surprises Jacob, but not the reader, for

the better. According to this reading, Jacob in the midrash, like his bibli-

cal counterpart, interprets Esau’s behavior according to its literal meaning

in the biblical text. These ironic meanings are not situated within the exe-

getical narrative itself but rather in the interplay betwixt and between the

biblical and midrashic stories. Only the reader who interprets dialogically

grasps and enjoys these double meanings.

If we continue in this vein, we must also reinterpret the final part of the

brothers’ exchange. In response to Jacob’s query (‘‘Did they say anything

to you?’’), Esau responds: ‘‘I was beaten [mechatat] by them.’’ He is referringto his thrashing by the angels, but how does Jacob, who remains unaware

throughout of his brother’s defeat, understand this reply? Themost obvious

reading is that the midrashic narrator is transforming Jacob’s self-effacing

response (‘‘To gain my lord’s favor’’ [Gen. 33:9])—which in the biblical

context refers to the appeasing gifts—into an ironic reply to Esau’s thrash-

ing.14 Now this is certainly Esau’s understanding (all the more barbed forJacob’s ignorance of its import for his brother), but is it Jacob’s? Though

a possible reading, the problem is that it abruptly and without motiva-

tion changes Jacob from an unknowing character to an all-knowing one.

Jacob could not possibly interpret thus and still remain in his state of igno-

rance, as the Midrash Tanchuma (Vayishlach 7) explicitly states: ‘‘Jacob didnot know that the Holy One had sent the angels, rather he thought that

Esau was concerned with the gifts he had previously sent him’’ (Townsend

1989: 208). Therefore, I suggest, the narrator is creating a new meaning

from this same root [chatat], namely, ‘‘I joined up with them,’’ as if Esaujoined forces with his brother’s gift-carrying entourage.15 This understand-ing is sufficiently ambiguous to allow both Esau and Jacob to misconstrue

the other’s intent.

Here we can ask an entirely new question: what brings the narrator to

create this dialogic meaning? Undoubtedly, one of the difficulties in the

reception of the biblical story within the rabbinic reading formation was

the portrayal of Jacob’s groveling behavior.The reality of life under Roman

conquest did not encourage the textual community to receive this behavior

as normative or appropriate. As another midrash states explicitly: ‘‘When

Jacob called Esau ‘my lord,’ the Holy One said to him: ‘You have abased

yourself and called Esau my lord eight times. I will, therefore, raise up

14. The irony of this reply may even be carried over to the next verse, where Esau says: ‘‘I

have enough, my brother’’ (Gen. 33:9).

15. See Jastrow 1950: 683: ‘‘to join closely (in a friendly or hostile sense) . . . to come in contact

(hostile or friendly), ‘Esau said, I had a meeting with them.’ ’’


eight kings of his descendants before yours’’ (Genesis Rabbah 75:11). On

the other hand, the rabbis were sufficiently engaged in realpolitik to know

that sometimes their survival depended upon their submissive behavior.

For example, Rabbi Judah the Patriarch adopted Jacob’s obsequious man-

ner when addressing a letter to Emperor Antoninus: ‘‘From your servant

Judah to our Sovereign the Emperor Antoninus.’’ When his scribe remon-

strated that the formulation was demeaning, the Patriarch replied: ‘‘Am I

then better than my ancestor? Did he not say: Thus shall you say, ‘To my

lord Esau, thus says your servant Jacob’?’’ (Genesis Rabbah 75:5).

The exegetical narrative, like any text, draws upon social and literary

models. In the text before us, there is a clash between these two frame-

works.The literary model presented in the canonical text portrays Jacob as

ingratiating himself to Esau. However, the social and ideological codes of

the textual community, which read Esau as Rome, could not idealize such

behavior (see Cohen 1967). Rewriting the biblical narrative by creating an

ironic superiority of the reader over all of the characters may be the way

that the rabbinic reading formation copes with this conflict. Jacob humbles

himself but is not humbled in Esau’s eyes. The reader’s elevated perspec-

tive enables him to distance himself from Jacob’s behavior and at the same

time enjoy Esau’s misfortune. Seen in this light, Jacob comes close to the

comic hero as described by Hans Jauss (1982: 193):

The comedy of the counter image comes from a degrading of the ideal to a level

that permits the reader or spectator an identification with the hero which he

can experience as relief from or protest against the pressure of authority, or as

solidarization.

The exegetical narrative not only creates a new coherence by filling in the

gaps of the biblical story but also produces ideological alignment between

the canonical text and its reception. The ambiguity enacted through the

characters’ opposing perceptions is a result of the dialogical reading. This

doubleness or hybridity resembles what James Scott has called the public

and hidden transcripts. In the former is recorded the voice of the subordi-

nate as the dominate wishes to hear it, just like the letter of Rabbi Judah.

Scott (1990: 4) stressed, however, that there also exists a hidden transcript

that represents ‘‘discourse that takes place ‘offstage,’ beyond direct obser-

vation by power holders,’’ as in the preferred address of Judah’s scribe:

‘‘From Judah the Prince to our Sovereign the Emperor Antoninus.’’ Beside

these two transcripts exists a third that serves both perspectives—that of

the dominant and that of the subservient—by negotiating between them:

This is a politics of disguise and anonymity that takes place in public view but is

designed to have a double meaning. . . . The condition of its public expression is


that it be sufficiently indirect and garbled that it is capable of two readings, one

of which is innocuous. (Ibid.: 19, 157)

This, I believe, is exactly what is enacted in the exegetical narrative before

us: the public transcript is dramatized in Jacob’s understanding of the

events; the defeated Esau enacts the hidden transcript of revenge and defi-

ance. As with any dominated group, life under Roman oppression forced

the Jews to display external submission while they aspired to revenge.The

dialogical reading not only joins these various transcripts but enables the

reader to experience them together.

6. Sororal Sympathy, or, the MerryWives of Jacob

I previously remarked that the narrative situation in this genre creates a

certain ‘‘advantage’’ for the reader who approaches the exegetical narrative

with knowledge of the biblical text. However, this advantage is not neces-

sarily constant nor stable.The narrator can confirm the expectations of his

readers or thwart them; he can create tension or surprise by manipulating

and playing with the accepted and innovative meanings. Sometimes, as we

have seen, this knowledge creates an ironic clash of perspectives (Sternberg

1979: 142) between the reader and the characters, and sometimes it can be

used against him, as we can see in my next example:

Wherein did Rachel’s modesty lie?—It is written, ‘‘And Jacob told Rachel

that he was her father’s brother and that he was Rebecca’s son’’ (Gen.

29:12).Was he her father’s brother, was he not the son of her father’s sister?

He said to her, ‘‘Will you marry me?’’ She replied to him, ‘‘Yes, but father is a

cheat, and you will not be able [to hold your own] against him.’’ He said, ‘‘I am

his brother in deception.’’ ‘‘But,’’ Rachel said to him, ‘‘is it permitted to the righ-

teous to indulge in deceitfulness?’’—‘‘Yes,’’ [he replied]. ‘‘As it is written, ‘With

the pure you act in purity, butwith the perverse be cunning’ ’’ (2 Sam. 22:27).

‘‘Wherein,’’ he asked her, ‘‘does his trickery lie?’’—‘‘I have,’’ she said, ‘‘a sister

who is older than I, and perhaps he will bring her before you.’’ [Thereupon] he

entrusted her with certain identifying signs.

While Leah was being led into [the bridal chamber], she thought, ‘‘My sister

will now be shamed,’’ [and so] she entrusted her [with] these very [signs]. And

this accounts for the Scriptural text: ‘‘And it came to pass in the morning that,

behold, it was Leah’’ (29:25), which seems to imply that until then she was

not Leah!? But, rather on account of the signs which Jacob had entrusted to

Rachel who then confided them to Leah, he did not know who she was until that

moment.16

16. Baba Batra 123a (BabylonianTalmud; see Epstein 1961: 511), according to Hamburg 165,

with corrections of Munich 95, Paris 1137, Escorial G-I-3.


The biblical story of the substitution of Leah for Rachel is Jacob’s pun-

ishment for his own replacement of his elder brother Esau. However, this

meaning is not explicated by the narrator, nor does it become apparent

to Jacob himself except in belated retrospect. In fact, it would seem that

in the present state of the biblical text, with Isaac bestowing upon Jacob

once again the blessing of Abraham prior to his hasty departure for Haran

(Gen. 28:1–4), the narrator almost encourages the reader to forget Jacob’s

duplicity and its consequences.17 An unsuspecting reader might at first con-clude that the narrator approves of Jacob’s duping his brother in order to

receive his designated blessing. In general, the narrator leaves both Jacob

and the reader in a state of ignorance about Jacob’s fate and the outcome

of his actions.

However, a more suspicious reader, and possibly one more attuned to

the ethical concerns of the biblical narrator, moves forward with a growing

feeling of apprehension and suspense. The suspicion that Jacob’s punish-

ment may be imminent is based upon the analogy between Jacob’s past

actions and his present situation. The reader may be alerted by the paral-

lel familial terms in the two stories. Leah and Rachel are presented to us

as ‘‘the elder and the younger’’ (Gen. 29:16), just as were the two brothers

(Gen. 27:42). Intimation turns to certainty when, after Laban’s trap has

been sprung, Jacob protests, ‘‘Why did you deceive me’’ (Gen. 29:25), in

language reminiscent of Isaac’s remonstration—‘‘But he answered, Your

brother came with deceit and took away your blessing’’ (Gen. 27:35). In any

case, whether the reader has been attentive or not, there is little room to

doubt that we hear the narrator’s judgment in Laban’s words—all themore

stinging for their indirectness: ‘‘it is not the practice in our place to give the

younger before the older’’ (Gen. 29:26).18 Just as Jacob took advantage ofIsaac’s blindness and tricked him in his bed with a disguise in order to sup-

plant his elder brother, so is he punished by the switching of the younger

sister with the elder in the darkness of his own bed through dissembling and

disguise.

The midrashic narrative is not only aware of this analogy but once again

constructs its own world upon it. For example, the dialogue between Jacob

and Rachel quoted above from the exegetical narrative resembles the con-

versation between Jacob and hismother in the biblical text. In both, a semi-

17. Biblical scholars have long recognized that these verses (Gen. 27:46–28:9) constitute a

later interpolation in the text and provide ‘‘an alternative reason for Jacob’s flight from his

family to his uncle Laban in Haran . . . that minimizes family conflict and gives a positive,

theological reason for the journey, that is, so that Jacob can find a suitable wife within the

family circle’’ (Brueggemann 1982: 236; see also von Rad 1985: 276).

18. This could be a further example of what Sternberg (1985: 48–56) has called the Bible’s

penchant for foolproof composition.


otic ruse is planned, and just as Jacob receives a disguise whereby to dupe

his father, so too Rachel receives here a sign to thwart her father’s decep-

tion.Thus, the biblical narrative provides a frame wherein Jacob cheats his

father and is cheated by Laban.Within this frame, the exegetical narrative

takes place wherein Jacob attempts to deceive Laban and is deceived in

turn by Rachel.

Yet these similarities also point to certain salient differences. While the

exegetical narrative constructs its story world upon this analogy, it seems

that the roles are partly reversed. In the biblical text, Rebekah proposes

the deception, while Jacob demurs. Here, it is Jacob who proposes the

ruse against the father figure, while Rachel expresses doubts. And while

Jacob’s doubts in the biblical text were merely of a tactical nature (‘‘But

my brother Esau is a hairy man and I am smooth-skinned’’ [Gen. 27:11]),

Rachel’s reservations are based onmoral grounds. It would seem that while

Jacob attempts to duplicate his mother’s machinations—using once again

a semiotic ruse to deceive Rachel’s father as he used one against his own

(see Fokkelman 1991: 123–41; Pardes 1992: 60–78)—Rachel is presented as

his morally superior sister in trickery.

Basing itself upon the double familial reference of Jacob, as ‘‘her father’s

brother’’ and as ‘‘Rebecca’s son,’’ the midrash creates an intricate web of

deceit and trickery. To Rachel’s innocent question: ‘‘may the righteous in-

dulge in deceit?’’ Jacob replies with a verse that legitimates his duplicity as

self-defense. But this is just the devil quoting Scripture. The reader knows

what Rachel does not, that this same Jacob has recently cheated his old

and infirm father without the benefit of any verse. Jacob may be described

as blameless (tam [Gen. 25:27])—but he is certainly not a guileless inno-cent.19With the quotation of the verse, Jacob becomes themeans of his ownundoing. If it is permissible to deceive the cunning, then not only may he

cheat Laban—but Rachel may deceive him.

Now, what is the relationship between the various characters and the

reader? The biblical narrator keeps his cards rather close to his chest. Even

if the suspicious reader proceedswith a growing anticipation of Jacob’s pun-

ishment—strengthened by the analogy between Jacob’s substitution for his

brother and Laban’s swapping of his daughters—the overall effect is one of

surprise, exemplified by the narrator’s use of free indirect thought, ‘‘behold,

it was Leah’’ (Gen. 29:25), which works ‘‘to align the reader’s viewpoint and

process of discovery with Jacob’s’’ (Sternberg 1985: 243). In contrast, the

19. The reader may well be aware of the verse previous to that quoted by Jacob (‘‘with the

loyal you deal loyally, with the blameless [tamim], blamelessly’’ [2 Sam. 22:26]), which con-tains an oblique (and now ironic) reference to Jacob himself, who is described by the biblical

narrator as blameless (tam).


exegetical narrative begins with an informational gap between the reader

and the characters.The midrashic reader knows of the impending denoue-

ment, while Jacob remains blissfully unaware of his imminent fate.20 It isnot the question ‘‘will Jacob be punished?’’ that informs the reading dynam-

ics of prospection but, rather, the when and the how of it. Here something

surprising occurs, and events begin to go awry. Rachel forewarns Jacob

concerning Laban’s plans to switch the younger daughter with the elder,

just as his own mother warned him of Isaac’s intention to bless Esau (thus

foreshadowing Rachel’s role as Rebekah’s daughter in trickery). If the bib-

lical narrator carefully manipulated the reader, scattering hints in order to

create an effect of surprise, it seems that hismidrashic counterpart has spent

all of his ammunition at once. At this point, the midrashic Jacob knows

more than his biblical equivalent. The narrator has effectively erased the

cognitive distance between the reader and the character and, by leveling the

playing field, has created the possibility of an alternate narrative denoue-

ment. Thus, a new gap is created, which does not exist in the biblical text.

How can Jacob be tricked (which he must be if the story is to achieve ideo-

logical closure) if he is forewarned? The readermay anticipate Jacob’s pun-

ishment, but with the unexpected revelation of Laban’s treachery, it is not

clear how this will happen.This is a clear example of canonicity and breach,

of how the exegetical narrative can interrupt and threaten to subvert the

anticipated telos of the biblical story.

There is here, moreover, a further twist in this game of disclosure and

opacity.While we do not know how Jacob can be tricked if forewarned, wedo know that Jacob the deceiver must be deceived. According to the genericconventions of the exegetical narrative, the midrashic plot must realign

itself with the horizon of expectations constituted by the biblical narrative.

Therefore, Rachel’s plan to thwart Laban’s deception must fail because, if

successful, it would by necessity forestall Jacob’s punishment. Thus, a sec-

ond gap is opened; just as we do not know how Jacob can be deceived, we

also do not know how Rachel’s plan will fail, as ultimately it must.

The most significant surprise in this narrative, however, is the major role

played by Rachel.While in the biblical story she is a pawn passed between

two men, here she becomes the dominant character instigating all of the

plot’s twists. Even within the parameters of the midrashic fictional world,

we do not expect that the very same character who warns Jacob will be

revealed as his sister in trickery and become the source of his downfall.The

reader’s superiority is reestablished only when the narrator informs him or

20. As in the previous exegetical narrative we examined, here too Jacob remains oblivious

to the hidden motivations of the other characters around him.


her (but not Jacob) of the new sisterly solidarity (‘‘she thought, my sister will

now be shamed’’). Once again Jacob is cognitively inferior to the reader as

well as to Rachel.

Rachel’s plot is also modeled on the biblical analogy but with a twist.

As Jacob’s sister in duplicity, she instigates a plan to change the normative

order and choice of the head of the family.Yet, unlike Jacob, who betrayed

his brother for his own benefit, her concern for her elder sister critically

illuminates Jacob as self-serving. She fails to trick her father only because

of her feelings for her sister, while Jacob succeeded in duping his father

because of lack of feelings for his brother. It is fitting, therefore, that he who

used a sign to switch identities with his brother is punished in kind when

Rachel uses a sign to switch identities with her sister.

At first sight, the substitution of Rachel for Laban, of female trickery for

male, seems a reflex of rabbinic androcentric ideology.Why make Rachel

the rod of divine retribution? Trickery and deception are, indeed, common

biblical motifs, especially related to the figure of the woman, who, in the

words of Kohelet, ‘‘is all traps and her heart is snares’’ (Eccles. 7:26).The list

of trickster figures in the Bible is long and illustrious, and while it includes

both male21 and female characters, there does seem to be a certain prepon-derance of female tricksters. Of the eleven or so female characters in the

book of Genesis, at least six are trickster figures.22 The question that hasbeen much discussed of late is whether this numerical imbalance indicates

that women, in the eyes of the biblical narrator, are devious by nature or

merely by circumstance. In general, it would seem that trickery is used by

both male and female characters to influence the course of events when

they are in a position of social disadvantage. Given the male-centeredness

of much of the Bible, ‘‘it is not surprising that fewer examples occur of men

working to gain compliance with their wishes through trickery’’ (Steinberg

1988: 8).

We could still ask, however, are there certain contours to the female trick-

ster in the Bible? As various scholars have remarked, the list of trickster

women includes those who are denigrated for their actions, like Potiphar’s

wife and Delilah, and those who are not, like Tamar, Rachav, and Yael

(Fuchs 1985, 1988).The distinguishing point seems to be thatwhen awoman

uses deception merely to further her own ends or when her actions are per-

ceived as undermining the patriarchal order, she is deprecated, but when

her actions promote providential plans or national aspirations of continuity,

21. For example, Abraham in Genesis 12 and the brothers of Dinah in Genesis 34.

22. Lot’s daughters, Rebekah, Rachel, Tamar, and Potiphar’s wife. I exclude from this list

those women who appear merely as names or who have no independent stories of their own.


she is praised (or at least justified) in her actions. Thus, as Carole Fontaine

(1988: 99) has remarked, patriarchy absorbs and neutralizes the ambiva-

lent of the powerful female, rendering her acceptable (i.e., subservient) to

the dominant ideology. In addition, whether the woman in question uses

deception to further goals approved by patriarchy or is depicted as threat-

ening those goals, ‘‘the strategy for effective action most closely associated

withwomen is amorally ambivalent one.This strategy is often coupledwith

the motif of sexual exchange, or takes place in contexts where ‘Woman the

Provider,’ associated with food, drink, and shelter turns deceiver, thereby

rendering the familiar nurturing figure suddenly dangerous to unsuspecting

males who fall into her ‘snares’ ’’ (ibid: 85).

Rachel in the midrash has obvious affinities with these characters. She

resorts to trickery because of her marginal status, and her act of sexual

exchange is certainly morally ambivalent.Yet there is one important point

that distinguishes the midrash’s Rachel from her biblical foremothers, who

usually deceivemen for the benefit of anotherman or to further tribal inter-

ests of continuity. Rachel’s ruse is neither for personal gain nor intended to

promote national goals but is, rather, motivated by an intensely personal

and moral concern.23 I cannot think of a single biblical story (with the pos-sible exception of Ruth) that describes a woman who deceives a man for the

benefit of another woman and even receives the narrator’s approval. But

this is exactly the situation here in the midrash.

In normative patriarchal society, men create bonds between themselves

through women, who are passed fromman toman, from father to husband,

from Laban to Jacob. ‘‘The trade that organizes patriarchal society,’’ in the

words of Luce Irigaray (1981: 107), ‘‘takes place exclusively among men.

Women, signs, goods, currency, all pass from one man to another.’’ This

is the situation in the biblical text, but it would seem that the midrashic

narrative contains traces of an intent which is less than normally androcen-

tric, possibly redefining reality from a female perspective.24 Not only doesRachel use Jacob in order to create a bond with her sister, but it is Jacob the

man who literally is passed from woman to woman and from bed to bed.

We may have here a glimpse of a subversive counterdiscourse, where men

are objects passed between women to further their own personal interests.

In fact, a later rendition of this text, in a stunning reversal of Jacob’s own

deception, actually places Rachel under Jacob’s nuptial bed, speaking in

23. Jeffery Rubenstein (1999: 275–77) recently showed how the category of shame is an

important aspect of the cultural formation of the rabbis in Babylonia and a prevalent theme

in narratives of conflict within the rabbinic academy. It is, therefore, interesting to note that

not only is this theme muted in the Palestinian version of this tale but that such a crucial

aspect of the self-understanding of the rabbis is adopted here by a woman.

24. Van Dijk-Hemmes (1993: 136) uses these terms in his discussion of the book of Ruth.


place of her sister25—as if to say ‘‘the voice is the voice of Rachel, yet thehands are the hands of Leah’’ (compare Gen. 27:22).

Feminine treachery uses the weapons of the dominant group for its own

purposes.26 If patriarchal ideology guards its hegemony by means of itscontrol of the production and circulation of semiotic systems, here Rachel

achieves her personal ends through this same semiotic economy. In the exe-

getical narrative, Jacob uses signs in an attempt to stabilize identity, in an

ironic reversal of his biblical tactic, where he used signs to confuse his iden-

tity with that of his brother. But, as Umberto Eco (1976: 58) has said, a sign

is anything that can be used in order to lie, and Rachel here uses these very

same signs to switch identities with her sister. Once again, she is Jacob’s

twin in trickery.Yet she does not so much fail in her plan to thwart Laban’s

deception, as I intimated earlier, as use his plan to further her own ends.Not

only is Rachel’s failure necessary to punish Jacob, but it is her self-imposed

failure that so forthrightly criticizes Jacob’s previous success. It is the male

tricksters, Jacob and Laban, whose successes count as a moral indictment

against them.

In this sense, although Rachel repeats Jacob’s trickery by exchanging

identities with her elder sister, the exegetical narrative can be seen as a cor-

rective to the biblical story.Her tale exemplifies how the communitas of Israel(the birth of the twelve sons of Jacob) could have been established. It is

here that the importance of her trickery lies. As Victor Turner and others

have suggested, not only is the power of the trickster, or the ‘‘powers of the

weak’’ as he calls them, defined in opposition to those who make the rules,

but trickster figures are often ‘‘unrecognized, yet necessary in moments of

crisis’’ to overcome a culture’s own dichotomies (Bal 1988: 137). It is those

who are not identifiedwith the hegemonic structures who often perform the

service for the whole society ‘‘by reminding it of communitas, of fundamentalhuman values which the social order violates in everyday practice. . . . Inso-

far as females in biblical narrative are also social marginals, often morally

ambiguous, or in violation of cultural categories, they may be available to

the society as a means of renewal or change’’ (Ashley 1988: 108; see also

Turner 1969: 183–85; Grottanelli 1983: 138).

Thus, perhaps the most subversive aspect of this midrash is the manipu-

lation of the reader. In the biblical story, the narrator punishes Jacob

25. Lamentations Rabbah, Petichta 24 (in Buber 1899: 14b). For an analysis of this source,

see Hasan-Rokem 2000: 126–29. Concerning the ‘‘female voice’’ in this text, she (ibid.: 129)

states: ‘‘This is not the loud voice of the textual establishment but a clandestine, concealed

voice, finding expression in indirect and subversive paths.’’

26. ‘‘Like all subversive thought, the counter-discourse is intensely—if surreptitiously—

parasitic upon its antagonist. . . . For in their opposition to the dominant, counter-discourses

function to survey its limits and internal weaknesses’’ (Terdiman 1985: 68).


for cheating his father, presents the foreign Laban as a rogue, and above

all teaches the reader a lesson in divine justice. In other words, despite

the manipulations and machinations of certain characters, the hegemonic

ethnic and moral hierarchies are reinstated. The situation in the exegeti-

cal narrative is different. The revelation of Rachel’s inner world creates

a negative analogy between female solidarity and fraternal discord. This

feminine perspective emphasizes the difference between Jacob and Rachel

when either comes to establish his or her identity: he through conflict and

she through unity, he in contest and she in empathy. The dialogic reading

creates an identification of the reader with the sisters against Jacob, for in

order to achieve the ideological closure of punishing Jacob, the readermust

identify with Rachel and justify her subversive actions. In the end, Jacob is

punished not because of Laban’s trickery, as in the Bible, but rather because

of Rachel’s moral superiority.

7. Duping the Reader: The Sacrifice of Isaac

In the examples discussed so far, the reader’s foreknowledge of the bibli-

cal text—his or her ‘‘unnatural’’ superiority to the narrated world—tends

to align the reader with the narrator against the characters, a coalition

that usually creates an ironic perspective. By its very structure as rewriting,

the exegetical narrative tends to favor this perspectival coalition; but as we

saw in the previous text, the dialogic composition enables the narrator to

manipulate the various points of view. In the last text I wish to examine,

the narrator uses the reader’s foreknowledge against him, as a trap. If else-

where themidrashic gap filling enables the reader to learn what he does not

know, in this case the narrator takes advantage of the fact that the reader

cannot forget what he already knows.

‘‘And he said, ‘do not raise your hand against the boy, or do anything to

him, for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your

son, your favored one, from me’ (Gen. 22:12).

Where was the knife? Tears had fallen from the angels upon it and melted it. He

[Abraham] said, ‘‘Then I will strangle him.’’ He replied, ‘‘Do not raise your

hand against the boy.’’ ‘‘Let me extract some blood from him,’’ he pleaded. ‘‘Do

nothing [meuma] to him—inflict no blemish [moom] upon him,’’ He answered,‘‘for now I know’’—I have made it known to all that you love Me. ‘‘Since you

have not withheld your son, your favored one’’—So that you shouldn’t say,

‘‘All sufferings that do not affect one’s own person are not real,’’ I account this

deed as if I had bidden you to sacrifice yourself and you did not refuse.27

27. Genesis Rabbah 56:7 (Freedman 1983: 497).


The biblical verse that functions as the structural frame of this exegetical

narrative presents the climax of Abraham’s trial. He has obeyed all of God’s

instructions, even raising the knife to slaughter his son. At this moment, an

angel appears and proclaims that he has successfully passed the test. The

biblical narrator has firmly established the reader’s superiority vis-à-vis the

characters. From the first verse (Gen. 22:1), the reader knows that God is

only testing Abraham. However, this superiority is only partial. What the

reader does not know is if Abraham will summon the necessary conviction

to pass the test—is his fear of God greater than his love for Isaac?28As ErichAuerbach (1953: 11) has made clear, the narrator refuses to reveal to us the

inner world of his characters and ‘‘everything remains unexpressed.’’ This

cognitive gap is not closed until the verse that begins the midrashic text.

The dynamics of the biblical narrative is structured by this double gap.The

reader alone knows of the trial but not if Abraham will be willing to sacri-

fice his beloved son for his God.The narrative dynamics in the Bible serve

to create a balance between the reader and the character: we learn of Abra-

ham’s absolute faith, and Abraham learns of the divine test.The base verse

of the exegetical narrative closes both gaps simultaneously.

Like the first text we considered, this exegetical narrative also writes

between the lines of the biblical story and, by giving expression to the ‘‘fig-

ures of silence,’’ both preserves and remotivates the meaning of the cited

verses. Ostensibly, the events in the exegetical narrative are generated by

the contradiction between the previous verse, which states that ‘‘Abraham

picked up the knife to slay his son’’ (Gen. 22:10), and the base verse, which

mentions only Abraham’s hand (‘‘Do not raise your hand against the boy’’)

but not the knife itself. This variation is read by the midrash as indicating

that another event occurred between the grasping of the knife and the at-

tempted sacrifice. Moreover, why is Abraham further commanded to ‘‘do

nothing’’? Does this additional command suggest that he refused or ob-

jected to the first request to not raise his hand against his son? In other

words, from the perspective of the midrash, the base verse contains both

too much and too little information. It is to these questions that the exegeti-

cal narrative addresses itself when it states that when Abraham raised the

knife against his son, tears fell from the ministering angels and melted it.

The ministering angels observed the scene from on high and wept, and

their tears melted the knife.29 It could be that they are weeping in empathy

28. See Levenson 1993: 137. On the issue of whether the announcement that ‘‘God put Abra-

ham to the test’’ (Gen. 22:1) actually signals to the reader the implication that the act com-

manded will not be carried to completion, see the opposing views of von Rad (1985: 238–39)

and Levenson (1993: 125–38).

29. The motif of the weeping angels is both widespread and ancient. It first appears in the


with Abraham’s suffering or that they are unaware of the test and represent

here, as in other places, a very human misunderstanding of the events, a

type of dramatized reader.30 In any case, their tears cause an unexpectedintervention. The critical question is how Abraham understands this new

and surprising development. How does Abraham respond? He wants to

strangle his son or at least to maim him! At the very moment when the

reader has learned that Abraham was ready to sacrifice his son and Abra-

ham himself has (supposedly) learned that the divine command is only a

test, we expect to hear a sigh of relief, and yet now that all narrative tensions

are resolved, we are presented with a scene that borders on the grotesque,

with Abraham pleading to continue.The angels want to stop him but seem

unable to do so, while Abraham can stop—but does not want to.

This alternative development comes as a total surprise for the reader. As

we saw, the rhetoric of the biblical narrative is structured upon a double

dynamic: the reader progressively becomes convinced of Abraham’s com-

mitment and, therefore, expects a divine intervention that will proclaim

that he has passed the test. ‘‘Once the answer is in,’’ as Jon Levenson (1993:

137) has said, ‘‘the sacrifice can be called off.’’ The base verse represents

the climax of these expectations: the gap between the narrative viewpoints

is closed once Abraham learns of the trial and the reader learns of Abra-

ham’s absolute obedience. Precisely at the moment that the biblical narra-

tive closes the gap, the exegetical narrative interrupts the closure. It creates

an opposite reading dynamic to that of the biblical text, and as the reader

progresses, he understands the character less and less.

What could be the midrashic Abraham’s motivation? It is precisely be-

cause the character is not privy to the information that it is only a test that

he believes that the disappearance of his knife is a further obstacle he must

overcome on the way to obeyingGod’s command.Therefore, in his attempt

to overcome all obstacles—including the disappearance of the instrument

of slaughter—he refuses to desist, lest his halting be considered a failure.

What in the biblical story signifies the fulfillment of the test (the interven-

tion of the angel) becomes from Abraham’s limited perspective an addi-

tional trial.

The midrash has upset the delicate balance struck in the biblical text

between the two gaps we mentioned above.While the reader has become

convinced that Abraham is steadfast in his faith, Abraham himself believes

that all attempts to stop him are part of the trial itself and must be over-

Qumran document designated as 4QPseudo-Jubilees and undergoes various permutations

in rabbinic literature. See Attridge et al. 1994: 151; Kister 1994: 10.

30. See, for example, Genesis Rabbah 8:10, 53:14; Sanhedrin 38b (Babylonian Talmud).


come. It is his absolute and uncompromising obedience that urges him on.

By manipulating the complacency generated by the reader’s foreknowl-

edge, his certainty that events will unfold according to the canonical script,

the midrash has succeeded in creating the narrative possibility that Abra-

ham will in fact harm his son. For a moment it seems that the midrash has

derailed the biblical story, and we entertain the thought that Abraham is

unstoppable—out of control—and like the ministering angels, we want to

cry out and stop him.

The foreknowledge of the reader of the biblical text creates a dialogic

tension of a new sort.Usually, knowledge of the future reduces narrative sus-

pense, and we can focus on Abraham’s obedience without worrying about

the outcome. At the moment that the angel intervenes and calls for Abra-

ham to desist, the reader is confident that Abraham has fulfilled all expec-

tations. Sternberg (1985: 265) has pointed out two separate ways that the

narrator can deal with the narrative tension which results from the reader’s

knowledge or lack thereof:

The variations in disclosure fall between two polar dynamics, contrasting in the

viewpoint and experience allotted to the reader. The narrator may choose to

construct the reading sequence so as to imitate (or even to worsen) the conditions

of our suspenseful advance from present to future in life, exploiting the opacity

of time to human vision in order to multiply gaps, pit hope against fear, and

delay the resolution to the last possible moment. But he may equally exploit his

retrospective posture to turn the opacity of the future into artful transparency:

to play down suspense by revealing at an early point some normally inacces-

sible information about what lies ahead, whether by way of explicit or implicit

forecasting.

The biblical narrator adopts here the second way, while the exegetical nar-

rative adopts the first. But its purpose is not merely to defamiliarize the

biblical story or to delay the narrative resolution in order to generate sus-

pense. The midrash confronts here a cardinal problem: how to convince

the reader that Abraham was willing to perform the ultimate sacrifice even

though he never actually does so. As in Zeno’s paradox, there is always a

moment between the knife and the neck.The midrashic narrator builds his

plot upon the superiority of the reader but exploits it against him. At the

moment that the reader believes he has understood Abraham, suddenly a

new gap is opened, and the possibility arises that he will harm his son. From

the cognitive gap between the reader and the character, the midrash has

created a new narrative wherein the tension between divine omniscience

and human understanding has blurred the distinction between obedience

and defiance.


8. Conclusion

Every genre creates a unique coalition between the narrator, his story, and

the reader. I began by stating that the exegetical narrative poses a chal-

lenge to the narrator, and I have tried to show a number of ways whereby he

meets this challenge. No less important is the fact that this genre presents a

special challenge to its readers.To read dialogically is both to read one text

as both narrative and exegesis and also to read two texts as one, in stereo

as it were, with and against each other. ‘‘The resultant dynamic oscillation

between the two,’’ to quote Iser (1989: 237), ‘‘ensures that their oldmeanings

now become potential sources for new ones. It is such transformations that

give rise to the aesthetic dimension of the text, for what had long seemed

closed is now opened up again.’’

Generic forms are not fortuitous but embedded in certain and specific

cultural practices, situations, and institutions. The double structure of the

exegetical narrative creates not only a special hermeneutic but also a spe-

cial type of reader. It fosters a certain type of dialogic consciousness, of

being both inside and outside the text at the same time. And this seems to

me to be an apt description of rabbinic consciousness in late antiquity. In

order to realize its rhetorical structures and strategies, the reader must fol-

low two plots simultaneously, composing a new—third—story between its

lines. It is this tale, ‘‘the unwritten part,’’ in the words of Thackeray, that

is the most interesting because it turns reading into a kind of writing (Ray

1946: 391). It is through this double structure of motivation that the exegeti-

cal narrative performs what Doležel (1998: 213) has called ‘‘the most magic

of all transformations that fiction can accomplish: past made present.’’

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Dialogical Reading in the Rabbinic Exegetical Narrative-Poetics Today

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