274 Shalom Carmy
appear to be confl icting passages, allocated to several diff erent sections of
the Torah, can add up to one message. But we can also take his work as a
response to a diff erent question: Why is there a duality of peshat and de-
rash? Why are there multiple and sometimes divergent levels within tradi-
tional Jewish exegesis? Th is latter question was immanent in the tradition:
sooner or later it was bound to arise and command the attention of tradi-
tional commentators independently of modern academic study.
Th e term omnisignifi cance has become popular in recent years to char-
acterize a basic presupposition of traditional Jewish exegesis. For our pur-
poses, this means that no feature of the biblical text, however minor it ap-
pears to be, is beneath the consideration of the commentator. Some votaries
of peshat are inclined to identify this orientation with midrash (think of Ibn
Ezra): within their peshat universe, certain details of orthography, elegant
variation (i.e., parallelism), redundancy, deviation from predictable vocab-
ulary or word order, even the arrangement of material, do not deserve the
pashtan’s attention. Others (think of the 19th-century eastern European
rabbinic exegete Meir Leibush Weiser, better known as Malbim) insist that
true fealty to peshat forbids the reader to pass over these phenomena.
Th e very existence of peshat as a category of interpretation in tension
with rabbinic tradition asserts the will to omnisignifi cance or at least mul-
tiplicity of signifi cance. If, for example, the word l ’olam is normatively in-
terpreted as “for an extended period of time [until the Jubilee],” then the
fact that the Torah chose a word that could plausibly mean “forever” is ir-
relevant unless one assumes that identifying the normative interpretation
does not exhaust the reader’s work. Increasing self-consciousness about
this point has contributed to the triumph of the “omnisignifi cant orien-
tation” among sophisticated traditional students of the Torah (including
some scholars affi liated with Orthodoxy and other students interested in
Tanakh who are not members of any academic community/institution).
Th e same conservative tendency would encourage the traditional exegete
to give credence to several diff erent peshat options found among their pre-
decessors, on the grounds that the Torah may permit multiple interpreta-
tions (in the Talmudic phrase “these and those are the words of the living
God”)7 or, more prosaically, that the Torah chose language open to mul-
tiple interpretations, ambiguous language, because more than one inter-
pretation is valid. Assuming that some of the contentions associated with
biblical criticism highlight signifi cant features of the biblical text, hitherto
ignored or treated sporadically in the classical Jewish literature, tradition-
alists of this stripe would welcome the opportunity to develop new insights