66 Benjamin D. Sommer
scripture were becoming common among Jews throughout the world, and
the era in which specifi cally midrashic interpretations were produced came
to an end.6
Four Characteristics of Biblical Language and Text
One of most important and distinctive characteristics of midrash is its view
of scriptural language. Indeed, the midrashic conception of scriptural lan-
guage is the most important engine that drives midrashic interpretation
forward. In what follows, I sketch out this conception and give a few ex-
amples of the sort of interpretations it produces.7 For midrashic interpret-
ers, four characteristics of scripture, and especially of scriptural language,
are of crucial importance.8
Characteristic 1. Th e classical rabbis believe that the Bible’s language is
divine language. Th e Torah is the word of God; the remaining books of the
Bible are divinely inspired. Consequently, their language is diff erent from
human language, no matter how similar it seems on the surface. When a
human being says something, she generally means one thing. Perhaps she
is punning or telling a joke, in which case she means two diff erent things
in this one utterance; or perhaps she is a poet or a particularly fi ne novel-
ist, in which case she might mean three or four things in a single utterance.
But the general rule is that a human being puts a fairly limited number of
meanings into an utterance: a human means one, two, maybe three, very
rarely four things when she says or writes something. But God’s language is
diff erent. God can pack huge amounts of meaning into an utterance. Scrip-
tural language, on the surface, may seem similar to, say, Homer’s Odyssey
or Justinian’s legal code, but in fact it is supercharged with meaning. Th e
challenge, then, is to fi nd keys to unlock some of the additional meanings
that are not so obvious at fi rst reading.9 For example, a midrash might fo-
cus intensely on each word of a verse, presuming that each one contains
a whole, complete thought that can be unpacked as its own sentence or
clause. Further, the midrashic interpreters take advantage of the fact that
Hebrew in their era was written without vowels, so that biblical texts con-
tained only consonants.10 Th ey would at times propose a new (or, better, an
additional) vocalization of a text, thus discovering two diff erent meanings
lurking in a verse or phrase.
Characteristic 2. Th e rabbis believe that the main unit of expression in
the Bible is the verse or a group of two or three successive verses. Th ey are