Concepts of Scriptural Language in Midrash 67not especially interested in larger literary units, such as a whole poem or a
complete story, much less a whole biblical book.11 Th us, as Robert Harris
has emphasized to me, there is no conception of “Th e Binding of Isaac”
among the classical midrashic interpreters. Only in the Middle Ages, when
Jewish interpreters began thinking about longer textual units, does this
concept (or this famous term) appear in Jewish literature.12 For the rabbis,
the Bible is not so much a collection of poems, laws, and narratives. It is a
collection of verses.
Characteristic 3. Th e fi rst two conceptions of biblical language and text
work together to produce an especially crucial midrashic conception,
which is worth exploring in some detail: the Bible is unity, a single docu-
ment, but a unity of a unique kind. Stemming from the mind of God and
not merely from the mind of human authors, the Bible is an infi nitely com-
plex unity, in which all parts are related to each other. Any verse in the
Bible is potentially linked to any other verse, and not only to the verses
right next to it. James Kugel sums up this aspect of midrashic exegesis es-
pecially well:
Midrash is an exegesis of biblical verses, not of books. . . . Th ere simply is
no boundary encountered beyond that of the verse until one comes to the
borders of the canon itself — a situation analogous to certain political or-
ganizations in which there are no separate states, provinces, or the like but
only the village and the Empire. One of the things this means is that each
verse of the Bible is in principle as connected to its most distant fellow as
to the one next door. 13Th us, when discussing, say, Genesis 22:1, a midrashic interpreter may not
be particularly interested in the relationship of this verse to Genesis 22:2
and Genesis 22:3. To be sure, 22:1 is related to those verses from the same
local literary context, but it is just as closely related to verses found in Psalm
11 and Psalm 60, in Deuteronomy 6 and 16, in Isaiah 57 and Ecclesiastes 8.
Th ese seemingly more far-fl ung relationships interest the midrashic inter-
preter more than the rather obvious connections to other verses in Genesis
- Indeed, in Genesis Rabbah §59, the interpreters of Genesis 22:1 do not
for the most part contextualize this verse alongside other verses from Gen-
esis 22; they do not examine Genesis 22:1 within what postmidrashic inter-
preters would call the story of the binding of Isaac. Instead, they attend to
the verses I have just mentioned from Psalms, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and
Ecclesiastes, among others. When they do turn to a verse from Genesis, it