Concepts of Scriptural Language in Midrash 69limit the interpreter, because such thinking would point the interpreter
toward surface context alone. Th e surface context would suggest various
meanings which might be legitimate ones intended by the divine author;
but those were unlikely to be the deepest or most interesting meanings, and
for the classical rabbis scripture was above all interesting and deep.
Producing meaning from any utterance (whether a poem or a narrative
or a note from one’s spouse about what to pick up from the supermarket
on the way home) is a matter of contextualizing the utterance properly. For
the rabbis, the correct context of a biblical verse includes not only, and not
even primarily, the local context (as it would for a medieval rabbinic in-
terpreter or for a modern literary reader) — that is, the correct context is
not the poem or narrative in which the verse appears. Th e context, rather,
is the whole Bible; or, rather, the context includes individual verses from
throughout scripture. Th e challenge, then, was to fi gure out which verses
elsewhere in the Bible were related to the verse under consideration.
Characteristic 4. To the extent that a midrashic interpreter wanted to
unpack some of the supercharged meaning that God loaded into a single
biblical verse, he16 needed to fi gure out which verses in other books re-
late directly to the verse under discussion — because while any verse in the
Bible was potentially related, only some verses were in fact related. How,
then, does the interpreter make the relevant connections? A given verse
might contain a rare word, a hard phrase, some elements that do not seem
to fi t easily in their immediate context. Th ose textual oddities may appear
in another verse elsewhere in scripture or may recall some other verse. Th e
oddity suggests that the two verses are connected with each other — that is,
that reading them side by side, or reading one in light of the other, might
produce some insight or allow one to glean an additional piece of informa-
tion that was initially not clear from either verse by itself. Of course, to
understand the fi rst verse in light of the second, it will oft en be necessary to
relate the second verse to a third verse. In such a case, only when the third
verse is added to the hypertextual matrix will the relevance of the second
verse to the fi rst become clear. Unfortunately for the reader of midrash, the
text of a given midrash may simply assume that the reader knows that one
has to understand the second verse in light of the third; the midrashic text
may not explicitly mention the third verse at all. Th is can create the ap-
pearance of a non sequitur to the modern reader who does not realize that
elsewhere in rabbinic literature another scholar has connected the second
verse to the third.17