Concepts of Scriptural Language in Midrash 77- On these newer methods of interpretation, which entailed new ways of con-
ceptualizing scripture, see the chapters by Meira Polliack and Robert Harris in
this volume. - Studies of the interpretive method of the rabbis are legion. In what follows,
I am deeply infl uenced by several scholars and their work: Isaac Heinemann, Dar-
khei Ha-Aggadah [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1970); Daniel Boyarin, Intertex-
tuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990);
many publications by James Kugel, especially In Potiphar’s House (San Francisco:
Torch, 1990) and “Two Introductions to Midrash,” in Midrash and Literature, ed.
Geoff rey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1986), 77 – 103 (originally in Prooft exts 3 [1983]: 131 – 55); and both the teaching and
writing of Michael Fishbane, among whose essays those found in Th e Garments
of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
- and Th e Exegetical Imagination: On Jewish Th ought and Th eology (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1998) are especially relevant.
- In identifying these four characteristics, I am infl uenced by James Kugel,
who has famously identifi ed four assumptions of ancient Jewish and Christian in-
terpreters of scripture generally. Th e interpreters of whom Kugel speaks include,
but are not limited to, the classical rabbis who produced the midrash. Th e four as-
sumptions Kugel describes are:
(1) Th e Bible is a fundamentally cryptic document, which is in need of espe-
cially close and careful reading.
(2) Th e Bible is fundamentally relevant, so that it speaks to contemporary
concerns.
(3) Th e Bible is perfect and perfectly harmonious; it contains no self-
contradictions.
(4) Scripture is divinely sanctioned, of divine provenance, or divinely in-
spired.
Th ese four assumptions are laid out in many of Kugel’s works; see, e.g., Th e Bible as
It Was (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997), 17 – 23, and
Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as It Was at the Start of the Common Era
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 14 – 19. While the four characteristics
I discuss are not the same as these four assumptions, Kugel’s infl uence on my ap-
proach is clear. - Later Jewish mystics accurately summarized this characteristic of the mid-
rashic view of scriptural language when they said, “Th ere are seventy facets to the
Torah.” Th is saying appears oft en in medieval texts such as works by Nahman-
ides and the Zohar, as well as in late-medieval/early-modern works such as Isaiah
Horowitz’s Shenei Luh.ot Ha-Berit. (Th ough oft en associated with the classical rab-
bis, this phrase appears only once in classical rabbinic literature, in Numbers Rab-
bah 13.15 – 16.) - Toward the end of the fi rst millennium, scribes invented a system of dots