Concepts of Scriptural Language in Midrash 75formation in both texts is a matter of what is found in a few verses them-
selves. Th e larger narratives of Numbers 11 and Judges 17 – 18 play no role in
the midrashic interpretation that the other three characteristics produced.
If one reads the entirety of Numbers 11, it quickly becomes clear that the
midrash does not attend to the narrative as a whole; many aspects of this
short story are nowhere hinted at in Numbers Rabbah §15.15: the Israelites’
complaints about their diet in the desert, Moses’s anger at the nation’s com-
plaints, the quail, and the plague, to name a few. Th is midrash remains a
midrash on a few verses from Numbers 11 and Judges 17 – 18 ( just as the fi rst
explanation related to these few verses of Numbers 11 along with one verse
from Ezekiel 38), not a holistic reading of the story that is Numbers 11.
As in the midrash that linked Numbers 11:26 with Ezekiel 38:17, the cru-
cial biblical text with which Numbers 11 is linked is not quoted. In fact, in
this case, it is not even alluded to. In the previous case, the words “Gog
and Magog” at least suggested what biblical passage contains the crucial
verse, but here the midrash does not even hint where the interpretive key
lies. To a reader not deeply familiar with the text of the Hebrew Bible, the
identifi cation of the lad as Gershom must seem arbitrary if not utterly ca-
pricious. But to the reader who knows biblical texts very thoroughly and
understands midrashic conceptions of how they function as hypertext, the
identifi cation seems not merely clever but inevitable, even natural. Since
the Bible is an intensely complex unity (characteristic 3), whose verses
(characteristic 2) must be read with great care so as to allow the emergence
of the myriad meanings that God has introduced into the text (character-
istic 1), the linkages between Numbers 11:27 and Judges 17:1 and 18:30 lead
directly to the midrash’s conclusion.
Th ese few examples from a single midrash hardly begin to suggest the
range of methods used by the classical rabbis to construct their interpreta-
tions, and in any event, surveying all those exegetical methods is not the
concern of this chapter. I have not, furthermore, touched on the extent to
which midrashim attempt to link extrabiblical traditions to biblical texts,
though this is a crucial aspect of many midrashim.20 What I hope to have
made clear is how the rabbis regard the Bible’s language as essentially, even
ontologically, diff erent from normal language. Because the Bible’s language
is divine, it functions radically diff erently from normal human language,
and it demands to be read in ways that refl ect this radical diff erence. Some
later Jewish thinkers and interpreters accept this proposition, extending the
notion of the radical ontological diff erence between scriptural and non-
scriptural language even further.21 Others reject it, insisting that scripture