right, 6 but one for reading itself.
Now this view of authority gives us, as Hartman has realized, a powerful nonreductive way of reading the Bible. 7 If gaps, contradictions, otherness, dialogue are characteristic of all literary texts, then it will not surprise or disturb us to encounter them in the text which is the very prototype of Western literature, the Bible. As argued by Sternberg in a text anything but pious, the Bible encodes a divine author. In our culture, truth claim and knowledge of what cannot be known is an oxymoron—one signals historiography, the other fiction, but "in the Bible's sociocultural context, . . . truth claim and free access to information go together owing to a discourse mechanism so basic that no contemporary would need to look around for it—the appeal to divine inspiration.'' 8 It follows then that God must be understood as the implied author of the Torah. This is not a theological or dogmatic claim but a semiotic one. That is to say that it does not matter for our purposes here if the inscribing of God as author of the Torah is a product of human work and therefore a fiction or an effect of actual divine authority. If God is the implied author of the Bible, then the gaps, repetitions, contradictions, and heterogeneity of the biblical text must be read , as a central part of the system of meaning production of that text. In midrash the rabbis respond to this invitation and challenge.
God, the implied author of the narrative of the Torah, has willingly, as it were, encoded into His text the very kinds of dialogue that all of His epigones were destined willynilly to encode into theirs. As with all literature, so with the
Torah, it is precisely the fault lines in the text, the gaps that its author has left, which enable reading. The argument of this chapter is that midrash enters into these interstices by exploring the ways in which the Bible can read itself. The famous indeterminacy of midrashic reading—its allowance of several possibilities equally—will be understood as a figure for the possibility of several ways of filling in the gaps. 9 In the first example of an extended reading here presented, we will see precisely how this structure can be located in the text.
GapFilling and Midrashic Indeterminacy
The concept of the gap is a very important one in theories which attend to the work of the reader in the processing of the narrative text. Any such text cannot but leave out much detail, including much that is vital to a construction of the story and the characters. The reader must fill in the gaps, forming hypotheses about what is left out of the text. This notion has been much elaborated in varying theoretical frameworks by several recent critics. 10 The Bible is notorious for the paucity of detail of certain sorts within its narrative. Erich Auerbach described this as being "fraught with background". The gaps are those silences in the text which call for interpretation if the reader is to "make sense" of what happened, to fill out the plot and the characters in a meaningful way. This is precisely what midrash does by means of its explicit narrative expansions. I am extending the application of the term "gap" here to mean any element in the textual system of the Bible which demands interpretation for a coherent construction of the story, that is, both gaps in the narrow sense, as well as contradictions and repetitions, which indicate to the reader that she must fill in something that is not given in the text in order to read it. The reason for broadening the extension of the term is that ail of these textual phenomena, when read synchronically, turn out to function similarly; that is, they are resolved by assuming that something has been left out of the text which can be restored by a more or less motivated activity of the reader. There is even a native rabbinic saying for this quality of the text: "this verse cries out, 'interpret me!'"
In our first example, we will see how
Now this view of authority gives us, as Hartman has realized, a powerful nonreductive way of reading the Bible. 7 If gaps, contradictions, otherness, dialogue are characteristic of all literary texts, then it will not surprise or disturb us to encounter them in the text which is the very prototype of Western literature, the Bible. As argued by Sternberg in a text anything but pious, the Bible encodes a divine author. In our culture, truth claim and knowledge of what cannot be known is an oxymoron—one signals historiography, the other fiction, but "in the Bible's sociocultural context, . . . truth claim and free access to information go together owing to a discourse mechanism so basic that no contemporary would need to look around for it—the appeal to divine inspiration.'' 8 It follows then that God must be understood as the implied author of the Torah. This is not a theological or dogmatic claim but a semiotic one. That is to say that it does not matter for our purposes here if the inscribing of God as author of the Torah is a product of human work and therefore a fiction or an effect of actual divine authority. If God is the implied author of the Bible, then the gaps, repetitions, contradictions, and heterogeneity of the biblical text must be read , as a central part of the system of meaning production of that text. In midrash the rabbis respond to this invitation and challenge.
God, the implied author of the narrative of the Torah, has willingly, as it were, encoded into His text the very kinds of dialogue that all of His epigones were destined willynilly to encode into theirs. As with all literature, so with the
Torah, it is precisely the fault lines in the text, the gaps that its author has left, which enable reading. The argument of this chapter is that midrash enters into these interstices by exploring the ways in which the Bible can read itself. The famous indeterminacy of midrashic reading—its allowance of several possibilities equally—will be understood as a figure for the possibility of several ways of filling in the gaps. 9 In the first example of an extended reading here presented, we will see precisely how this structure can be located in the text.
GapFilling and Midrashic Indeterminacy
The concept of the gap is a very important one in theories which attend to the work of the reader in the processing of the narrative text. Any such text cannot but leave out much detail, including much that is vital to a construction of the story and the characters. The reader must fill in the gaps, forming hypotheses about what is left out of the text. This notion has been much elaborated in varying theoretical frameworks by several recent critics. 10 The Bible is notorious for the paucity of detail of certain sorts within its narrative. Erich Auerbach described this as being "fraught with background". The gaps are those silences in the text which call for interpretation if the reader is to "make sense" of what happened, to fill out the plot and the characters in a meaningful way. This is precisely what midrash does by means of its explicit narrative expansions. I am extending the application of the term "gap" here to mean any element in the textual system of the Bible which demands interpretation for a coherent construction of the story, that is, both gaps in the narrow sense, as well as contradictions and repetitions, which indicate to the reader that she must fill in something that is not given in the text in order to read it. The reason for broadening the extension of the term is that ail of these textual phenomena, when read synchronically, turn out to function similarly; that is, they are resolved by assuming that something has been left out of the text which can be restored by a more or less motivated activity of the reader. There is even a native rabbinic saying for this quality of the text: "this verse cries out, 'interpret me!'"
In our first example, we will see how
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