Free Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash by Daniel Boyarin

The reading is accomplished by bringing together other texts which relate to the same subject, the behavior of God toward Israel in the wilderness. These texts, which form a semantic field or paradigm, are reinscribed in a new narrative, in a new syntagmatic structure, by the midrashist. The new narrative specifies and concretizes the contexts in which the metaphorical statements distributed throughout the canon function.

    My thrust here is not to set up a taxonomy of syntagmatic versus paradigmatic midrash, so much as to unsettle this distinction. That is to say, by identifying these two structures as realizations of the same underlying hermeneutic idea where previous scholars have not seen a structural connection between these different subgenres of midrash, I believe that I draw nearer to an adequate characterization of the category "midrash" as a method of intertextual reading. The specifications or concretizations are essentially the same, whether the verses are organized into a story as in the second example, or into a paradigm as in the first. The essential hermeneutic moment is in both cases, "This is a verse made rich in meaning from many places," whether the enriching is by syntagmatic or paradigmatic means, and for me this is a synecdoche of midrash as a whole. Paradigmatic and syntagmatic structures are both used to accomplish the same task of quoting other verses in the context of the verse to be interpreted.

    The verses of the Bible function for the rabbis much as do words in ordinary speech. They are a repertoire of semiotic elements that can be recombined into new discourse, just as words are recombined constantly into new discourse. Just as in a lexicon words are placed into juxtaposition revealing semantic similarities and differences, so in the midrashic text, semantic similarities and differences between texts are revealed via new juxtapositions. Just as the words of any language can be placed into new syntagmatic relations, so can the verses of the Bible.
    Such use of higher levels of discourse as elements of further discourse has been discussed with regard to the use of the proverb in narrative by Galit HasanRokem:

    It seems that the main difference between the quotation and the proverb consists of the difference in the systems to which the speaker relates when he interjects the text into the new context. All of the proverbs of one ethnic group comprise the proverb repertoire of that group. Each single proverb exists in the Saussurian langue aspect, that is, as a paradigmatic unit with the potential of being applied in parole , of being put to actual use. In quoting, on the other hand, the speaker refers to an already existing specific parole , which he applies to a new, intertextual parole . It is not possible to speak of a repertoire of quotations, since any text, poetic or nonpoetic, regardless of formal, contextual, or structural characteristics, may become a quotation. 23
    HasanRokem speaks of the ambiguous status of the proverb in language. It belongs to langue in its aspect as a unit in a paradigm of proverbial units in the culture; however, it also belongs to an already existing parole in that it is quoted from a previous discourse. While she expressly distinguishes between proverbs and quotations, claiming that quotations do not form a repertoire, it seems that in midrash the Bible can be understood precisely as a repertoire of quotations in this sense. The opposition between the Bible as parole and as langue is therefore unsettled. On the one hand, obviously, the Bible is a parole , and quotation from it appears as the injecting of one parole into another. On the other hand, the Bible as virtually the only source of quotations in the midrash, and a closed and wellknown corpus, does take on the aspect of langue , in the sense that HasanRokem uses the term. Quoting from the Bible resembles an act of selecting from a repertoire. The langue like nature of the biblical text for the rabbis is