Free Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash by Daniel Boyarin Page B

"To Him who divided the Red Sea into parts" [Ps. 136:13]. It was piled up into stacks, as it is said: "And with the blast of Thy nostrils the waters were pried up" [Exod. 15:8]. It formed a sort of heap, as it is said: "The floods stood upright as a heap" [Exod. 15:8]. He extracted for them sweet water from the salt, as it is said: "He brought streams also out of the rock and caused waters to nm down like rivers [Ps. 78:16]. The sea congealed on both sides and became a sort of glass crystal, as it is said: "The deeps were congealed in the heart of the sea" [Exod. 15:8]. 28
    Each of the verses cited here comes from a poetic text that treats the splitting of the Red Sea. The midrashist has gathered all of these verses together, so that they may make the maximum impression on the hearer/reader. When each verse is encountered in its own place, as it were, its impact is relatively weak, but when all are encountered together, as a list of the ten miracles which God performed for the Israelites on this one occasion, the dramatic and pictorial effect is enhanced greatly. In the words of Towner himself, this is a "device for 'setting up' the scripture so that it can be seen and heard." 29 On the one hand, we might say we have a list of all of the verses which treat a certain subject in the salvation history, a kind of archive of traditions and interpretations, but it is the melding of these different texts into a
    single quasinarrative that makes this passage work as midrash and ultimately that gives each of the quoted verses its maximum power. In this example of the enumeration paradigm, we can detect the synchronic transition between narrative paradigm and paradigmatic narrative. The enumeration form is not, however, the only form which has this hermeneutic function of exposing the relations of similarity and difference between verses dealing with a similar event or subject. As we have seen above, the mashal has this function; there are other such structures as well. Indeed, I would argue that all of the generic patterns of midrash have this function of exposing and creating intertextual hermeneutic relations between different biblical texts.

    One of the most dramatic forms of paradigmatic intertextual dialogue is the realization of meanings through the confrontation of texts:

    Rabbi Shim'on ben Gamliel says, Come and see how beloved is Israel before HimWhoSpokeandtheWorldWas, for as they are beloved, He reversed the act of creation. He made the low into the high and the high into the low. Formerly, bread came up from the land, and dew came down from heaven, as it says, "A land of grain and wine, and His heavens drip dew" [Deut. 33:28]. But now the state of affairs is reversed. Bread began to come down from heaven and dew to go up from the land, as it says, "Behold I rain down for you bread from heaven [Exod. 16:4]—And the layer of dew went up" [Exod. 16:14]. 30 [Lauterbach, II, pp. 102–103]

    R. Shim'on's move here is to place these "two utterances in juxtaposition," so that they "enter into a particular kind of semantic relation which we call dialogical" 31 or intertextual. Meaning is released in this interaction of texts which neither text had on its own, in its own context. What is in Deuteronomy a poetic statement concerning the richness of the land becomes background for a high drama of cosmic intervention. What in Exodus reads as physical description of the events of the miracle comes to have an axiological significance only latent in the original context. This miracle was so great that it involved nothing less than a restructuring of the universe. Now, this point could have been made
    without the quotation of the verse from Deuteronomy; we all know that normally rain falls from the heaven and bread grows from the earth. What is so striking here, therefore (and so characteristic), is not the "meaning" of the statement, but rather the way its meaning is produced. That meaning resides there already in the verses, or