Retracing a Writerly Text: In the Footsteps of a Midrashic Sequence on the Creation of the Male and the Female

Abstract

Despite their variety, the schools of biblical scholarship which have developed in the Western world share certain formal and thematic expectations, which they take for granted as natural and necessary. Textual order is assumed to coincide with the relations of cause and effect and chronological sequence; where it does not, justification must be sought. Temporal and logical incongruities are treated as merely apparent, accidental blemishes, or as resolvable into a higher unity of meaning. In any case, the interpretative act attempts to uncover the fully coherent order and significance of the text. Historical biblical criticism tends to consider those elements which resist integration into the dominant logical and chronological order of the text as flaws. It posits an ideal text, free of inconsistency of any sort, and sees the incongruities of the actual text as fortuitous mishaps: errors of transmission, clumsy compilation of various documents, scribal mistakes, ideological prejudices, and so on. Violations of the expected order are treated as flaws which must be removed in order to reveal the true text. Once removed, these violations are assumed to leave no residual marks on the ‘corrected reading’.