About book Intertextuality And The Reading Of Midrash (1994)
Boyarin here provides a new perspective for understanding Midrash. Indeed, he succeeds at providing a convincing model of reading midrash, and the interpretations he is able make are thicker and of more interest than simply attributing different sayings to different authors and contexts. Boyarin is concerned not simply to dissect the texts, but to inquire more deeply into what the peculiarities of midrashic reading of the Hebrew Bible are doing, and what they therefore mean. The model of intertextuality is brilliantly suited to this task both as a means for reading midrashic texts and for understanding the ways midrashic texts interpret biblical texts. Just as the midrash works with the gaps in the biblical text to find meaning, Boyarin works with the gaps in the midrashic texts to give a thicker description of what the texts means than form or source criticism is able to find. At times, Boyarin comes dangerously close to conflating 20th century literary theory and rabbinic midrashic methodology which predated Kristeva by hundreds of years. While in the last chapter Boyarin rightly interprets midrash as somewhere between history and intertextuality, the study generally favors the intertextual model, sometimes apparently blind to the (socio-)historical questions that need to be asked of the text. That said, the study is a great foundational tool for understanding midrashic texts.
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