Three decades since Robert Cover's seminal essay on “nomos and narrative,” legal and literary questions have entered into more substantive dialogue, including in the field of ancient Judaism; for example, Steven Fraade chose to frame his volume of collected essays around this theme (Legal Fictions: Studies of Law and Narrative in the Discursive Worlds of Ancient Jewish Sectarians and Sages [Leiden: Brill, 2011]). Jane L. Kanarek's book joins this conversation by examining how biblical narrative is used in early rabbinic law. Her acknowledgements show that she is well qualified to make a novel contribution, having studied legal theory, rabbinic texts, and theology with experts in both the United States and Israel, then taught this literature for several years. Her book is based on a 2007 thesis (building on her supervisor Michael Fishbane's studies of “inner-biblical exegesis”, e.g., the reworking of biblical law within Deuteronomy). Finally, Kanarek has carved out a distinct niche in this law/literature edifice: she will focus on the rabbis' legal readings of Genesis—the least apparently law-like book in the Torah—and thereby reveal that “biblical narrative is embedded in the heart of the rabbinic lawmaking enterprise” (1). In sum, her project is both clear and exciting.
The main texts, the axis of comparison, theory, and prior literature are all presented succinctly. The author will compare how Genesis is used in three corpora: the exegetical compilation Bereshit Rabbah and both Talmuds. Specifically, she will examine how four verses from different stories (Genesis 22:10, 24:55, 50:10, and 42:5) are used differently by redactors of the Palestinian corpora versus the Babylonian Talmud. (She also discusses Second Temple texts that adduce similar legal issues in narratives from Genesis, but these comparisons occupy only a few pages.) Her thesis is that, “through exegesis, rabbinic texts create law that prescribes behavior as it simultaneously encodes meanings for the behavior” (22–3). They do so by putting verses into a “web” of exegeses of other biblical and rabbinic sources, a whole that confers new meaning on each of the parts. As this thesis is uncontroversial and Kanarek does not critique alternatives, her proposed contribution must be descriptive—to guide us along a “path of exegetical connections that need to be traced in order to comprehend a larger referential web of woven meaning” (5). Each chapter traces the contours of these legal “webs” around the biblical verse.
Chapter 2 (a similar version of which was published as an article in 2010) compares how the two traditions use “And he took the knife to slaughter his son” (Genesis 22:10). Both cite this verse as evidence for the legal validity of slaughtering with movables (מטלטלין). In part, that is because the story contains words that the rabbis read as law elsewhere in the Bible, and because several other rabbinic texts associate the binding of Isaac with laws about sacrifice. However, the Babylonian tradition diverges by adding that this verse also teaches about how Abraham performed the slaughter: with “zeal” (זריזות). This “web” thereby turns the abnormal tale about human sacrifice into a paradigm for ritual sacrifice. “Nevertheless,” as Kanarek notes, this is “not inevitable: it is a product of rabbinic reading” (60). The law reflects narrative context as well as inner-rabbinic associations.
Chapter 3 compares uses of “Let the maiden remain with us some ten days” (Genesis 24:55). Again, both traditions relate this verse to a shared legal issue: the status between betrothal and marriage called “claiming” (תביעה). In this case, they are both responding, not just to the biblical prooftext, but also to a mishnah about the law of “claiming” (M. Ketubot 5:3). The Babylonian tradition focuses more on this mishnah itself and, similarly, stresses the legal issue of women's age of sexual majority (in Genesis 24:16). Kanarek concludes that, like Abraham, Rebekah becomes a legal exemplar in both interpretive traditions, “but each arrives at law taking a slightly different path” (99). Here, unlike the last case, it is the Palestinian tradition that stresses the biblical character's moral as well as legal status, unfolding a more extensive reading of the narrative.
Chapter 4 examines “He performed mourning for his father for seven days” (Genesis 50:10) as precedent for the seven-day mourning period (shivah). The Palestinian tradition uses this verse because it describes Israelite “mourning” in the Torah (110), whereas the Babylonian does not. Assuming it knows “at least a version of” the Palestinian text (25), Kanarek calls its exegetical strategy “avoidance of the obvious” (124–38). I was not persuaded by this argument from silence, but Kanarek's discussion of the legal status of pre-Sinaitic narratives was particularly interesting. She shows that, by leaving this status ambiguous, the redactors use these texts to forge new links between biblical stories (111–8; a cross-reference to p. 63 is needed at “As I wrote earlier,” 116).
Chapter 5 (not in the dissertation) takes a different tack, comparing traditions that do not have a shared prooftext for a law (that a quorum equals ten members—Genesis 42:5 is inconclusive). Kanarek calls this phenomenon “textual fragmentation” (164–6, 170–3), i.e. “the lack of a larger referential exegetical web” (170). She argues that it results from the absence of a contextual basis for this law in the biblical narrative itself, generating laws that are not “random” but nevertheless “varied and incomplete” (173). She emphasizes this claim by comparing versions in manuscripts.
As this summary shows, the book is organized around differences: Palestinian/Babylonian, rabbinic/Second Temple, between manuscripts, even between tradents in the same literary unit. But if information is, in Gregory Bateson's definition, “a difference which makes a difference,” these differences are not all equally informative. The Palestinian/Babylonian contrast does not reveal a strong pattern across the four cases but “subtle variation” (180). As for the main difference, between law and narrative, Kanarek repeatedly says that, for the rabbis themselves, “scripture's genre is not important” (178; see also 44, 48, 71–2, 116, 137, 170, 173). Still, given the framing of the argument, I kept looking for some distinctive texture in these “webs” of law and narrative. As Kanarek summarizes at one point, “Individuals cannot by themselves read correct rabbinic behavior by reading scripture. The Bible must first be remade, through exegesis, into a rabbinic legal document. This remaking of the Bible into a rabbinic legal document, though, does not efface narrative” (135). True, but is this more or distinctively true for these texts than for other branches of rabbinic literature? How do the rabbis' traditionalist transformations of Genesis differ from those of other ancient Jewish exegetes? We should look forward to further installments of this project that clarify its principal distinctions in light of viable alternatives.
Addendum: It is not as a criticism of the author but in solidarity with her that I join Daniel Boyarin in noting the editing, style, and copyediting errors in another recent volume in this field from this press. Without using any reference materials or the internet, I noticed more than fifty in the work itself, nine in the bibliography, and one on the back cover. Most are simply typos, but some are substantive: “a log of blood” instead of a quarter-log (52), an unnoted modified translation of Deuteuronomy 6:5 (“soul” → “being”) (53), unnoted citation of two different texts of a mishnah (54–5), the claim that the translator of Auerbach's Mimesis also edited the work (in bibliography), etc.
