"This We Know to Be the Carnal Israel": Circumcision and the Erotic Life of God and Israel

meaning plane, no opposition of the letter, the carnal form of language, to its spirit, its inner, invisible meaning. The entire hermeneutic effort is devoted to working out the concrete details of what happened 12. "Opened" is a technical term for the production of a special kind of midrashic discourse before the daily lection from the Torah. It involves the citation of a verse from the prophets or the Hagiographa, which is then shown to be interpretative of the opening verse of the lection (in this case, Ps. 139:5). Its ideological function (in my view) was to demonstrate the interconnectability of all parts of Scripture as a self-glossing text. 13. Midrash Rabbah: Genesis [Hebrew], ed. Jehuda Theodor and Chanoch Albeck, 3 vols. (Jerusalem, 1965), 1:54-55. This is the classic and most important midrash on Genesis, and all my examples of Rabbinic interpretation of Genesis will be adduced from this text. As in all midrashic texts, it is a collection of many different sayings from different Rabbis and different periods, edited into a single, multivocal text, in Palestine some time in the fifth century or so. Its closest cultural congeners are, accordingly, the Greek Fathers. 480 Daniel Boyarin Circumcision and the "Carnal Israel" and specifying them. This is done, moreover, by relating the story in Genesis to another set of material signifiers, namely, Psalms 139, quoted twice in our midrashic text. One verse of the psalm-"Behind and before You formed me, and You placed Your hands upon me"-gives rise to the interpretation of the first human as a two-faced creature later separated into its component parts,'4 while another-"My golem which Your eyes have seen"-produces the interpretation of the first created human as an unsexed, undifferentiated embryonic human. The use of these two verses as keys to the interpretation of the events told in Genesis is rendered possible by a hermeneutic theory that sees the Bible as a self-glossing work and hermeneutics as a process of connecting concrete signifiers-not as a process of replacing concrete signifiers with their spiritual meanings.'5 Specifically, in this case it derives from a tradition that reads Psalms 139 as a commentary on the story of Adam. This is shown by the fact that two more verses from the same psalm are also interpreted with reference to Adam later in the same midrash.'6 Accordingly, if Philo's allegory is the restoration of the visible text (body) to its source and origin, to its spiritual, invisible meaning (spirit), midrash is the linking up of text to text to release meaning-without any doctrine of an originary spirit that precedes the body of the language of the Torah. The midrashic text thematizes neither a supplementarity for the woman" nor for its own materiality and physicality as text. Man and woman, body and spirit, language and meaning are inseparably bound together in it from the beginning. It escapes the logic of the supplement entirely because the culture resists the Platonic metaphysics of signification. 14. To be sure, the Genesis Rabbah text does not state this explicitly, but it is implicit in the structure of the midrashic text. The whole point of citing Rabbi Yohanan's interpretation of the verse from Psalms is to chain it to an interpretation of the same verse that will be connected with the first verse of the lection, namely, Genesis 1:27. That connection can only be accomplished if the Psalms verse is indeed the background for Rabbi Yermiah's statement. Later midrashic texts, which are the earliest and (culturally) closest readers of the midrash, explicitly read the text this way. See, for instance, Midrash Tanhuma, ed. S. Buber, 4 vols. (1885; Jerusalem, 1964). 15. See James L. Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History (New Haven, Conn., 1981), pp. 137-38, which already marked this difference. See also Gerald L. Bruns, "Midrash and Allegory: The Beginnings of Scriptural Interpretation," in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), pp. 625-46. Bruns's description of midrash is fine; what is missing, paradoxically, is precisely some attempt to come to grips with the differences between midrash and allegory. This is not to say, of course, that the Fathers did not often read the Bible as self-glossing also. 16. See Midrash Rabbah: Genesis, 1:89, 137-38. 17. Even those Rabbinic readings that do not interpret the first human as androgynous do not (to the best of my knowledge) ever derive an ontologically secondary or supervenient status for women from her secondary creation. For further discussion see chapter three of my forthcoming book. Critical Inquiry Spring 1992 481 Gregory of Nyssa and Midrash on the Manna: Allegory and Asceticism Verna Harrison has shown in a recent paper how in the commentaries of Gregory of Nyssa (a follower of Origen) the discourse of asceticism is coarticulated with allegory. Her discussion of Gregory's interpretationi of the manna, when contrasted with the midrashic treatment of this sign, will give us an elegant emblem of the differences between these two formations. The literal interpretation of the manna as physical food had been one of the major bones of contention of the Evangelist against "Jewish" hermeneutic. In analyzing the Father's reading of this contention, Harrison provides us with an exceedingly clear formulation of one way of looking at the nexus between hermeneutics and the body: For Gregory's primary audience in the ascetic community, where fasting and chastity are highly valued as spiritual practices, biblical texts involving food and sexuality, such as the Manna in the Exodus story and the conjugal love in the Song of Songs, are often pastorally inapplicable in their literal sense. Ascetics can read such materials as Scripture only if they are interpreted in another way. So Gregory finds it appropriate to understand them allegorically. Moreover, within his broadly Platonic world-view, allegory allows him to transfer the concepts and images of nourishment and intimacy from the material to the intelligible world. In his hands, this deliberate transition from text to interpretation becomes an excellent tool for expressing how the ascetic re-directs natural human desire from bodily pleasures toward God. Exegetical method thus comes to mirror ascetic behavior itself and conversely embodies a redirection of thought which can serve as a model for the corresponding redirection of human drives and activities.'8 There is then a perfect fit between the hermeneutics and anthropologies of this system, as we have already observed for Philo. The troping of language from the literal to the figurative-which is called moving from the carnal to the spiritual--exactly parallels the turning of human intention from the desire and pleasure of the body to the desire and pleasure of the soul. Linguistic structure and psychology are thus isomorphic. Even more, I would suggest that this kind of allegorical reading as practiced by this line ofJewish and then Christian Platonists is itself an ascetic practice (and not only a model for one), for the very renunciation of the pleasure of the text, understood as story and about bodies, is itself a turning from corporeal pleasure to spiritual contemplation. This articulation between an allegorical hermeneutic and an ascetical anthropology 18. Verna E. F. Harrison, "Allegory and Asceticism in Gregory of Nyssa," paper presented at Society of Biblical Literature convention, New Orleans, Nov. 1990; hereafter