Mythopoeic Imagination and the

Hermeneutic Bridging of Temporal

Spacing: On Michael Fishbanes Biblical
Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking
ELLIOT R. WOLFSON

B I B LI C A L M Y T H AN D R A BB I N IC M Y T HM A KI N G (Oxford University
Press, 2003) is a capacious examination of the mythic potential in the
Jewish hermeneutical imagination expressed in biblical, rabbinic, and
kabbalistic sources. As we have come to expect from Michael Fishbane,
this monograph is replete with exacting analyses of primary texts that
serve the aim of grounding larger theoretical assumptions that pertain to
Jewish textual practices in particular and to the mythopoeic sensibility
in the history of religions more generally. The author himself instructs
the reader early on that the purpose of the book is an attempt to retrieve,
study, and even reconstruct the phenomenon of monotheistic myth over
the course of two millenniafocusing on its first literary articulations
in the Hebrew Bible and continuing through the increasingly intensified
process whereby mythmaking occurs in classical rabbinic Midrash and
the medieval Kabbalistic book of Zohar, by means of hermeneutical reformulations of scriptural myths and language (p. 13).
Prima facie, the locution monotheistic myth may strike the ear as an
oxymoron, but Fishbane is one of several contemporary scholars who
have challenged the older antiquated depiction of ancient Israelite monotheism as a rejection of pagan mythology. On the contrary, from Fishbanes perspective, not only is it inaccurate to view monotheism in this
light but Scripture should be seen as the wellspring of the cultural forms
and the concrete expressions of a vital mythic imagination, found in classical
texts of the Jewish monotheistic tradition. These myths, accordingly,
do not occur either as private or inchoate musings, but as processed and
particular statements made at specific times and passed on as part of a
vast cultural enterprise. We may say that the myths do not occur in the
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REVIEW FORUM

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abstract, but always as bound formsbound to a given genre or occasion

or citation from Scripture (p. 308). The motor that makes the many
myths of Scripture manifest is identified as exegesis, for the interpretive
gesture extends and transforms older motifs . . . In ever artful ways,
new myths and narratives are produced; and in ever creative ways, the
resources of tradition (Scripture, Midrash, and Kabbalah) are integrated
and projected into transcendental domains (p. 305). It follows, therefore,
that the exegetical bond between Scripture and myth, which comes to
light in the homiletical dicta of the rabbis and the theosophic ruminations
of the kabbalists, implies that this canonical source conceals a deeper
dimension about the acts and nature of God, and thus the language of the
readable text is but the surface of another narrative about divine deeds
or divine feelings hidden from immediate view. To know how to read
rightly is thus to know that the historical character of Scripture is but the
verbal outcropping of another narrativenot an account of Israel but of
God, and not of the events of the earth but of the hidden acts of the Lord
in heaven (pp. 30809).
In Fishbanes reconstruction of the exegetical trajectory, there is a crucial difference between the rabbis and kabbalists: the former considered
Scripture to be the measure of myth, whereas the latter, and especially
the Castilian circle responsible for the zoharic anthology, maintained that
Scripture is itself the myth of God. Alternatively expressed, the aggadic
explication of Scripture on the part of the rabbis was inspired by the
hope of finding exegetical proof or warrant for Gods sorrows and sympathies, and for His decision to share in the fate of Israel. To be sure,
the kabbalists shared this goal as well, but they went beyond it as their
ceaseless scriptural exegesis and interpretation of its mysteries constituted a mode of mythical living, for there is no separation between living
the truth of Scripture and living within the truth of God . . . Scripture
suffuses all; for it is the real myth of God, insofar as this is ever or at all
sayable in human speech or accessible to the human imagination. Gods
truth is refracted in fragments of myth bound by the syntax of Scripture
(p. 309). It is not always clear that this distinction can be upheld, and I
think it fair to say that Fishbane himself is not unaware of the point of
convergence. Indeed, one of the most important ramifications of Fishbanes study is the narrowing of the alleged gap between midrashic and
kabbalistic perspectives. The boldness of the zoharic exegesis notwithstanding, the close readings of midrashic texts offered by Fishbane demonstrate the inherent mythopoeic properties of rabbinic theology, and
thus his corrective to previous scholars who have insisted that mythopoeic images employed by the rabbis are merely metaphors or figurative

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tropes sapped of their mythic vitality. Medieval kabbalists revised the

earlier material, but there is good reason to accept their claim that they
were explicating secrets embedded in the aggadic dicta.
A crucial aspect of Fishbanes study, indeed a notional pillar upon
which the whole edifice rests, although it is not thematized as such, involves the intricate relation between time and hermeneutics. In the remainder of this brief note, I wish to delve more deeply into this matter.
Underlying the emphasis on exegesis as the power that energizes and
revives older myths is a presumption regarding the dialectic interplay of
innovation and preservation, hermeneutical conditions that are correlated
with the temporal categories of change and repetition. In one passage,
Fishbane addresses the issue by noting that the real cultural issue at
hand is determining whether or not the mythopoeic activity exemplified
in medieval Kabbalaha protean exegetical energy that turns biblical
verses in every conceivable direction in order to reveal their esoteric
truthis a new birth or a rebirth of older processes?; and, Is this the
return or invasion of alien pagan elements, or the recrudescence and reformulation of inner-Jewish images and topics? (p. 10). The response
to these hypothetical questions is unequivocal on Fishbanes part: the
preponderance of myth in kabbalistic doctrine is not a new birth but a
rebirth, the mythmaking is not the grafting of some foreign element onto
the body of Judaism but a recrudescence, a revivification of creative elements that lay dormant beneath the surface.
To appreciate the full force of these claims, we must again raise the
issue of time in relation to the hermeneutical presuppositions of Fishbanes argument. I do not think it disrespectful to say that the book would
have been enhanced philosophically had the author offered the reader a
sustained discussion of this topic, but even in the absence of such a discussion there is surely enough material to allow the conscientious reader
to elicit the conception of temporality that undergirds Fishbanes hermeneutical orientation. The persistence of mythic structures through time is
assumed, but in such a way that they are renewed by exegetical concerns
that ensue from the exigencies of particular moments in history. Thus, in
one passage, Fishbane writes of the anthropomorphic and anthropopathic imagery of Scripture that was variously developed and intensified by its midrashic and kabbalistic inheritors, who also received the
mythic figures of antiquity and extended them through bold and innovative exegetical strategies (p. 11). Eschewing an approach to myth that
would ignore specific historical contexts and cultural locations in favor of
atemporal archetypical paradigms, Fishbane insists that the more immediate cultural task that is required is to reconsider certain biblical and

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rabbinic evidence in the light of related comparative phenomenon (p.

12).
Methodologically, Fishbane wishes to have his proverbial cake and eat
it too; that is, he insists on considering historical context when evaluating
a mythic confabulation, but he is not enslaved to a historicist understanding of historical context. The identification of external correlations must
then be supplemented by more nuanced evaluations of their respective
meanings and functions in context. Such a procedure will allow us to
consider the nature and vitality of the imagery involvedaided by an
analysis of the modes of discourse involved and the cultural strategies
that the specific topics encode. Certainly no definition of myth will give a
fixed Archimedian point, agreeable to all; but it may provide something
of a wobbling pivot around which we may analyse certain cultural data
from a comparative and even more universal perspective (pp. 1213).
The implicit issue of time and hermeneutics is addressed somewhat
more directly in the following statement:
In what follows, I shall adopt a typological approach that will isolate
several paradigmatic configurations overall, and use these types to explore the varied character and construction of monotheistic myth in
the sources, as well as its patterns of thematic continuity and transformation. Such a methodological strategy will permit a synchronic analysis of central topics in each separate period (with due attention to the
diversity of motifs and structures), and facilitate their diachronic correlation and comparison in different corpora. (p. 13)
Utilizing the terminology of Ferdinand de Saussure, who distinguished
between synchronic linguistics, the study of language at a particular point
in time, and diachronic linguistics, the study of the history or evolution
of language, Fishbane seeks to adopt a methodology that is attentive
equally to the permanence of mythic structures through time and to the
evolution they undergo relative to changed historical circumstances. Illustrating what he calls the principle of parsimony from the specific theme of
divine combat, Fishbane concludes that a mythic topic in Hebrew Scripture . . . can undergo a recontextualization in the exegesis of rabbinic
Midrash but still remain the same mythic topic overall, if the terms remain the same and if there is no wholesale theological or literary transformation. This granted, it must nevertheless be stressed that every new
occurrence of a mythic topic (in its new context) produces a new myth
overall, insofar as the concerns and purposes of the latter varies. The
principle of parsimony does not therefore mean that a myth or mytholo-

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237

gem in its various renditions is always one and the same but only that
similar images should be assumed to be the same and have the same semiotic value unless there are good textual reasons to conclude differently
(p. 18).
Another consequence of Fishbanes study as it relates to the question
of time and hermeneutics is his challenge to the assumption that mythmaking is a feature of degeneration and decreased spontaneity. Rather
than viewing literary evolution within a specific cultural matrix in linear
terms as a progression from a primitive mode of mythic imagination to
more abstract forms of rational thinking, Fishbane understands myth as
a key factor in the revitalization of earlier sources and a sign of ongoing
cultural creativity (p. 20). By insisting that the process of exegetical
mythopoesis is predicated on a complex synthesis of enduring mythologic
symbols and ever-changing modalities of mythmaking, Fishbanes thinking is a subtle and sophisticated reinscription of the very process that he
sets out to describe in scholarly terms. He is to be commended, for providing a path that avoids the extremes of empiricist reductionism and
archetypal essentialism. Discerning structures that cannot be reduced to
time-bound eventualities does not preclude the necessity to examine the
historical contexts that inform the exegetical process of revisioning and
reformulating older mythologoumena. Quite to the contrary, the sophisticated hermeneutical model constructed by Fishbane enables the reader
to stand at the intersection of the two seas, the sea of permanence and
the sea of fluctuation. The process of mythmaking in the Jewish religious
sensibility so deftly described by Fishbane ensues from that very point of
junction where the temporal is eternalized and the eternal temporalized.
The point is well illustrated by Fishbane in his comments on the theme
of divine pathos and the longing for reunion in a passage from the Zohar
(3.42a-b). The cry of the Shekhinah above and her yearning for cohabitation with the holy One parallel the lament of the people of Israel below
and their hope for redemption from exile. Reflecting on the symbolic
parallelism between events in the divine and human realms, Fishbane
draws the following conclusion:
Where myth ends and history begins is just as mysterious as where
history ends and the myth begins. For the teachers who speak here,
neither the one nor the other is truly the truth. In fact the two are
really one, under the two aspects of time and eternity. It remains for
the reader to ponder and to wonder at this mystery, so boldly expressed in these teachings of the book of Zohar. (p. 297)

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Myth and history are correlated respectively with eternity and time. The
mythical suffering of the divine corresponds to the historical suffering of
the Jewish people. The mystery brought to light in the dark luminosity
of zoharic Kabbalah consists of the fact that there is one truth with two
manifestations, the eternal and the temporal. The mythic and historical
are not to be set in binary opposition, but they are rather two sides of one
coin.
As is well known to philosophers, intellectual historians, and scholars
of religion, there has been a tendency to correlate linear time with the
historical and cyclical time with the mythical, and a further association of
the former with ancient Israel and Judaism and the latter with either
Near Eastern or Hellenistic models of religious philosophy. But the conceptions of time that one may elicit from the tripartite of biblical, rabbinic,
and kabbalistic sources is a convergence of history and myth that renders
the more standard perspective dubious. Fishbanes insight regarding the
nexus of myth and history lends support to the suspicion that the modalities of linear and circular time are not easily separated in the case of
Judaism. Recurrent patterns transpire within the narrative framework of
linear successionthe timelessness of lived time extending in the attenuated circle of returnyielding a temporality that is at once interminably
ephemeral and ephemerally interminable. An appreciation of the mythopoeic dimension of the Jewish exegetical imagination meticulously documented in Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking requires that one fathom
the mystery of the eternality of time from within the cloak of the temporality of eternity.

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Making and Living Myth: On Michael

Fishbanes Biblical Myth And Rabbinical
Mythmaking
WILLIAM SCHWEIKER

I T I S A D E LI G HT A ND H O NO R for me to respond to Professor Michael

Fishbanes magisterial work, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking and,
additionally, to do so within the pages of The Jewish Quarterly Review. Anyone who cracks the covers of his book will be humbled and also ennobled
by Fishbanes breadth of learning and depth of insight. Of course, this
also means that any response, especially a relatively short one, will never
plumb the wealth of his work. What is more, I am not a biblical scholar
or a scholar of Jewish thought and tradition, so the distinct pleasure of
response brings with it special trepidation. Happily, given the richness of
his work there is sufficient intellectual overlap to allow a theological ethicist like myself to isolate topics of common concern. Rather than storming disciplinary gates, my interest is to learn from and to engage this
fascinating book and also, hopefully, make some addition to its scholarly
assessment.
The structure of Fishbanes book is clear enough. The three parts of
the volume move from myth in the Hebrew Bible, through rabbinic mythmaking as a kind of exegetical activity, to, finally, the Zohar and mythmaking in the Middle Ages. Through this massive historical sweep,
Fishbane traces a set of myths of Gods action and personality, like
Gods struggle with primordial waters and the divine pathos for the suffering of Israel. These paradigmatic myths provide a template upon which
the author charts permutations in mythmaking across periods of Jewish
This essay was originally given in a different form at the Deans Forum on
Michael Fishbanes book March 31, 2004, at the University of Chicago Divinity
School. I want to thank Dean Richard Rosengarten for the invitation to participate in this event as well as Reverend Cynthia Linder, the other respondent.
Most important, I want to thank Professor Fishbane for the clarity and subtly of
his insights and for his deep collegial spirit.
The Jewish Quarterly Review (Spring 2006)
Copyright 2006 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved.

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history. In the process of this history, if I read Fishbane correctly, there

is increasing intensification such that, by the time of the medievals, the
myth itself, as an inward and spiritual reality of divine Being, is unsayable
and unknowable on its own terms; and only becomes knowable and sayable in the terminology of Scripturewhen this is properly understood
(p. 301). Stated most pointedly, God is mythologized, the myths are inscribed in exegetical practice, and, what is more, reality itself is theologized, as it were. This theological intensification, if I can call it that, is
correlated, as we will see, to an intensification and interiorization of
human action. What is disclosed in this complex historical process, according to Fishbane, is the texture and tenure of Jewish monotheism as
well as the articulation of a distinctive way of life, a way of being religious
humanly. So Fishbane concludes near the end of the book that monotheism is consonant with this comprehensive view of the Godhead, and it is
variously expressed through myth . . . The two repeatedly intertwine and
are mutually reinforcing (p. 304).
One could dig into each of the moments of tradition that Fishbane
isolates and note, as he does, changes in mythmaking. Rather than summarizing the text, which would in any case be a paltry thing on my part
in comparison to the richness of the actual work, I am more interested in
its Sache, the thing or subject matter of the book. By carefully parsing the
question of myth and mythmaking, I submit that one can grasp the scholarly, human, and religious reach of Fishbanes work. So at the far end of
these reflections I will pose questions not about living myth but, rather,
the living or inhabiting of myth, mystically and morally. In the final analysis what Fishbanes book provokes is the question of the shape and orientation of religious understanding and the possibilities, if any, for
contemporary appropriations of very traditional religious forms. Stated
otherwise, monotheism and the intensification of human action and consciousness are the deepest concern of this work. Fishbane aims to show
the ways in which exegetical practices as distinct forms of mythmaking
enable those living in profoundly different times and places than the those
of the biblical texts to enact and to encounter the reality of God. The
question will then become the extent to which there are constraints or
limits to the labor of hermeneutical enactment. In order to make these
points, I must begin with Fishbanes engagement with myth and mythmaking.
MYTH AND MYTHMAKING

The question of myth has occupied much modern and now postmodern
thought about culture and the religions. In many ways, scholars at the

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241

University of Chicago Divinity School (Wach, Eliade, Meland, Kitagawa,

Tillich, Ricoeur, Gilkey, Betz, Smith, Tracy, Doniger, Lincoln, Fishbane)
have helped to define the modern and contemporary study of culture and
myth. There is of course no unified line of argument among these thinkers. Furthermore, definitions of myth, like its theories, are legion. How
does Fishbane define myth?
We shall understand the word Myth to refer to (sacred and authoritative) accounts of the deeds and personalities of the gods and heroes
during the formative events of primordial times, or during subsequent
historical interventions or actions of these figures which are constitutive for the founding of a given culture and its rituals. (p. 11)
A myth is an account (in whatever form, narrative or not) of actions and
persons (divine and heroic; cosmogonic or historical) that are culturally
constitutive.
It is important to grasp the force of this definition.1 The definition Fishbane gives of myth includes but does not reduce it to literary form
(narrative structure); to some event illo tempore; or, more generically, to
any authoritative story in a culture. Further, Fishbane also avoids, rightly
in my judgment, the temptation to reduce myth to a veiled discourse of
power aimed at political obedience or to inflating the concept so that
every cultural form is really mythic. By avoiding these extremes and
pitfalls he clarifies myth and mythmaking in Jewish thought but also, on
my reading, advances scholarly work on myth along three lines: (a) myth
and exegesis; (b) myth and monotheism; and (c) myth and logos. My
reasons for noting these topics will become clear by the last turn of questions in these reflections on Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking. Let me
consider these three topics.
1. It is important to note when in the flow of inquiry a thinker ought to engage
in the work of definition. Is it possible to specify a definition prior to unfolding
the phenomenon in question? While Fishbane begins his book with matters of
definition, it is my sense that he does so more in terms of the order of knowing
than, as the medievals put it, the order of being. That is, I assume that Fishbanes
definition of myth flows from rather than determines the direction of his historical
and hermeneutical inquiry. This is crucial because it means that the impulse of
this book is to think within and through the forms of thought and tradition it is
attempting to explore. It is beyond the scope of this essay to take up the problem,
philosophically, of definition or even to debate the various accounts of myth
found in current scholarly work.

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Myth and Exegesis

One feature of the modern study of myth has been to locate it at the
ostensive point of difference between the historical and the archaic
mind. Some scholars, one thinks of Eliade, drew a distinction between
mythic cultures and the forms of thought, life, and cultural activities that
arise after the end of those cultures.2 The idea is that somehow the mythic
imagination is archaic and the activities of the worlds so-called great
religions, including their exegetical and commentarial acts on sacred
texts, at best work with fragments of the archaic. The great religions
signal the fall into history and thus a rupture in human consciousness
from its archaic dwelling in a sacred cosmos. In this sense of the term,
Judaism must somehow be a postmythic religion and culture, and the
same needs to be said of Christianity, Islam, and the great religions
flowing out of Indian and China. This rupture in consciousness is taken
as the decisive fact in human religiousness.
Fishbanes work challenges the use of myth as the obvious point of
difference between cultural and religious forms. As he notes, For anyone
who might think that myths die with the death of comprehensive mythic
cultures, and that exegesis is a post-mortem activity that takes over the
shards of old images and at best patches together old vessels for a more
potable content, the phenomenon of Jewish myth and mythmaking is
instructive (p. 305). Fishbane demonstrates that the intellectual practice
of exegesis is itself a form of mythmaking and thereby challenges the use
of myth as the marker between the archaic and the historic. He examines this point in terms of how the myth of divine combat forms a link
between creation and the exodus in the biblical texts (see pp. 6369),
how the theme of the primordial waters is explored among the rabbis (as
on pp. 11224), and, finally, the myth of the serpent in the Zohar wherein
this radical myth of evil, the cunning serpent is part of Godand thus
a part of all being created from His Being (p.284). These shifts in a myth
of origin, and so events in primordial time, through exegetical practices
enable the scholar to engage the domain of the mythic free from the demand to differentiate the archaic and its residual fragments in the hermeneutical practices found in Judaism. The force of this insight is to
provoke a reconsideration of the temporal structure of human consciousness in relation to the history of religions.
2. See, for instance, Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal
Return (New York, 1963), and Eliade, Myth and Reality (New York, 1963).

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243

Myth and Monotheism

The first point, then, is that through his study of rabbinic mythmaking,
Fishbane debunks a long-standing figure of thought found within modern
approaches to religion, namely, that myth configures a shift in human
consciousness and cultural forms that we conveniently designate as archaic versus the historical or the domain of the world religions. The
shape and dynamic of religious consciousness displayed in the history of
Judaism is more complex than the oppositional categories archaic and
historical seem to allow. Insofar as Jewish practice is exemplary of
human religiousness, then we must, in the light of Fishbanes work, reconsider assumed categories in the study of religion.
Fishbanes second important insight is to contest the wildly popular
notion that myth and monotheism are at odds. The claim, one made by
Jews and Christians alike, is that Israelite monotheism and the revelation
of the living God in history means that myth does not pertain; myth is
a pagan concept for a different understanding of human time and a
pantheon of deities. One might see this as a subset of my first point: the
biblical religions enter what Eliade called the terror of history while
the archaic religions were mythic but not historical and so at one with
nature. Jewish and Christian thinkers, especially in the mid-twentieth
century, jumped on the bandwagon to say that the Bible has a linear
conception of time whereas the pagan mentality is mythic and circular,
sunk in the realm of the unchanging eternal. The apologetic strategy of
numerous Jewish and Christian thinkers aimed to show the uniqueness
of biblical faith and its incomparability with religion and myth.3
Fishbane rejects this way of discounting the importance of myth in
biblical religion and its legacy in Judaism. The full force of his claim
3. The wide array of thinkers who made this claim is astonishing. They range
from Gerhard von Rad to Martin Buber, from Karl Barth and Rudolph Bultmann to Abraham Heschel, and from Paul Tillich to Arthur Cohen. One should
note that the same claim, albeit it in different form, continues in a good deal of
so-called postmodern discourse. It is not at all clear to me that thinkers like Emmanuel Levinas or Jacques Derrida or so-called narrative theologians among
Christians have really made any revision in the supposed opposition of the biblical and the mythic already basic to the earlier apologetic discourse. It is also
the case that the sharp distinction between the biblical religions of history and
religions supposedly more friendly to nature is a mainstay of current ecological
theology and ethics. The question of the validity of the distinction is one which
for now can remain unresolved, but suffice it to say that Fishbanes work is
rightly pressing basic questions for constructive Jewish and Christian thought.

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should not be missed. Rabbinic mythmaking pictures the divine personality such that Gods own nature is thus mythically portrayed as affected
by Israels life, and never abstract or abstracted from human personalities (p. 239). In rabbinic mythmaking, human action, in a way not true
of biblical myth, has great effect on divine judgment and mercy. And with
the Zohar, the hidden myth of Divine Being is encoded in the words
and sentences of scripture, and it is precisely in the exegetic pyrotechnics
applied to these words and sentences that the great mystery is articulated (p. 303). The balance of power, he notes, is given into the hands
of humans, whose every action is deemed a crucial component of the
divine whole (p. 313). As noted at the outset of these reflections, the
intensification of myths about God into the idea, found in the Zohar, that
Scripture itself is the myth of Gods being is correlated to an intensification and even interiorization of human action. The reality of God in all
things becomes articulated in the exegetical act of mythmaking which
thereby opens a mode of mythic living. A human act, the act of exegesis, enacts the divine being in all things. This means, importantly, that
access to the divine is freed from the sociocultural conditions of the original revelation or production of the text. Myth cannot serve as the principle of differentiating archaic from historical religion. Yet it is also the
case that Jewish monotheism, with its insistence on the one living God
beyond all images, is vitalized and living precisely in the labor of mythmaking. What is made possible in this development is a mode of participation in the divine life, a form of religious consciousness, within disciplines
of interpretation.
Myth and Logos
I have argued that Fishbanes work foils long-standing strategies that use
myth to differentiate and classify religions (archaic/historical) or which
deploy it, often apologetically, in order to accent the supposed uniqueness
of biblical religions focal conviction against other kinds of religion (monotheistic/mythic). The book also makes an advance around another extremely long-standing line of thought and debate: myth and logos. The
contention has been that myth is rhetorical and symbolic window dressing for what ought to be rendered into philosophical categories (logos).
Myth, on this account, is, as Fishbane notes, really an allegory for deeper
truths better stated in dialectical form. This strategy runs from the Greek
philosophers up through Hegel and to some twentieth-century thinkers,
like Rudolf Bultmann, who argued that one could demythologize the

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245

biblical texts to get at their real existential meaning.4 Fishbane notes with
delicious irony that for the early Greek poets, like Hesiod and Homer,
logos was an unworthy and crafty form of discourse. Yet when philosophers brought things down to earth, valuations began to change. Logos
and not mythos ought to guide human life, and the guidance of life by
logos becomes the definition of the philosophical quest. The purgation or
taming of myth, as Fishbane calls it (p. 3), by philosophers continued in
Jewish culture influenced by Greek rationalism. The same can be said
about the rise and development of Christian thought.5
Fishbane labors against the grain of this entrenched assumption about
the superiority of logos to mythos, and, thereby, philosophys assumed
priority over exegesis. As previously indicated, the force of his argument
is to isolate a novel and distinct way of life intertwined with forms of
mythmaking. Mythopoesis, he notes, is a symbolic form of the imagination which brings a kind of narrative world into being. For Fishbane
this does not mean a celebration of emotion or fancy, a festival of noncognitive accounts of the world. Fictive realities (or hermeneutical inventions) make truth claims that can and ought to be lived. There is, he
continues, a dimension of truth which the mythmaker (and his disciples
or heirs) inhabits through his hermeneutical inventions, and which may
be accepted or transformed by successive stages of mythopoesis (p. 25).
Fishbane even suggests, provocatively, that scholarship can revive old
myths and thus is an intriguing and intricate case of logos in the service
of mythos (p. 27). Here we are, I think, at the heart of Fishbanes project
about myth, monotheism, and religious consciousness.
Plato, the first and maybe most trenchant critic of myth, grasped that
any myth makes both cognitive and moral claims. That is to say, any
myth makes claims about how to understand reality and also about how
human beings ought rightly to orient their lives within reality so de4. The question is not about the need for philosophical concepts in the articulation of mythic truths, a point that seems obvious enough. The problem is when
one assumes that the concepts exhaust the meaning of myth so that the mythic
becomes a disposable form in the hands of the philosopher. On this point I judge
that Plato, and probably Bultmann too, were wiser than the grand mind of Heidelberg, G. W. F. Hegel. Certainly the so-called left-wing Hegelians (Feuerbach,
Marx, and others) and their fight against ideology got the point missed by their
master.
5. On this point see The Beginnings of Christianity: A Collection of Articles, ed. J.
Pastor and M. Mor (Jerusalem, 2005) and Christianity in Jewish Terms, ed. T.
Frymer-Kensky et al. (Boulder, Colo., 2000).

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picted.6 Plato understood that there is no myth without morals and, conversely, there is no morality that is not intertwined with some picture
of reality, the space of human actions that necessarily exceeds empirical
knowledge. Not surprisingly, the great modern critics of myth (Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, and others) attacked the cognitive and moral pretensions of myths. They sought to uncover the illusion of myth and what
they took to be the suppressed nihilism of its moral outlook, as Nietzsche
might put it. Yet the smartest of the critics, from Plato to Nietzsche, also
knew that an alternate myth would be needed to debunk illusion simply
because actual human beings never meet reality without imaginative
forms used to orient their lives. So, Plato dialogically reinvents myths,
Nietzsche has Zarathustra perched on a mountain, and Freud plumbs the
depths of Moses and Monotheism in the realm of the psyche. The smartest minds knew that one dispels a myth only with better, or at least different, myth.
If one grasps the complexity of this point, then a strategy other than
the priority of philosophy to myth or the creation of (supposedly) new
myths might also be true, as Fishbane shows. Basic inherited myths can
generate patterns of mythmaking by means of which a cultures vibrancy
pushes through time to meet new and uncertain challenges. Human religious consciousness is thereby defined not by markers between the archaic and the historical, it is not defined by the conflict between reason
(logos) and fancy (myth), but, more importantly, through hermeneutical
strategies of participation. That option is precisely what Fishbanes book
traces. The strategy culminates, in his reading, in texts like the Zohar
in which a mode of life simply is the ceaseless scriptural exegesis and
interpretations of its mysteries (p. 309). This is a kind of mysticism,
maybe even Gnosticism. For those in the know, there is no separation
between living the truth of scripture and living within the truth of God
(p. 309). More profoundly, through the interiorization of the mythic
dramas, the person assimilates the modalities of the divine reality and
strives to actualize its truths in every thought and action (p. 314). Hermeneutical invention, a work of the imagination, enacts the truth of Gods
being. The inner landscape of the soul is to be conformed to God. Jewish
mythmaking, especially in this mystical form, is logos in the service and
6. The complex relation between claims about reality and morality (how
one ought to live humanly) is the story of Western and now global moral thought.
On this point, see the various treatments of the topic in The Blackwell Companion
to Religious Ethics, ed. William Schweiker (Oxford, 2005). More specifically, one
should consider Fishbanes contribution to this volume, Text and Canon,
6077.

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production of mythos; it is a reasonable, yet mythic, way of life enacted

in the ceaseless labor of interpretation. There is in this hermeneutic venture a formative identity between the act of exegesis and the texture and
tenor of religious understanding.
MAKING AND L IV ING MYTH

I hope that through this reading of Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking
I have grasped its hermeneutical subject matter and also something of
Fishbanes exceedingly complex argument. I have tried to show that his
account of mythopoesis enacted through exegetical labor and invention is
also and simultaneously a depiction of a way of life and even a form of
mysticism or shape of religious self-understanding. If this reading is at all
correct, it enables me to pose questions with which I can conclude these
reflections, and, in doing so, return, happily, to theological and ethical
inquiry. Each of my questions indicates a specific limit or constraint on
mythmaking in our present situation which, on my reasoning, needs serious consideration if we are to trace out the implications of Fishbanes
argument for current thought and life.
First, if there is a connection between the cognitive and moral dynamics of myth, what does it really mean to live a myth? Is it significant, for
instance, that a culture is formed around a myth of divine combat but
also a God manifest in pathos for a suffering people? It is well-known
that many religions, not just Christianity and Judaism, warrant forms of
death and death-dealing on the belief that the divine or sacred brings
life from death. Surely it is important that each of these traditions has
countervoices that challenge obedience to a logic of life-through-death.7
How might these different accounts of a tradition and images of life,
death, and combat variously shape the landscape of the soul? And how
in Judaism does that shift made by the rabbinic intensification of human
action via the myth bear on the very being and action of God? Stated
otherwise, it would be fascinating to trace in detail the lived meaning of
the symbolic imagination and mythopoesis from covenantal obedience to
the mystical state and ask if these are not, in fact, virtually different forms
of culture, different modalities or ways of life. Put starkly, what norms
can and do and ought to guide how a myth is reactivated through exegetic action into actual life? The question here is about the normative
limitations or constraints on living or inhabiting myth.
7. This is of course one of the most pressing issues in current religious
thought. On this, see Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth
Century (New Haven, Conn., 2000), and Darrell J. Fasching and Dell deChant,
Comparative Religious Ethics: A Narrative Approach (Oxford, 2001).

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Second, I would find it illuminating to learn more about relevant and

valid forms of nonmythic knowledge operative within the various periods
of Jewish myth and mythmaking. With medieval texts like the Zohar it
seems, as Fishbane notes, that the theosphere embraces the biosphere,
so that for the mystic the biosphere is really a modality or an actualization
of the all-embracing theosphere (p. 313). What does that really mean?
How exclusive or how tight, if I can put it like that, is this mythical
outlook and what does that say for other advances in knowledge found
in the history of Jewish culture? This would seem especially germane in
determining the possible place of mythmaking in current life when a simple return to a medieval or premodern outlook is not possible. Is mysticism via a kind of mythmaking or hermeneutical invention still open to
us, and if it is open, then who is the us? To be sure, Fishbane labors
mightily to show that one can participate anew in these actions and practices and thus enact in our situation a kind of traditional religious consciousness. Yet the question remains about cognitive distances that
cannot be bridged and the extent to which nowadays we must insist that
certain insights, say from the natural and social sciences, rightly limit
what one can legitimately say about the divine in relation to our all-toohuman reality. The question here is not about normative limits on hermeneutical reenactment but, rather, constraints on exegetical practice from
other modes of human knowing.8
A final question can be posed from within the wealth of Fishbanes
historical insight. Can his work aid us in understanding the expressions
that various religions, at least those with strong exegetical and commentarial practices, can and do take within the present world scene? Are there
any hints to be found for how scholars within those traditions might defuse their traditions worst tendencies and vitalize its most creative and
life-sustaining insights? Might that not too be logos in the service of mythos, not only mystical but also (dare I say it!) ethical and theological?
Could that be the most profound point of the book, a claim, let us admit,
about the landscape of the scholars soul? Perhaps at the horizon of this
book is not just an insight about how to renew the human participation
8. I am, then, in complete agreement with Fishbane that within religious traditions like Judaism and Christianity understanding is a kind of enactment of
meanings. The questions I am posing are about the extent to which we must also
insist on constraints or limits to the power of enactment. On this, see William
Schweiker, Mimetic Reflection: A Study in Hermeneutics, Theology, and Ethics (New
York, 1990). For a helpful recent discussion of the intersections between religious
reflection and other forms of knowledge, see James M. Gustafson, An Examined
Faith: The Grace of Self-Doubt (Minneapolis, Minn., 2003).

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in the being of God but also how to reclaim, with all due modesty and
limitation, a new religious humanism. After all, other human communities
place constraints or limits on our own labors of enactment and mythmaking. Surely it is the case that we exist in an age in which many people are
living within and through their inherited myths amid the global compression of the world. 9 If that is so, how does the study of the history of
myth and mythmaking in one tradition contribute to assessing the current
religious situation in which human beings and all realms of life are profoundly endangered? This is, admittedly, a diagnostic and reflexive question intertwined with my other questions about the limits and constrains
of hermeneutical enactment provoked by this brilliant book
I conclude by returning to where I began the inquiry. Once again I want
to voice my profound gratitude for this text and my admiration for Michael Fishbanes stellar addition to the study of Jewish thought and life.
I applaud his contribution to the venture shared by scholars who wrestle
from within our distinctive disciplines with the wild dynamics of the religions. And if I have him right, I want to join Fishbane in the grand
venture of reclaiming a religious sensibility for our time that is also, and
always, an acknowledgement of the dignity and vulnerability of human
beings.

9. For an account of the relation of myth and religious and ethical thinking
amid global dynamics, see William Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics: In the Time of Many Worlds (Oxford, 2004).

T H E J E W I S H Q U A R T E R LY R E V I E W , Vol. 96, No. 2 (Spring 2006) 250261

Jewish Myths between Text and

Ethnography: On Michael Fishbanes
Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking
E L I YA S S I F

T H E CO N C EP T OF M YT H has been discussed in Jewish studies almost

since its beginning. While in those initial steps discussions about myth
adhered solely to the Hebrew Bible, during the next stages of the development of Jewish studies the discussion expanded to other periods of
Jewish culture, raising new questions and issues, so much so that it became almost an independent discipline. Still, when a seminal study on
Jewish myths is published, one that covers three successive periodsthe
Hebrew Bible, rabbinic literature, and medieval Kabbalahand opens
major theoretical and historical questions for a new discussion, this is
undoubtedly a scholarly event. Such a book has been written by Michael
Fishbane. While the long-term impact of this important study cannot be
foreseen, we should not refrain from an attempt to assess the contribution
of such a central publication.
The outstanding contribution of this study is its range. Fishbane delves
into three complex historical periods that, in spite of great differences,
are connected to each other in overt and covert relationships. One obvious link is tradition; each period builds on the motifs, thought structures,
and models of the prior generations. It is impossible to understand the
mythical creativity of the Kabbalah without the mythical derashah (sermon) in the Talmud and midrash; or, in turn, the mythical thinking in
rabbinic literature without the foundations built in the Hebrew Bible.
The Hebrew Bible is another link binding all three eras. Fishbane also
looks at the sustained and evolving apperception of the one Godan
image that is the basis of the mythic worldviewas well as particular
themes such as the struggle of God with the primaeval creatures, and the
participation of God in the nations sufferings.
Despite its scope, the book does not neglect the details. We could say
The Jewish Quarterly Review (Spring 2006)
Copyright 2006 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved.

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that here, no doubt, God is found in the details. The author did not rely
for his arguments on this or that representative text but brings another
text and another one, each one with detailed explication founded on the
severest philological principles: the manuscripts, the language, the
sources, the variants, the background. One of the truly impressive characteristics of this book is the fact that its author never surrenders to any
temptation toward popularization. The book is difficult and rigorous, demanding maximum concentration and professionalism. The best example
for that is appendix 2, The Term Kivyakhol and its Uses. In this appendix, Fishbane collects all the instances of the term from every existing
source in manuscript or printed book and examines the context and place
of each among the other instances of the term. He also categorizes all the
instances according to their themes and forms and assesses their function
and meaning in Jewish culture. This is exemplary philological research,
and only very few like it have been published in recent years. In conclusion, this read is not easy going, and is not intended to be.
One of the main interests of the study is its reassessment of the concept
of the monotheistic myth. This concept changes, in many aspects, the
way we understand myths in Jewish culture, and not only in the Hebrew
Bible, where Fishbane uses it the most. The general scholarly understanding of biblical myths (and in many cases of those in rabbinic literature as
well) is that they are either fragments or remnants of pagan myths,
or metaphors through which creators of Jewish myths tried to express
other ideas. This sort of reading has dominated Jewish studies for decades, and I myself used this approach in my studies of biblical myths.1
According to this paradigm, biblical myths were not living expressions of
biblical religiousity but either were inserted there incidentally, as remnants of older, primitive religions, or should be grasped as rhetorical
models, used as vehicles to express other religious truths. With the help
of dozens of examples taken from these two formative periods of Jewish
culture, biblical and rabbinic, the author attempts, and to my mind succeeds convincingly, in changing this approach. Myth did not append itself
incidentally to Jewish culture, and it is not an empty rhetorical or linguistic vessel. It is instead an essential element of the monotheistic worldview,
and one of the most important venues used to express its creativity and
spirituality.2 The monotheistic myth posits one God in the center of a
1. Eli Yassif, The Hebrew Folktale: History, Genre, Meaning (Bloomington, Ind.,
and Indianapolis, 1999 [Hebrew original: 1994]), 1015.
2. The great Hebrew poet Uri Zvi Greenberg (18971981) expressed the
same idea profoundly in his poetry, already in the beginning of the twentieth
century, however with the inner, emotional conviction of a prophetical poet.

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divine drama, as the dominating force of nature and the leader of human
history. Looked at in this way, the God of the Hebrew Bible or of rabbinic literature is not different from the gods of other cultures in the
ancient Near East, as Fishbane proves here again and again. However,
this deep similarity is not to suggest, as previous scholarship did, that
these are borrowings from or remnants of those cultures, but that biblical
myth is profoundly and genuinely creativeIsraelite mythmaking at its
best.
The mythical worldview of the talmudic rabbis is always confusing.
Since the pioneering attempts of the great nineteenth-century folklorist
Max Grunbaum to define and survey myth in rabbinic literature, there
has been no serious attempt to assess rabbinic mythology until the present
book.3 Scholars did not consider the mythical worldview of rabbinic literature important or central for understanding rabbinic culture. The present book must change this attitude in a seminal way. Leading the reader
through dozens of closely analyzed examples from across rabbinic literature, Fishbane shows us a rich and powerful mythical corpus in which
the rabbis invested much thought and creativity. The outstanding characteristic of these myths is not the creation of new mythical narratives but
the creation of complex and imaginative ties between myths and biblical
verses. This creative utilization of biblical verses is also a technique used
to Judaize pagan myths or to transform older myths into new narratives that express the rabbis revolutionary ideas.4 Such is the myth of the
exile of Shekhinah and Gods participation in the suffering of his people.
By creating one mythical motif, the rabbis transform God from being
director of Jewish history into a participating God who is going with his
people into exile and suffering hand in hand with them. In the biblical
book of Lamentations there is no hint of a lament by God himself. Fishbane suggests boldly that the rabbinic myth of Gods own lament over the
destruction of Jerusalem was created by the imaginative interpretation of
biblical verses, and the outcome is similar to the lament of the gods of
ancient Near Eastern mythologies over the destruction of their cities.
3. It is to be regretted that the present book did not make any attempt to
acknowledge these pioneering studies. See Max Grunbaum, Beitrage zur vergleichenden Mythologie aus der Hagada, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesselschaft 31 (1877): 183359, and reprinted in his Gesamelte Aufsaze zur
sprach- und Sagenkunde (Berlin, 1901).
4. The process of Judaization of folk narratives was formalized earlier by Dov
Noy, The Jewish Versions of the Animal Languages Folktale (AT 670): A
Typological-Structural Study, Scripta Hierosolymitana 22 (1971): 171208; Yassif,
The Hebrew Folktale, 26582.

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These insights into rabbinic mythmaking shed new light on some of the
most widespread rabbinic texts and invest them with new status and
meaning.
Like most rabbinic traditions, rabbinic myths do not come anonymously but in the names of tradents and with a line of transmission. Another critical novum of the book is Fishbanes observation that the major
rabbinic myths were created and recreated by few schools. This changes
the perception of mythmaking in the rabbinic period from anonymous
and obscure texts to a definable creative process, with background and
historical context.
The last important insight I will list is methodological. Fishbane shows
that mythical traditions are transmitted by nonmythical genres. As it is in
the Hebrew Bible, via poetry, prophecy, historiography, wisdom literature, so it is in rabbinic literature, via the derasha (or homily). In this
context, a full chapter in the book is dedicated to uncovering mythical
motifs in the piyyut (liturgical poetry) of Late Antiquity and the early
Middle Ages. Through its outstanding form and poetical language, the
piyyut expresses much original mythical worldview and creativity. Although this observation, in principle, is not newit was used, for example, in the study of Greek myths in epic poetry, drama, and philosophical
literatureit had not previously been applied to Jewish culture.
I will leave the question of the present books treatment of myth in
Kabbalah, and its contribution to the work of Gershom Scholem and
Yehuda Liebes, to experts in this field.
The contribution of the present book to Jewish studies cannot be overstated; it is more questionable, however, what its contribution is to the
study of folklore and anthropology. Let us start with the working definition of myth used here:
We shall understand the word Myth to refer to (sacred and authoritative) accounts of the deeds and personalities of the gods and heroes
during the formative events of primordial times, or during the subsequent historical interventions or actions of these figures which are constitutive for the founding of a given culture and its rituals. (p. 11)
It is understood that a definition can never be accepted by all, especially
when it relates to such a complex and disputed concept as myth. The
present definition, I have no doubt, was chosen carefully and is intended
to serve the texts this work deals with. For this reason, I am not going to
criticize the present definition in itself, or compare it to others that folk-

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lorists or anthropologists would prefer.5 However, I will look at the consistency of this initial, working definition throughout the book. Thus,
when the author speaks of the myth of the Exodus from Egypt as it
was transformed from the Hebrew Bible to tannaitic literature, he writes,
[these are] teachings which transform the biblical account of Israels
historical redemption by God into a mythic event that includes God as
well (p. 142). And then again, when he speaks of the peoples weeping
over the destruction of Jerusalem in the book of Lamentations as transformed in the midrash into Gods lament, he writes, But just this is the
mythic view that midrash makes possible, transforming Israelite Heilsgeschichte into a divine drama (p. 154). Myth is presented here as an opposition to sacred history.6 According to this view, and different from his
initial definition, myth could be considered only that which is a divine
drama, a narrative that its protagonist is only God, not human beings.
This is why I could not find, although I have looked hard throughout the
book, even one myth whose protagonist is a human being. Not even the
Exodus from Egypt with Moses at its center, nor even tales of Samson,
David, and Goliath,7 or the tale of Elijahs ascension to heaven; and of
course no treatment of such figures such as Rabbi Ishmael who ascended
heaven in the midrash, Rabbi Joshua ben Levi who duped the Angel of
Death and entered alive into heaven, Raba bar-bar Hannah who met the
mythical Dead of the Desert,8 or the deeds of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai
and his group in the Zohar. Of course, an author may decide to deal only
with the figure of God in Jewish myths, but such a decision should be
announced loud and clear, along with an explanation for this choice. The
narrowing of myth to the domain of acts and deeds of God alone in fact
omits much that is essential to Jewish mythmaking in the periods this
book covers (and of course in later periods as well).
5. The dozens of definitions found in the textbooks used by folklorists and
anthropologists are not mentioned or used here at all. See William G. Doty, Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 2000).
6. See the classical definition of myth, which opposes strongly such an approach, in Alan Dundes, ed., Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth
(Berkeley, Calif., 1984).
7. Heda Jason, The Story of David and Goliath: Folk Epic? (Hebrew),
Hasifrut 23 (1976): 2341; English translation: Biblica 60 (1979): 3670.
8. Rabbi Ishmael ascends to heaven to annul the death verdict for the ten
rabbis, in Midrash ele ezkera, in Aharon (Adolph) Jellinek, ed., Bet ha-midrash (Hebrew; Jerusalem, 1967); Rabbi Joshua ben Levi dupes the Angel of Death,
jumps alive into the Garden of Eden, and steals the Angel of Deaths sword in
bKett 77b; Raba bar bar Hanna, the talmudic traveler and tall-tales storyteller,
meets in the desert the hoards of exiles from Egypt who died in the desert and
did not enter Canaan (bBB 73a-74b).

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The last word in the aforementioned definition is rituals. It is somehow odd that the concept is included in the initial working definition,
since it holds almost no place in the analysis or interpretation of the dozens of texts in the book (indeed, the references to the word ritual in the
general index are misleading). At best there, we find textual analyses of
a few texts from the Bible or rabbinic literature that describe rituals (as
on pp. 18487), but without any attempt to present the place and function
of these mythical texts in the context of Jewish rituals. It is a general
opinion today among folklorists and anthropologists that no serious discussion of myth can be conducted without some kind of reference to
ritual. After the great debate that dominated mid-twentieth-century anthropological discourse, against the myth-ritual theory, a careful and balanced approach replaced it, an attitude that recognizes the essential place
of ritual in mythical praxis and sees it as a central element for understanding its meaning and function.9
From my vantage in folklore, the almost total disregard for the ritual
basis of myth is confusing. I am not saying here that the rituals with
which these myths are affiliated are somehow out there and that the author disregards them. Rather, because the materials with which he grapples are textual, not ethnographical (they are not based on ethnographic
fieldwork), the social function of these texts, in which ritual acts are central, should have been taken into account. For example, the battle of God
and the sea monster in the Hebrew Bibleone of the central themes
discussed in the bookis repeated again and again in different variants
in the Psalms. Does this poetical repetition of the motif in the Psalms
have any ritual implications? Is it possible that in public events, either in
the Temple or in other sacred locations, it was part of a ritual commemorating or symbolizing the mythical battle? The interpretation of this myth
could benefit much from such considerations. Or another central theme
in this book, the participation of the Shekhinah in the events of the Destruction and Exile, which, as Fishbane convincingly proves, is the most
important myth created by the rabbis: might we consider the possibility
that the public context of the myth, at least in later generations, is the
Ninth of Av? That the crying and moaning on the Ninth of Av, echoed,
as it were, the voice of God himself? Again, ritualistic considerations of
9. The concentrated critique could be found in Joseph Fontenrose, The Ritual
Theory of Myth (Berkeley, Calif., 1971). The anthropological balancing approach started already with Klyde Kluckhohn, Myth and Rituals: A General
Theory, Harvard Theological Review 35 (1942): 4579, and resumed with the influential Victor W. Turner, Myth and Symbol, International Encyclopedia of the
Social Sciences, ed. D. L. Sills (New York, 1968), 57682.

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the myth could add much depth to its meaning and especially to its function in life (Sitz im Leben).
That ritual is sidelined here is symptomatic of a more general observation: the book is text-bound to the extreme. There are almost no ethnological or anthropological, hence human, considerations. It is true, of course,
that when we deal with the biblical or rabbinic periods, the vast bulk of
the evidence is textual. Any ethnographic hypotheses would remain of
necessity hypotheses. However, we should not forget, throughout the discussion of these texts, that human beings created them and expressed
themselves through them. These are human beings who projected their
fears, their tensions, their hopes, and not just textual creations and textbound insights (as Fishbane puts it: the priority of exegesis, p. 108).
The author argues again and again that the myths he analyzes are part
of a living myth, and not just a dead metaphor or a remnant from earlier, pagan times. However, it is regrettable that he does not elaborate
here and explain what exactly he means by a living myth. Does it mean
that the myth was enacted ritually in real life? Or that the storytellers
and their audiences (readers, in this case), believed in them in the way
suggested by Paul Veyne?10 Or perhaps that it was created as an answer
to a disturbing question regarding real society? For example, when Fishbane claims that the myth told by R. Levi in Genesis Rabbah (32.2)the
copulation of the upper and the lower watersis a rabbinizing of a living myth (p. 107), it makes one wonder who in the time of Rabbi Levi
was still interested in such myths? What did they mean and what function
in real life did they have, to enable them the definition of a living myth?
I accept Fishbanes conclusion, although not his reasons, that these
myths, especially in rabbinic literature, are not folk-creations but learned
literature. These are what we might call desk myths, created mainly at
the writing or study desk and not in real life. They were created in
order to serve, as Fishbane proves convincingly, the text-bound worldview of the rabbis, and their brilliant exegetical insights. When I surveyed
the folk literature of the rabbinic period in my book The Hebrew Folktale,
I did not include these texts in the survey,11 as I did not think they could
be defined as folk literature, but for different reasons. They did not fulfill
the basic condition of folk narrative, being multiple existence (multiple
variants of a given narrative), the major index proving whether a tradi10. Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?, trans. from the French
by P. Wissing (Chicago, 1988).
11. Yassif, The Hebrew Folktale, 70370.

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tion was accepted by society and became part of folklore.12 Most of the
myths presented and analyzed in the present volume did not pass the
folk barrier; they remained textual, learned myths on the pages of
the Talmud and midrash and did not exit from there into real life to become living myths.
However, there are myths studied in depth by Fishbane that are also
exemplary folklore. Such is the ancient myth of the fertilization of the
virgin land by the Baalthe husband or male organwhich is not an
original rabbinic myth but was adopted by the rabbis using their usual
exegetical techniques. Or, much more interesting, is the myth of the exile
of the Shekhinah. Even if we will accept Fishbanes suggestion that this is
a learned myth as it is founded on brilliant verse homily, still it is a folk
myth at its best: it is found in rabbinic and medieval sources in dozens of
variants; it became an oral tradition repeated again and again by various
layers of Jewish society; and it was used intensively as part of the ritual
of Ninth of Av. Even if it has been proved that the source of a certain
myth is learnedthat it was created within the walls of bet ha-midrash,
for exampleit could still be a folk myth, because of its function in society. I want to refute here a too-often-accepted misunderstanding, which
considers the source of a given narrative to be the main criterion for its
characterization as learned or folk. The rabbis, either in bet hamidrash or outside it, were part of Jewish society and not a separate species. As such, their works are neither folk nor learned (could their degree
of learning be measured? What if a certain rabbi is only half learned,
as was a man like Raba bar bar Hannah?). It is the afterlife, not the
origin of a motif, that should determine its status. If a folktale or a myth
was created by a rabbi and it never broke through to the real life of the
community, remaining only on the pages of the Talmud or midrash, it is
learned. However, if such a creation overcame the folk barrier, and
society found it useful or meaningful for its life, and it told and retold it
again and again in different variantsthis is a folk narrative, regardless
of its source.
We may use here a concept that could be termed mythical mentality,
that is to say, the mental or psychological state of a person or society
that creates myths. Freud called it in his Totem and Taboo (1913) the
omnipotence of thoughts, in which he saw the mental state that was
the foundation of religions: Men mistook the order of their ideas for the
order of nature, and hence imagined that the control which they have, or
12. Alan Dundes, Introduction, in A. Dundes and C. Pagter, eds., Urban
Folklore from the Paperwork Empire (Austin, Tex., 1975), xiiixxii.

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seem to have, over their thoughts, permitted them to exercize a corresponding control over things.13 Such is the foundation of the mythical
mentality, that which describes God as having hands and legs or smelling
the odor of sacrifices. We can accept or reject Freuds historical observations on the origin of religions, but it is difficult to deny that the basis of
mythmaking could not have been an artificial construct or logical argumentation but that same mythical mentality that projects its creations on
the external world. Another, somewhat forgotten great scholar of rabbinic literature, Isaac Heinemann, proposed the concept of organic
thinkinga type of mentality the rabbis shared with other primitive
cultures, which was a concrete, open, and creative worldview.14 Thus,
although I agree with Fishbane that most of rabbinic myths are learned
not folk creations, the fact that there were certain rabbinic schools that
chose this particular way to express their ideas is a proof for some kind
of mythical mentality existing in the basis of their religious and literary
thought. Is this what Fishbane means by living myths?
However, it does not seem right to go into this matter only halfway, to
define these texts as myths and stop there. If in the basis of rabbinic
religious thinking lies some kind of mythical mentality, and it is impossible to think otherwise, then these mythical images like the hand of God
smashing the monster of the sea, or his weeping eyes on the destruction
of Jerusalem, were created inside the rabbis thoughts and projected afterward to God, hence a rabbinic omnipotence of thoughts. The way
from here to full admission that the very concept of God was created in
the minds and souls of human beings is not very far.
On this background, it seems, we can understand, from a different
angle, the term kivyakhol that, as I mentioned above, is studied in this
book in an exemplary fashion. With the support of the three interpretations Fishbane suggests there, it is possible to understand the term as a
clear statement of rabbinic theology. Understanding the danger inherent
in mythical personifications of God that they were created in their minds
and thoughts (while explicating biblical verses), the rabbis felt the need
to limit such imaginings to the exegetical realm and keep it from the
13. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. J. Starchey [the standard edition,
vol. 13] (London, 1958 [1913]), 83 (the quotation is founded on earlier work of
the British anthropologist Sir James Fraser).
14. Isaac Heinemann, Darkhe ha-agada (Jerusalem, 1954). On the personification of Gods attributes as emerging from organic thinking, see pp. 1520. It
should be also noted that the present book could benefit much from Heinemanns
profound and pioneering discussion of the ways rabbinic literature utilizes the
biblical verses.

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ontology of God himself. Or to put it differently, the rabbis, through this

term kivyakhol, acknowledge an omnipotence of thoughts that does not
apply to the very existence of God. As this conviction has to be a constant
and essential presence, it is repeated again and again, as Fishbanes study
proves. I am trying to argue here that we cannot understand the mythical
creativity even in a learned case like that of rabbinic culture without
acknowledging, in full and without fear, the mythical mentality on which
it is founded.
The term kivyakhol is revealing from another folkloristic perspective,
and this is the tension between the monotheistic-spiritual concept of God
and the pagan-concrete one. I am not trying to argue that this dichotomy
is always valid, or that it could exist at all in real life. However, in its basic
conceptualization, a dichotomy like this lived in the minds and feelings of
those who developed a monotheistic worldview. The term kivyakhol enables the rabbis to grasp, side by side, both concepts of God: to continue
holding to a purist belief in the spirituality of the one God, and to describe
immediately and in the most concrete way, the body of God and his
human activities. At the same time that we accept in principle a basic
recognition of the forceful creativity invested in the monotheistic myth
for the rabbis, still it is important to emphasize that one of the sources of
its strength is a powerful tension. There is a recognition in the rabbis
monotheistic mythmaking that the personifications it creates and uses,
although they refer to the one God, emerge from a mythical mentality
that cannot be but pagan. The most ostensible expression of this tension
is the concept of kivyakhol, and we can see and feel it in almost every
occurrence of the word.
This tension is represented in the Hebrew Bible in well-known examples that Fishbane chose not to include in his discussion:
The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children
of men were building. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one,
and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now
nothing will be withheld from them, which they have schemed to do.
Come, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they
may not understand one anothers speech. (Gn 11.57)
God descends to earth to determine whether mans deeds might pose a
threat to his dominion (why cannot the Almighty see it from above?!).
When the rebellious character of the builders of the city and the tower
becomes evident, the third-person-singular voice changes to the first-person plural, and a number of gods descend from the heavens for a struggle

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with the recalcitrant children of men. There is something in this of a

general declaration of war between gods and mortals who would pursue the course of rebellion. The transformations in this text from the
singular to the plural and back are a clear expression of the tension between the pagan basis of this myththe plurality of gods and their
human characteristicsand the monotheistic tendency which the book
of Genesis tries to promote. In the second example this tension is even
bolder:
And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the
earth, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God15 saw
that the daughters of men were fair; and they took them wives of all
whom they chose. And the Lord said, my spirit shall not forever abide
in man, for that he also is flesh: and his days shall be a hundred and
twenty years. There were Nefilim in the earth in those days; and also
after that, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and
they bore children to them; the same were mighty men of old, men of
renown. (Gn 6.14)16
The birth of the giants is a challenge against divinely ordained mortality,
for the hybrid offspring of god and man would be immortal. These
beings are the Nefilim (i.e., the giants or the great culture heroes of ancient mythologies). This version of the myth emphasizes that my spirit
shall not forever abide in man, for that he also is flesh: and his days shall
be a hundred and twenty years (Gn 6.3). In other words, the existence
of demigods who, according to common mythological beliefs, are immortal is denied.
That is how the tension between the basic pagan beliefs (the multiplicity of gods, the gods family [sons of gods], the human-like feelings of
the gods such as lust for women, the birth of the giants/culture heroes)
and the basic monotheistic conception of the one and only heavenly being
is expressed here. It is impossible, to my mind, to understand in all its
depth the mythical creativity in the domain of Jewish culture in each of
the three periods this book is dealing with without the acknowledgment
15. In almost all Jewish translations of this text, I found substitutes for the
expression sons of God [or gods], such as heavenly host, divine beings,
angels, etc. I consider such a deliberate confusion between translation and interpretation, because the original biblical expression interferes with someones
beliefs(!), as pure chutzpah.
16. For some of the abundant scholarship published on these myths, see Yassif, The Hebrew Folktale, 46365, n. 5.

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of the continuous and powerful tensionmental, theological, and literarybetween the open and concrete worldview of the pagan myths and
the monotheistic demand for spiritual unity of the world and the God
who governs it.
The disagreement between me and the author of this important monograph emerges mainly from a different orientation: mine is more reality
bound and society oriented, his is more textually bound and intellectually
oriented. However, any kind of disagreement cannot weaken the seminal
achievement of this book and its contribution to any future discussion of
this and related themes.