Textual Mirrors. Dina Stein
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He said to her: These are the males and those are the females.
She said to him: My son, you are a great sage.
She performed yet another test in front of him. She brought circumcised and uncircumcised before him, all of the same height and all wearing the same clothing.
She said to him: Separate the circumcised from the uncircumcised.
He immediately signaled to the high priest, and he opened the ark of the covenant. The circumcised among them bowed to half their height, and not only that but their faces were filled with the radiance of the Shekhinah. The uncircumcised among them immediately fell prostrate.
He said to her: These are circumcised and those are uncircumcised.
She said: From where do you know?
He said to her: From Balaam, is it not written, “Who beholds visions from the Almighty, [prostrate but with eyes unveiled]”? (Num. 24:4). Had he not fallen, he would not have seen anything. And if you do not wish to learn from Balaam, come learn from Job, for when his three friends came to comfort him, he said to them: “But I, like you, have a mind, and am not less than [lo nofel me] you” (Job 12:3). I do not fall like you.6
At that moment, she said to him: “I did not believe the reports until I came and saw with my own eyes that not even the half had been told me; your wisdom and wealth surpass the reports that I heard. How fortunate are your men, and how fortunate are these your courtiers who are always in attendance on you and can hear your wisdom! Praised be the Lord your God, Who delighted in you and set you on the throne of Israel. It is because of the Lord’s everlasting love for Israel that He made you king to administer justice and righteousness.” (1 Kings 10:7–9)
The riddling tale involves two main actors—Solomon and the Queen of Sheba—and a distinct mode of communication between them: riddles. It also involves what Hillis Miller terms “possible selves.” According to him, characters that operate in narratives allow their addressees (readers or listeners) to “experiment with possible selves and to learn to take … place in the real world, to play … [a] part there.”7 Solomon, as we will see later on, is a prototypical rabbinical figure and as such he engages in midrash. The Queen of Sheba constitutes an “other,” in her gender and in her religion; her discursive weapon, riddles, are also “other.” The riddles thus serve as a possible discursive other holding up a mirror to the midrashic self. In Miller’s terms, the Queen of Sheba and her riddles are “possible selves.”
As is usual with rabbinic tales, this one comes to us devoid of its contexts. When (if ever) was the story performed? For which audience? We are unlikely ever to have answers to these questions or to others that would provide a framework for the tale. Today, however, we are well aware that context is a constructed, rather than a given, trait of cultural phenomena. While we cannot recover the contexts, we have at hand “co-texts” in the form of other relevant texts in relation to which the story can be read. In other words, the co-texts are a construct of a given reading practice. The co-textual space designates a field of meaning in which our text resides.8 This space broadens or limits possible meanings when we examine the way in which the riddles in the riddling tale function.
In my discussion of the tale of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, I will first address the rhetorical characteristic of this form of discourse, from an a-temporal (ahistorical) and a-cultural point of view, by positing the riddle’s rhetorical potential. I will continue this line of investigation by considering the diachronic aspect of this form of discourse, which will inform us of the place that the riddle occupies within Jewish culture. The salient question will be: Do models of riddling tales or riddles exist within the culture? I will also look at similar forms of discourse in neighboring cultures.
The co-textual environment, the “sound box” of the riddling story in Midrash Mishle, consists of other texts, three of which will be discussed here: the biblical story of the meeting of the two leaders; other traditions about the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon and their encounter; and traditions of riddles and riddling tales in the cultural environment of Midrash Mishle.
The Riddle
Riddles are a form of discursive other, in relationship to and against which the midrashic self is examined. By identifying the riddles as an other in rabbinic texts, I mean that they are discursively unusual and anomalous in the rabbinic corpus; if we identify a pivotal rabbinic self with the discourse of midrash, riddles are clearly situated outside that discursive center and can potentially serve as a vantage point from which the center is reflected upon. In order to understand the intense reflective quality that the riddles may hold in our text, we should briefly address the biblical and rabbinic models of riddles and elaborate on the rhetorical and cognitive aspects of the genre.
Riddles make rare appearances in rabbinic literature. In chapter 1 of Lamentations Rabbah, we find eleven riddling tales, which involve people of Jerusalem and Athenians. In the Targum sheni (second translation) of the Book of Esther (customarily dated to the seventh or eighth century CE), the Queen of Sheba poses three riddles to Solomon. In Lamentations Rabbah, the fourth riddle alone is articulated in a riddling situation proper.9 Going back to the Bible, a riddle is explicitly presented in Samson’s story10 (Judg. 14:12), and the accounts of the meeting between Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (1 Kings 10; 2 Chronicles 9) state that the queen posed him riddles but do not offer the riddles themselves. Some argue that various forms of discourse in the Bible in the wisdom literature, such as Psalms and Proverbs, are riddle-like (and may have originated from proper riddles) and that, while they have been transformed, they can still be identified.11 The connections among the different forms of discourse are important; nonetheless, they should not blur the boundaries that differentiate them and that make them distinct genres.
In sum, the textual evidence shows that riddles in the Bible and in rabbinic tradition could have served as possible rhetorical models—although limited in scope—for the text in Midrash Mishle. Riddles in that model served in a situation of conflict, involving tensions of different kinds: intercultural tension (Jerusalem/Athens; foreign queen/king of Israel; Samson/the Philistines) and an erotic tension (Samson/Delilah; Queen of Sheba/Solomon).
Let us turn to the potential meaning embedded in the riddle as a genre. As we shall see, the riddle may carry seemingly contradictory qualities. For example, it may seem subversive and undermining, as well as reassuring and settling. It is its dual, even evasive, character that renders the riddle a powerful and uncanny other, against which midrash is measured here. The fact that riddles are part of a riddling tale intensifies their complexity since, as Roger Abrahams insightfully noted: “[R]iddles within stories seem so central to an understanding of all ‘true riddles’ for, in calling attention to themselves as wit-testing devices, the vocabulary of riddles is more fully, if reflexively, explored than in other descriptive enigmas.”12
The riddle comprises the riddle image and the solution to which the image refers. The relations between the descriptive elements in the first half of the riddle are confusing, in a way that postpones, or even blocks out, the identification of the referent.13 The surprising connections between the descriptive elements that point to a certain referent imply the possibility of alternative ways of categorization. For example, the answer to the riddle “what has blond hair and stands in the corner” is a broom (and not a person). The riddle thus mixes two supposedly distinct categories—human and nonhuman/animate or subject and object, by constructing an image that refers simultaneously to both categories. Both animate and non-animate, according to the riddle image, can be referred to in the same terms (“hair,” “standing”). The riddle image establishes an identity between categories that are usually opposed to or distinct from each other. Thus, the riddle shows users of the language that these classifications, insofar that they are reflected in language, are not unassailable.14 In this way, by demonstrating that conceptual categories should not be regarded as exclusive, the riddle undermines institutional order by which human beings classify the world. In other words, the riddle implies that cultural classifications are arbitrary, or, as