“Chiseled from all Sides”: Hermeneutics and Dispute in the Rabbinic Tradition

Among contemporary literary theorists—and in the humanities in general—theological approaches toward interpretation have been dismissed in favor of hermeneutic models committed to the contingency, partiality, and historicity of all interpretative practice. Against the grain of this tendency, which tends to dismiss all vestiges of theology from postmodern habits of reading and interpretation, critics like Daniel Boyarin and David Stern, have, over the past decades, attempted to recover the distinctly Jewish modes and discourses of reading and interpretation. In the process, they have, as Boyarin himself underlines, introduced a specifically Jewish mode of reading—that of midrash—into the literary theoretical canon.