The stone that 'transports itself': A comparative study of Song of Songs Rabbah (1,4) and the Dialogue on Miracles (8,63) by Caesarius of Heisterbach

The Jewish story about Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa and his donation to the temple appears in Song of Songs Rabbah, an exegetic Midrash of the sixth century, and in the later Ecclesiastes Rabbah. According to this tale, Rabbi Hanina was so poor that he was unable to provide the standard festival offerings to the temple, as was customary on the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Instead, he managed to find a heavy stone which he chiseled and brought along with him. The narrative function of bringing weighty stones to holy places also appears in one of the exempla of Dialogus miraculorum which was written by Caesarius of Heisterbach in the thirteenth century. The protagonist of this tale, in apprehension of the gravity of his sins, decided to bring heavy stones to the local Church of the Apostles. On the approaching Day of Judgment, so he hoped, these stones would add to the weight of his good deeds and outweigh his sins. Literary materials and narrative functions tend to circulate across cultural and temporal boundaries, thus making it possible to view different stories that share these features as manifesting one single phenomenon. Their common narrative function expresses a similar, Judeo-Christian consciousness of the categories of 'stone' and 'holy place'. The individual cultural settings of these stories, however, establish different interrelations between these classifications.