Gilad Elbom

Textual Rivalries: Jesus, Midrash, and Kabbalah Gilad Elbom

The kabbalistic tradition is a missing link to eye-opening connections between ancient texts and contemporary understandings of textuality. Not only is much of kabbalistic interpretation unavailable in English, but it also tends to be mislabeled as mysticism. Textual Rivalries demystifies kabbalistic thought, treats it as a consistent framework, makes it accessible to new audiences, and, most importantly, explores the theology of textuality inherent to kabbalistic interpretation.



In Textual Rivalries, Gilad Elbom recovers innovative methods of Jewish biblical interpretation and traces the implications for a theology of textuality, important for both Jewish and Christian understandings of the Bible. Rather than a set of tried-and-true statements about an existing reality, the Bible, as Elbom shows, is a perpetually creative sign system that produces multiple meanings and generates new realities. In theological terms, the Bible is as perpetually creative as God--and just as imaginative. Biblical interpretation becomes an active participant in the gradual repair of an imperfect world and a major factor in the ongoing search for more profound definitions of God, language, history, and humanity.

Textual Rivalries then probes the ways in which assigning surprising roles to signifiers is achieved through an intertextual reading of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and midrash, including mainstream rabbinic hermeneutics and inventive kabbalistic texts. Some of the major characters that undergo transformations are Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Moses and Jethro, Nebuchadnezzar, Yohanan ben Zakkai, Jephthah's daughter and the concubine at Gibeah, King Saul and King David, Paul, God himself--and his beloved female counterpart, the Shekhinah.

Rather than impose a semiotic theory on biblical, rabbinic, and kabbalistic literature, Elbom uses elements of Jewish interpretation as early semiotic frameworks that articulate, shape, and foreshadow modern modes of thinking, reading, and meaning-making.