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 Abrahams put it: “[R]iddles, in bringing together elements from different semantic domains bring those classes themselves and the whole idea of classification under question.”15 Riddles may be viewed as ambiguous elements that threaten the integrity of the system—as an aggressive form of discourse, a view that explains the ritual restrictions placed on it. Not surprisingly, as anthropological studies have shown, the boundaries of riddling games are marked and defined.16 Yet riddles also demonstrate the flexibility of a cultural system that has the ability to mediate between diverse, and even opposed, categories. Accordingly, riddles can create new categories in which to place the things to which the images refer—the solutions to the riddles—classifying them according to salient attributes that nevertheless might not previously have been seen as possible criteria for categorization.17 Since the ability to create categories is central to the cognitive aspects of adaptive learning, riddles are paradigmatic examples of the process by which this ability is acquired.18 In a similar fashion, it can be argued that riddles offer a concrete demonstration of the various ways in which things in the phenomenal world interrelate. In this, the riddle may be viewed as encapsulating the notion of culture as a unity of the diverse.19 A complementary view is that the riddle channels energy. That energy, which could be potentially harmful for the community and its values, finds its expression in a non-damaging, and even psychologically supportive, form. The riddle creates a world of conflict that is resolved within the framework of a game. The solution leaves unresolved, once the game is over, the actual social, cultural, and existential conflicts external to the riddle game.20
As I mentioned earlier, the mixing of categories that riddles entail explains their subversive, nonconformative, and aggressive qualities. Yet, like the carnival, these very same qualities enable riddles to function as an outlet and diversion for these destructive forces, thus supporting the authority of the culture that produces them. Even so, for its poser, the riddle is unequivocally aggressive—he (or, as in the present case, she) gains power by sowing confusion while making use of the wit proper to this form. This aspect should not be overlooked in the analysis of riddles embedded in a riddling situation, where a riddler and an addressee are explicitly mentioned. In this case, the riddle is not directed at the readers, and they are not required to solve it. Rather, the riddle is embedded in another discourse, in a plot. It is a riddling tale. And the fact that the riddling situation is surrounded by a different form of discourse bears, as we shall see, other implications.
In ancient and modern cultures, both Jewish and non-Jewish, riddling is often associated with wedding rituals. A riddle in the midrashic discourse may thus evoke matrimony, intensifying a story’s erotic subtext—as is the case in the midrash about Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.21 Why are riddles associated with weddings? It could be because the form itself is erotic: “It is structured to bring the separated together, to connect the disconnected.”22 From a more socially pragmatic perspective, riddles are presented at weddings, which join a couple and the members of their families. Posed, as they are, within the clear boundaries of a riddling game, they thus offer relief from the tensions that underlie the situation: the psychological, cultural, and economic tensions between the families, as well as the erotic tension between the couple.23 Furthermore, weddings are the expression par excellence of kinship laws, laws that serve as the founding categories of social organization. Since riddles may imply that any act of categorization is arbitrary, the analogy between the riddle and the wedding framework in which it is performed suggests that kinship laws are arbitrary, too, just like other forms of social categorization. Hence the riddle provides an outlet for defiance of the very foundations of culture (kinship laws) but also mediates between this defiance and the forms of actual social organization.
Akin to the riddle, though different, is the wisdom question. Its solution is based on prior knowledge of the subject or of scripture.24 Wisdom questions, too, are not prevalent in the Jewish tradition prior to Midrash Mishle. It is, however, worth mentioning the few instances in which they appear, which constitute an additional possible model for our midrashic text.
The Babylonian Talmud tells us of Rabbi Yehoshuʿa’s confrontation with sixty citizens of Athens, in which he offered irrefutable answers to their questions (bBekhorot 8b). In another place in the Talmud (bTamid 72b), we learn of a similar confrontation of wisdom questions between Alexander the Great and the elders of the Negev.25 From a synchronic perspective, the organizing pattern of Pseudo–Ben Sira (roughly a contemporary of our text) is that of wisdom questions. The situation in which a man stands before a ruler and answers his questions is a predominant literary format in Arabic (and other Eastern) literature of the time. One such example occurs in the eleventh chapter of the fable cycle Kalila and Dimna, where a dialogue between a king and one of his sages advances the plot. The Kalila and Dimna cycle was translated from Pahlavi into Arabic in the eighth century (and into Persian in the tenth) and was known among the Jews.26 It seems, therefore, that we cannot rule out the possibility that this Eastern dialogical fabula-model influenced the riddle dialogue
