Moses reads to the people. “The Testament and Death of Moses,” a fresco attributed to Luca Signorelli and Bartolomeo della Gatta, around 1482, the Sistine Chapel, Rome. Wikimedia
The Torah’s Use of Mise en Abyme
After Sinai, Moses writes down YHWH’s Laws on a scroll and reads it to the people (Exodus 24). Similarly, Moses writes down the Deuteronomic Torah, which will be read to the people every seven years (Deuteronomy 31). Using the literary mirroring technique, mise en abyme, the Torah connects its authority to these ancient scrolls on one hand, and its readers with the ancient Israelite audience on the other.
Published: January 26, 2022
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Last Updated: September 7, 2026
When the CC begins here or whether the opening speech in 20:19/22 begins the CC is debated by scholars.
The LXX text has the Israelites respond here the same way they respond in v. 7 (ποιήσομεν καὶ ἀκουσόμεθα).
This is Moses’ second foray into scribal activity. In Exod 17:14, Moses, for the first time, resorts to written communication when YHWH enjoins him to write a reminder of Amalek’s defeat “on a scroll” (to be recited in the hearing of Joshua).
Jean Louis Ska, “From History Writing to Library Building: The End of History and the Birth of the Book,” in The Pentateuch as Torah: New Models for Understanding Its Promulgation and Acceptance, ed., Gary N. Knoppers and Bernard M. Levinson (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2007), 162.
André Gide, Journal 1889-1939 (Paris: Gallimard, 1948) 41. I follow the translation by Marcus Snow, Into the Abyss: a Study of the Mise en Abyme, Doctoral Thesis (London Metropolitan University, 2016) 23. Gide also mentions Velásquez’s painting of the Meniñas, though he notes it is used differently there.
Gide also calls attention to Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in which at the moment the narrator is reading the story of Ethelred the knight fighting a dragon to his friend Roderick Usher, he (the narrator) and Usher can hear the sound of Roderick’s sister fighting her way out of the tomb in which she was buried alive.
Indeed, as early as 1864, Victor Hugo had already observed the pervasiveness of the technique in Shakespeare:
Every play of Shakespeare’s, two excepted, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet (thirty-four plays out of thirty-six), offers to our observation one peculiarity which seems to have escaped, up to this day, the most eminent commentators and critics... It is a double action which traverses the drama, and reflects it on a small scale.
Victor Hugo, Shakespeare, transl. M.B. Anderson (Chicago: A.C. McClurg and Company, 1887), 274. Another example from Shakespeare is the comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which features two pairs of lovers whose feelings have been confused by fairy magic. In one of the scenes, the characters watch a terrible performance of Ovid’s “Pyramus and Thisbe,” which features lovers whose confusion leads to their committing suicide one after the other.
Gide, Journal, 41. Lucien Dällenbach’s, The Mirror in the Text (1977), is the classic essay. It has provided the first systematic analysis of the mise en abyme and of its literary and artistic applications from Van Eyck and Velásquez to Gide, Beckett and the French nouveau roman.
Dorrit Cohn, “Metalepsis and Mise en Abyme,” Narrative 20.1 (2012) 105; quoting Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980) 236. See Jean-Pierre Sonnet, “‘Today’ in Deuteronomy: A Narrative Metalepsis,” Biblica 101.4 (2020) 498–518.
Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative. Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985) 77.
Editor’s note: For a discussion of what the Torah presents as Moses’ word and what the Torah intends to imply about the identity and authority of its narrator, see Christopher A. Rollston, “Who Wrote the Torah According to the Torah?” TheTorah (2017).
Editor’s note: For a discussion of what this might refer to in context, see David Glatt-Gilad, “Deuteronomy: The First Torah,” TheTorah (2015).
Editor’s note: For a discussion of the what this text references, see Tzemah Yoreh, “Moses Wrote Down this Song, Deuteronomy 31:22 - Which Song?” TheTorah (2018).
Exod 24:12; 31:18; 32:16, etc., Deut 4:13; 5:22; 9:10; etc.
The phrase is best understood as an allusion to words (figuratively) written upon the heart, more precisely, “upon the tablet of the heart,” as two passages in the book of Proverbs make clear (Prov 3:3 and 7:3; cf. 6:20-22). Such a heart tablet is thus a metonymy (interior for exterior) of the wooden or slate board scribes and students carried on their chest (“on their heart”), on which to write exercises or memoranda.
Of particular interest is Iddo Dickmann’s investigation on the taking over of the mise en abyme in rabbinic tradition. Dickmann shows how the five texts the Talmudic sages granted the halakhic status of sēper to – the Torah, the tefillin, the get, the mezuzah, and the Scroll of Esther – are distinguished not only by comprising halakhic requirements regarding their format and material, but also by comprising mise en abyme —the trait of literary self-containing. In conjunction with those requirements, this mise en abyme is unique as its “centrifugal” expansion exceeds, not virtually but practically, the boundaries of the book towards pragmatic, empirical, reality. See Iddo Dickman, “The Sefer as a Challenge to Reception Theories,” Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy 26 (2018) 67–93; The Little Crystalline Seed: The Ontological Significance of Mise en Abyme in Post-Heideggerian Thought, SUNY series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019).
