After quoting side-by-side in Greek the first few lines of the Odyssey and the new testament letter called Hebrews, Jared starts in:
I thought I would write an essay—in Montaigne’ sense of a try, an experiment, an attempt that is never conclusive but always questioning—by bringing together two texts and just seeing what happens. It is really a midrashic moment, in fact, because I started thinking about these two texts due to a single word that appears in the first line of each with slight variation: πολύτροπον and πολυτρόπως. This bringing together two texts based upon the occurrence of a single word is, as noted, a midrashic technique, one known as gezera shawa, a technique employed by one of the texts under consideration—Hebrews—but, as we will see, my interpretive maneuvers of reading one text against another through the occurrence of a single word is . . .Now jump over to his post for much more and many turns.
