Introduction

Midrash is the primary mode by which the ancient rabbis received and transmitted the Hebrew Bible:

Leopold Zunz, Die Gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden, historisch entwickelt (Berlin, 1832); Saul Lieberman, Hellenism in Jewish Palestine (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1950) 47-82; Isaac Heinemann, The Methods of Aggadah. 3rd ed. (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1970, Hebrew); Joseph Heinemann, Aggadot and their Traditions (Jerusalem: Keter, 1974, Hebrew); James L. Kugel, “Two Introductions to Midrash,” Prooftexts 3 (1983), 131-155, idem., ed. Studies in Ancient Midrash (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 2001); Ofra Meir, The Exegetical Narrative in Genesis Rabbah (Tel Aviv: Ha-Ḳibuts ha-meʼuḥad, 1987, Hebrew); Steven Fraade, “Interpreting Midrash 1: Midrash and the History of Judaism.” Prooftexts 7.2 (1987): 179-94; idem, “Interpreting Midrash 2: Midrash and its Literary Contexts.” Prooftexts 7.3 (1987): 284-300 (with corrigenda in 8.1 [1988]: 159-60); Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1990); Rimon Kasher, “The Interpretation of Scripture in Rabbinic Literature,” in M. J. Mulder and Harry Sysling, eds. Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading, and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990) 574-94; Yonah Fraenḳel, The Methods of Aggadah and Midrash (Masadah: Yad la-Talmud, 1991, Hebrew); David Stern, Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University, 1991), idem, Midrash and Theory: Ancient Jewish Exegesis and Contemporary Literary Studies (Evanston, Il: Northwestern University, 1996);

Marc Hirshman, A Rivalry of Genius: Jewish and Christian Biblical Interpretation in Late Antiquity (Albany: State University of New York, 1996); Jeffrey Rubenstein, Talmudic Stories: Narrative Art, Composition, and Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1999); Galit Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University, 2000); Martin S. Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200 BCE-400 CE (Oxford: Oxford University, 2001); Joshua Levinson, The Twice-Told Tale: A Poetics of the Exegetical Narrative in Rabbinic Midrash (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2005, Hebrew); Klaus Davidowicz, A. Galadari, D. N. Gottlieb, et al, “Midrash and Aggadah” Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception edited by Constance M. Furey, Joel Marcus LeMon, et al, (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2010); David Kraemer, “The Reception of the Bible in Rabbinic Judaism: A Study in Complexity”, Journal of the Bible and Its Reception 1 (2014), 29-46; Paul D. Mandel, The Origins of Midrash: From Teaching to Text (Leiden: Brill, 2017); for more see Burton Visotzky and Michael Tilly, eds., Judaism II: Literature (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2021); and for full bibliography, see “Midrash and Aggadah,” Burton Visotzky and Benjamin Kamine, Oxford Bibliographies in Biblical Studies ed. Christopher Matthews (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019, 2020) http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195393361/obo 9780195393361-0185.xml?rskey=fWd9Gq&result=1&q

Further, the rabbis regularly presented verses of Scripture as “prooftexts” to buttress arguments, some directly on point, while others required interpretation to prove their point. But overwhelmingly, the rabbis who flourished from ca. 70 – 1100 CE received the Hebrew Bible through the various and changing poetics of midrash halakhah (on Jewish law/ behavior) and midrash aggadah (everything else) (Shmuel HaNagid’s Introduction to the Babylonian Talmud). Before the rabbis could do midrash on the Bible, however, there had to be a canonized biblical text. This was a two-stage process. In the first stage, centuries before the rabbis came on the scene, a great deal of “inner-biblical midrash” was written; offering glosses, definitions, name-etymologies, historical notes, and such within the text received during the Bible’s various layers of transmission (Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Oxford University, 1985); and Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative). The ancient rabbis themselves recognized these types of texts as midrash, per se, as in the comment in Genesis Rabbah on Genesis 5:29, “He called his name Noah, saying, `This one shall comfort us . . .’” The midrash, noting that the trilateral root of the name Noah (nun-vav-ḥet) does not conform to the supposed etymology of “comfort,” (the root of which is nun-ḥet-mem), comments: “The name is not [appropriate to] the midrash; nor is the midrash [appropriate to] the name”. Once the biblical text was reasonably fixed, the rabbis had to decide which specific books would be admitted to their canon. Through some creative accounting, the ancient rabbis settled on 24 books for the Hebrew Bible, not coincidently the same number of books in the Iliad and the Odyssey. But the rabbis debated which books were in and which books were out. They notably omitted Ben Sirach and other late books, known as Apocrypha, which were nevertheless included in the Church’s canon.

With the completion of the biblical canon, the work of rabbinic reception could begin in earnest. Essentially, the rabbis asserted that there was a written Torah, i. e. the canonical text, and an Oral Torah, its rabbinic interpretation. The idea of “two Torahs” is attributed to the great rabbinic forebears Hillel and Shammai. Elsewhere in rabbinic mythology, this Oral Torah was seen as contemporaneous with Written Torah itself, e. g. the Pirke Avot chain of tradition offered as the epigraph to this essay, which attributes Oral Torah to Moses. Leviticus Rabbah 22:1 expansively claims that all of rabbinic teaching was given at Sinai. The rabbis even appreciated the evolution of this Oral Torah over the generations, so that they could imagine that what Rabbi Aqiba taught his students in the second century CE would be incomprehensible to Moses himself (bMen 29b). Indeed, Oral Torah, and specifically its genre Midrash (Addison G. Wright, “The Literary Genre Midrash,” CBQ 28 (1966), 417-457), had a long history of development, in which rabbinic reception of the Bible changed over time.

In its biblical origins, Midrash often meant the searching out of God’s will. In Genesis 25:22, Rebecca seeks out God’s will (lidrosh et YHWH) regarding her difficult pregnancy and receives an oracle. In I Kings 22:5, another element is added as Jehoshaphat asks the king “to seek the word of the Lord.” This may be the same as seeking God directly, but in light of later traditions, one might assume that the “word of the Lord,” could indicate an interpretation of a specific text. Ezra 7:10, “expounds (lidrosh) the Torah of God,” which refers to something closely akin to our Pentateuch. Ezra’s exposition, then, would be on the order of what the rabbis themselves later did following his lead, when they received and expounded the Bible as part of its transmission.

power of the Mishnah and its compiler, Rabbi Judah the Patriarch, was such that subsequent generations of Talmudic rabbis focused on that work, its relationship to other Tannaitic traditions, and only much later, its connection to the Bible. The rabbis in the generations following the Mishnah (redacted ca. 200 CE) are called Amoraim, as they spoke (Hebrew: ´amr) and discussed the earlier rabbinic corpora (Carol Bakhos, “Amoraic Literature (ca 250-650): Talmud and Midrash,” Visotzky and Tilly, Judaism II: Literature, 122-140; and see B. L. Visotzky, “The Literature of the Rabbis,” From Mesopotamia to Modernity, Ten Lectures in Jewish History and Literature, eds. D. Fishman and B. Visotzky (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999) 71-102). The Talmud of the Land of Israel (also called the Jerusalem Talmud or Yerushalmi), was compiled between 350-425 CE, as Israel turned increasingly into a Christian “Holy Land” (Robert Wilken, The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought). Even though the rabbis and their communities flourished (Lee I. Levine, “The Resilience of Jews and Judaism in Late Roman-Byzantine Eretz Israel,” in Visotzky and Tilly, Judaism I: History (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2021) 106-120), they consolidated their works in this era, producing a wave of Amoraic texts, both Talmudic and midrashic. This first Talmud sought to reconcile the laws of the Mishnah with those of the Tosefta and of other, then unpublished, Tannaitic statements that had been transmitted orally by the rabbis. Further, the Talmud Yerushalmi took notice of the Tannaitic midrashim, particularly of the Akiban school, as the rabbis sought to buttress the apodictic statements of the Tannaim with justifications from Scriptural authority.

Amoraic aggadic midrashim, compiled concurrently with the Yerushalmi, ca. late-fourth to early-fifth century CE. The rabbis of this period produced a rich aggadic literature on various books of the Bible. Here, we shall briefly consider five examples.30 Genesis Rabbah covers over ninety percent of the verses in the biblical book. It includes many Tannaitic statements, as there is no Tannaitic midrash on the first book of the Pentateuch. It focusses almost exclusively on Aggadah, in keeping with the nature of the Genesis narrative. What makes Genesis Rabbah’s reception of the Bible outstanding is its unusual hermeneutic, which presumes such a sacred quiddity to the biblical book that it reads it atomistically, virtually ignoring context and narrative flow. It will break verses apart, consider the received meaning of individual words, surprisingly also of individual letters, imputing meaning even to their written shape (e. g. the bet that is the first letter of the Torah). Genesis Rabbah’s influence is pervasive, as it is quoted in almost all subsequent rabbinic treatments of Genesis and frequently elsewhere