Throughout the midrash Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer , motifs are recycled to connect primordial time to the eschaton. In this paper, I read passages on the well “created at twilight of the Sixth Day” in light of Bakhtin's notion of “chronotope” . The author of PRE disengages the itinerant well from its traditional association with the desert sojourn and links it, instead, to the foundation stone of the world at the Temple Mount. The midrash reflects the influence of Islamic (...) legends about the “white stone” around which the Dome of the Rock was built . Over the course of the discussion, PRE is understood in terms of the genre “narrative midrash” and compared to classical rabbinic literature in order to illustrate changes in both form and content arising from the author's apocalyptic eschatology. (shrink)

This paper begins by attempting to define midrash as a distinct genre of classical rabbinic literature in order to understand the significance of the term in contemporary discourse. It will then examine what Jewish feminists mean when they apply the term, midrash, to their work and consider the extent to which such appropriation is useful or reasonable. The paper will then outline, with my own suggestions, how midrash might be usefully appropriated for feminist ends and the paper (...) will conclude with a concrete example. (shrink)

Much of traditional rabbinic hermeneutics, what I call "midrashic interpretation," appears to be of such a bizarre nature as to require some sort of explanation, or even justification. This essay attempts to provide a philosophical foundation for midrashic interpretation by placing it in the context of the idea (vaguely neo-platonic) that God is only fully realized as the result of a certain process, a process of which midrashic interpretation is an essential part. In the final section I attempt to spell (...) out some connections between the specifically Jewish question of rabbinic hermeneutics and some more general ideas in philosophy and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Literary theory, newly conscious of its own historicism, has recently turned its attention to the history of interpretation. For midrash, this attention has arrived none too soon. The activity of Biblical interpretation as practiced by the sages of early Rabbinic Judaism in late antiquity, midrash has long been known to Western scholars, but mainly as either an exegetical curiosity or a source to be mined for facts about the Jewish background of early Christianity. The perspective of literary theory (...) has placed midrash in a decidedly new light. The very nature of midrash has now come to epitomize precisely that order of literary discourse to which much critical writing has recently aspired, a discourse that avoids the dichotomized opposition of literature versus commentary and instead resides in the dense shuttle space between text and interpreter. In the hermeneutical techniques of midrash, critics have found especially attractive the sense of interpretation as play rather than as explication, the use of commentary as a means of extending a text’s meanings rather than as a mere forum for the arbitration of original authorial intention. Some theoreticians have gone so far as to invoke midrash as a precursor, in a spiritual if not a historical sense, to more recent post-structuralist literary theory, in particular to deconstruction with its critique of logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence David Stern is assistant professor of medieval Hebrew literature in the department of Oriental Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Parables in Midrash: The Intersection of Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature and coauthor, with Mark Jay Mirsky, of Rabbinic Fantasies: Imaginative Narratives from Classical and Medieval Hebrew Literature. (shrink)

The initial impetus for writing this book was the desire to understand more fully and completely the contribution of the redactors of the Talmud, the Stammaim.

The opening sections of some exegetical Midrashim deal with the same type of material that is found in introductions to medieval rabbinic Bible commentaries. The application of Goldberg's form analysis to these sections reveals the new form "Inner-Midrashic Introduction" as a thematic discourse on introductory issues to biblical books. By its very nature the IMI is embedded within the comments on the first biblical verse. Further analysis of medieval rabbinic Bible commentary introductions in terms of their formal, thematic, and material (...) characteristics, reveals that a high degree of continuity exists between them and the IMIs, including another newly discovered form, the "Inner-Commentary Introduction". These new discoveries challenge the current view that traces the origin of Bible introduction in Judaism exclusively to non-Jewish models. They also point to another important link between the Midrashim and the commentaries, i.e., the decomposition of the functional form midrash in the new discoursive context of the commentaries. Finally, the form analysis demonstrates how larger discourses are formed in the exegetical Midrashim. (shrink)

The term midrash expresses the conviction that the ultimate answer is to be found in searching the Scripture, where it will be revealed to whoever knows how to search.

The Midrashic literature and biblical translations focus majorly on the verses that describe the gathering in Haman’s house and the preparing of the gallows for Mordechai the Jew (Es 5:14). The goal of this study is to discuss the narrative shaped by the Targum and Midrashic sources and to examine both the realistic domain concerning methods of punishment that were suggested and the theological–educational meaning of the punishment and the type of tree chosen. Targum Rishon develops the contents of the (...) conversation in Haman’s house as to how Mordechai should be executed. While according to the text, the suggestion to hang Mordechai appears to have been the only method agreed upon by all those present at the meeting, Targum Rishon includes several forms of killing and torture that were proposed and considered. While Targum Rishon presents the theological meaning of the choice to kill Mordechai specifically by hanging him from a gallows, a Midrash aggadah attempts to clarify the species of the tree used to prepare Mordechai’s gallows and comes to the surprising conclusion that it was a type of thorn tree. Regarding Haman’s search for a suitable beam on which to hang Mordechai, Midrash Abba Gorion relates that the beam was found in the king’s palace or, according to another opinion, the sawed beam found originated from Noah’s ark.Contribution: The Midrashic sources portray an entire scene that includes discourse, deliberations and choice in Haman’s house and in heaven. It seems that the authors of the Midrash and the Targum not only clarify the text and complement the story by adding missing realistic details, they also enrich the text with new meanings that serve their theological concepts. (shrink)

In this paper I have not, of course, presented all the embryological data that can be collected from the Talmudic and Midrashic literature. More details can be found in Julius Preuss' classical work on biblical and talmudic medicine, now available in Fred Rosner's English translation and in a French M.D. thesis by Martine Michel.75 I also did not present any data on teratology, and did not deal with the very rich Jewish mystical lore, the Cabbala. But a few comments are (...) in order here about the material on embryology.There are very few original ideas in the Talmudic corpus on embryology, but it is obvious that the Sages were well aware of the Greek and Roman theories on embryology.The fact that the Talmud is a compilation that was built up slowly, during several centuries, explains why the information recorded in it cannot be ascribed solely to one school of thought or one clear-cut influence.When a definite problem was difficult to solve because there were many different theories about it, the Sages based their opinion on a famous experiment that seemed to offer guarantees of validity. This was the case with the controversial problem of the formation of the embryo and its sexual differentiation, where the Sages made use of an experiment allegedly initiated by Cleopatra.The Sages were ready to discuss scientific problems with non-Jewish scholars and even to accept their arguments. This was the case with the important topic of the time of the entry of the soul into the embryo. But the legal conclusions drawn from the Sages' opinion were not consistent with those declared by Churth Fathers such as Tertullian. Embryotomy, for instance, was permitted by Jewish law.Wide interest, scholarly discussions, suggestive descriptions and readiness to inquire and to obtain detailed information characterized the Talmudic discussions of embryology.In conclusion, I quote a Talmudic text that reviews the whole process of embryological development through the sequence of prayers of a faithful Jew who learns that his wife is expecting a baby.The first three days, [he should pray to the Lord] that the seed should not putrefy.From the third to the fortieth day: that the child should be a male.From the fortieth day to the third month: that there should not occur any superfetation, which could lead the first embryo to be a fetus compressus.From the third to the sixth month: that an abortion should not occur.From the sixth to the ninth month: that the birth should be without problems.76. (shrink)

This article explores the association between animals and ethics in the teachings of Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, famously known as the Maharal of Prague. The article is divided into three parts. The first will present the Maharal and the nature of his writings; the second will present how the Maharal viewed the essence of animals and their place in the act of creation; and the third part will examine the Maharal’s ethical approach toward animals. I will deal with the (...) Maharal’s philosophy as it is reflected in his extensive writing. (shrink)

In the 1980s there was a brief but intense period of interest among literary critics and theorists in Classical Rabbinic interpretation, and, in particular, the genre of commentary known as Midrash. Interest concentrated around the apparent similarities between Midrash and the commentaries and criticism of Derrida, Lacan, Freud, Barthes and others. This essay examines this connection between Midrash and theory in light of the persistent charge from Foucault and others that all hermeneutics is essentially theological. It proceeds (...) by drawing out the aims and frustrations of the literary critics and Jewish scholars involved, and considers in what ways the questions which arose in these years might be pertinent for contemporary literary criticism, theory and institutional practice. (shrink)

In <I>The Unbinding of Isaac, Stephen J. Stern upends traditional understandings of this controversial narrative through a phenomenological midrash or interpretation of Genesis 22 from the Dialogic and Jewish philosophies of Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and, most notably, Emmanuel Levinas. With great originality, Dr. Stern intersects Jewish studies, Biblical studies, and philosophy in a literary/midrashic style that challenges traditional Western philosophical epistemology. Through the biblical narrative of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and Rebecca, Dr. Stern explains that Rosenzweig, Buber, and Levinas (...) Judaically exercise and offer an alternative epistemic orientation to the study of ethics than that of traditional Western or Hellenic-Christian philosophy. <I>The Unbinding of Isaac makes the works of these three thinkers accessible to those outside philosophy and Jewish studies while also introducing readers to the playfulness of how Jewish tradition midrashically addresses the Bible. (shrink)

Many Jewish groups of late antiquity assumed that they were obligated to observe the Divine Law. This book attempts to study the various rationales offered by these groups to explain the authority that the Divine Law had over them. Second Temple groups tended to look towards philosophy or metaphysics to justify the Divine Law's authority. The tannaim, though, formulated legal arguments that obligate Israel to observe the Divine Law. While this turn towards legalism is pan-tannaitic, two distinct legal arguments can (...) be identified in tannaitic literature. These specific arguments about the Divine Law's authority, link to a set of issues regarding the tannaim's conception of Divine Law and of Israel's election. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The Psalms are the most cited portions of Scripture in the New Testament. This paper investigates Paul’s use of the Psalms and seeks to answer the concern that his citation strategy is both arbitrary and self-serving. Inasmuch as it has sometimes been concluded that Paul, in midrashic fashion, forced his citations to say something contrary to a more natural reading. This paper suggests that Paul uses citation criteria very carefully. Preliminary results point to the use of texts that lie (...) well within their natural reading, yet exegeted in such a way that the resulting exegesis is folded back into the text as the apostle cites it. Thus rather than citing texts arbitrarily, Paul uses great skill and sophistication in selecting and utilising texts with exegetical precision. In so doing, Paul is not using midrash but may actually be developing a characteristically Christian approach to the citation of sacred text. (shrink)

The shared trajectory and thought between the phenomenological hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger and midrashic analysis of Franz Rosenzweig is established with respect to the task of taking up existing “classical” texts such as “The Song of Songs” and “The Ister” as well with respect to the embodied conditions of understanding through language with a view to delineating the motivating factors and the structural guidelines that determine our interpretive activities; specifically, intentional structures that distinguish communicative acts from one another that either (...) brings them into conflict or into fruitful and harmonious communities. (shrink)

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The ArgumentBetween 1550 and 1650, the intellectual elite of Ashkenazic (German-and Yiddish-speaking) Jews, including rabbis such as Yom Tov Lipmann Heller (1578–1654), showed a marked interest in astronomy, and to a lesser degree in the natural sciences generally. This is one aspect of the assimilation of medieval Jewish rationalism by that group. Passages from Heller‘s writings show his familiarity with medieval and early modern Hebrew astronomical texts, and his belief that astronomy should be studied by all Jewish schoolboys. Heller‘s astronomical (...) views were then influenced by the discoveries and debates of his period. Between 1614 and the 1630‘s, Heller moved from an Aristotelian to a Tychonic view of the nature of the celestial bodies. Inspired, furthermore, by the notion of a natural order subject to change, and basing himself on the exegesis of ancient rabbinic texts, Heller offered what we have termed” midrashic natural histories”: namely, a hypothesis concerning the development of a certain type of animal, and another concerning the dimming of the moon and its movement into a lower orbit. (shrink)

This article argues that contemporary polemics against critical reading, understood as the enduring legacy of “theory” in the humanities, overlook the unusual and generative concept of critique formulated by one of the literary scholars most closely associated with “theory,” the German-born American literary critic Geoffrey Hartman. For Hartman, critique amounts to a thinking that exposes itself to the alterity of the future and thus risks being wrong. Engaging two of Hartman’s essays from the mid-1980s, “The Struggle for the Text” and (...) “Meaning, Error, Text,” the article specifically argues that Hartman derives this concept of critique as thinking that risks error from rabbinic midrash. However, this does not mean that Hartman seeks to “do midrash” himself. To the contrary, what Hartman learns from midrash is that the very structure of linguistic repetition, citation, or imitation forecloses the possibility of absolute fidelity to tradition. In “The Struggle for the Text,” he demonstrates this lesson through subversive readings of Genesis 32 and a fragment from Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle; in “Meaning, Error, Text,” Hartman historicizes his hermeneutic in relation to Christian supersession and the Holocaust, claiming ethical and political significance for his “restitution” of midrash as a model of critique. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.1 (2003) 126-127 [Access article in PDF] James Arthur Diamond. Maimonides and the Hermeneutics of Concealment: Deciphering Scripture and Midrash in The Guide of the Perplexed. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Pp. viii + 235. Paper, $20.95. In his text about the nature of Maimonidean text, Diamond shows us firsthand how the great medieval Jewish thinker's use of biblical (...) and rabbinic prooftexts brings life to each page of his Guide by having meaning rely ultimately on the reader's interpretive glance. Inviting us into his study with an epigraph by Rosenzweig on the integral role of quotation in Jewish medieval writing, Diamond concludes that a prooftext within Maimonides' great philosophical text, The Guide of the Perplexed, is "not merely a prop on which to hang certain philosophical propositions regarding God and his relationship to the creation but rather melds with the text to form an organic continuum of thought" (160). By showing how Maimonides has crafted a masterful "interplay of text and prooftext" (30), Diamond presents the Guide to us as "a bridge, drawing the student out of the philosophical text into the sacred texts and back again, dissolving the divide between the two in a perpetual hermeneutical crisscross" (31).Emphasizing the centrality of the role of the reader—and in particular, the reader engaged in an intertextual hermeneutic—in any appreciation of Maimonidean text, Diamond employs Ricoeurian language, speaking, for example, of how Maimonides' text, in its use of prooftexts whose efficacy lies in the reader's interpretive response, constitutes "a network of intersignification, thanks to which the isolated texts signify something else, something more" (40; quote from Ricoeur, "The Bible and the Imagination," 71). In particular, Diamond stresses how these hermeneutically charged prooftexts are used by Maimonides to penetrate through a range of—what are for Maimonides—metaphorical discourses about the Divine within the Jewish tradition. Ranging from straightforwardly anthropomorphic claims about God sitting or standing, to more subtly anthropocentric conceptions of the role of God in Providence, there are a host of biblical and rabbinic claims about God which Maimonides sees as metaphors—statements whose meanings are in no way worn on their sleeves, as it were. Mindful, though, of the potentially devastating effects of alerting all religious folk to the falsity of certain ways of thinking about God, Maimonides crafts his text—in particular, according to Diamond, in his use of intertextually pointing prooftexts—to beckon only the philosophically prepared readers to the real truths about God and Providence. These truths are neither spelled out in the prooftext nor in the further context from which said prooftext is pulled; rather, as Diamond explains, the truths emerge in the hermeneutical unfolding of text and prooftext, in the live process of the reader's intertextual investigation. In an encounter with Maimonides' Guide, intertextually pointing prooftexts thus enable a reader to fashion "a 'surplus of meaning' out of apparent semantic nonsense" (11; reference to Ricoeur's treatment of metaphor in his Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning).What is fresh, creative and new about Diamond's book is not that it alerts us to the presence of secret writing strategies in Maimonides' Guide which reveal unspoken truths about God. This idea in and of itself is quite well-rehearsed within Maimonidean scholarship. What is fresh, creative and new about Diamond's study is that, in its focus on the hermeneutical efficacy of prooftexts as central to that secret writing strategy, it actually walks us through the hermeneutical process in question, step by step, with a number of cases in point. And so, Diamond not only tells us that Maimonides uses prooftexts as a strategy for pointing careful readers to uncover unspoken truths about the Divine, but Diamond actually devotes a full-length study to showing how this works in a number of [End Page 126] concrete cases. Diamond actually engages in exegesis of Maimonides' Guide in this study of Maimonidean exegesis; he actually shows us how he thinks a number of prooftexts ought to be traced through. Using a number of Maimonidean prooftexts as his starting points, Diamond takes us from Maimonides' text... (shrink)

The author upends traditional understandings of this controversial narrative through a phenomenological midrash or interpretation of Genesis 22 from the Dialogic and Jewish philosophies of Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and, most notably, Emmanuel Levinas. He intersects Jewish studies, Biblical studies, and philosophy in a literary/midrashic style that challenges traditional Western philosophical epistemology. Through the biblical narrative of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and Rebecca, he explains that Rosenzweig, Buber, and Levinas Judaically exercise and offer an alternative epistemic orientation to the study (...) of ethics than that of traditional Western or Hellenic-Christian philosophy. (shrink)

Employing the rabbinical practice of midrashic reading in order to unfold a passage from The Song of Songs, the manner in which a European/colonial affirmation of the seasons, particularly the season of spring, might become a mode of injustice in a non-temperate climate is explored. The wilding of seasons imposed by colonial usurpation of country finds a particular case study in the invasion of Arrente lands in Australia by buffel grass even as the effects of climate change are being felt. (...) In conclusion, an argument is made for recasting the practice of midrashic reading in order to render the seasons as they are found in TheSong of Songs vulnerable to unanticipated intonations of the seasons as they emerge in Arrente country. (shrink)

This chapter examines historical reconstruction and literary structures of rabbinic texts using the Leviticus Rabbah as an example. It explains that Leviticus Rabbah is a commentary on the Book of Leviticus which now forms part of Midrash Rabbah. It proposes ten theses about the special problems which the literary structures of rabbinic texts pose for the historian and analyses a section of the amoraic work of Leviticus Rabbah to describe some of those literary structures. The findings suggest that it (...) is impossible to explain how the textuality of rabbinic sources worked and that many rabbinic works fill the same functional position in a text more than once. (shrink)