Inner Midrashic Introductions And Their Influence On Introductions To Medieval Rabbinic Bible Commentaries

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” (IMI) 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 (1:1). 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.

"Judaism is often described as the religion of the book par excellence - a religious movement built around the study of and commentary on the Hebrew Bible and steeped in a culture of bookishness that evolved from an unrelenting focus on a canonical text. Standard works of modern scholarship reinforce this view -- that the Jewish tradition has always embraced the Bible as a blueprint for the religious life. In this monograph, Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg argues that this depiction of the tradition does not hold for much if its existence -- and more specifically, not for the first thousand years after the Bible was first canonized. Prior to the modern era, late antique and early medieval rabbinic authorities were deeply ambivalent about the Hebrew Bible (aka Old Testament, aka Torah). The Bible can be a really unsettling book because of its repeated depictions of impiety, taboo behavior of all sorts, and unapologetic expressions of doubt and skepticism. It's no accident, then, that Jews -- including their rabbis -- seldom opened a Bible during this long period. But how can you avoid Bible reading while being part of a community in which that same Bible is supposed to be a central pillar of communal identity? The rabbis met this challenge by instituting two workarounds. On the one hand, they incorporated ritualized readings of biblical passages into liturgical gatherings, so that the text was "read" (or chanted) in a rote, formulaic way -- a way that did not lend itself to deep musing about meaning. In such gatherings, the Torah scroll was treated as an entity that manifests sacred powers in its own right (hence the development of rituals governing the handling of the scrolls, including the practices of binding, unrolling, and rolling them). On the other hand, the rabbis constructed a vast edifice of interpretation of Scripture that came to be known in the tradition as the "Oral Torah", including rabbinic stories, commentary, and laws (and associated with terms such as midrash and Talmud). Both of these workarounds, argues Wollenberg, served to marginalize the written text of the Hebrew Bible as a source of cultural transmission and knowledge"--

The contributions compiled in this volume comprise studies of Jewish texts - biblical, rabbinic, medieval, and modern - as well as of patristic and medieval Christian texts, and in one case, a passage of the Muslim text par excellence, the Quran. The authors, scholars in the fields of Jewish Studies, Catholic and Protestant Theology, Islamic Studies, German philology etc., invited to reflect on texts of their respective disciplines in context-sensitive interpretations, taking into account the link connecting Midrash, hermeneutics, and narrative, provide illuminating narratological and/or hermeneutical insights into the texts in question. The interdisciplinary dialogue that characterized the conference "Narratology, Hermeneutics, and Midrash" that gave rise to the volume proves to be rich and full of potential for further research in the direction proposed by the Series Poetics, Exegesis and Narrative. Studies in Jewish literature and art.

In Beyond Faith: Belief, Morality and Memory in a Fifteenth-Century Judeo-Iberian Manuscript, Michelle M. Hamilton sheds light on the concerns of Jewish and converso readers of the generation before the Expulsion. Using a mid-fifteenth-century collection of Iberian vernacular literary, philosophical and religious texts (MS Parm. 2666) recorded in Hebrew characters as a lens, Hamilton explores how its compiler or compilers were forging a particular form of personal, individual religious belief, based not only on the Judeo-Andalusi philosophical tradition of medieval Iberia, but also on the Latinate humanism of late 14th and early 15th-century Europe. The form/s such expressions take reveal the contingent and specific engagement of learned Iberian Jews and conversos with the larger Iberian, European and Arab Mediterranean cultures of the 15th-century.

This volume examines questions concerning the construction of gender and identity in the earliest days of what is now Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Methodologically explicit, the contributions analyze textual and material sources related to these religious traditions in their cultural contexts. The sources examined are predominantly products of patriarchal elite discourses requiring innovative approaches to unveil aspects of gender otherwise hidden. This volume extends the discussion represented in the volume Gender and Second-Temple Judaism (2020) and highlights the fruitfulness of interdisciplinary research beyond anachronistic discipline distinctions.

In A Philosopher of Scripture: The Exegesis and Thought of Tanḥum ha-Yerushalmi, Raphael Dascalu presents a detailed intellectual portrait of Tanḥum ha-Yerushalmi (d. 1291, Egypt) – a Jewish philosopher and mystic, linguist and philologist, and a biblical exegete of singular breadth.

This book introduces a new system for describing non-biblical ancient Jewish literature. It arises from a fresh empirical investigation into the literary structures of many anonymous and pseudepigraphic sources, including Pseudepigrapha and Apocrypha of the Old Testament, the larger Dead Sea Scrolls, Midrash, and the Talmuds. A comprehensive framework of several hundred literary features, based on modern literary studies and text linguistics, allows describing the variety of important text types which characterize ancient Judaism without recourse to vague and superficial genre terms. The features proposed cover all aspects of the ancient Jewish texts, including the self-presentation, perspective, and knowledge horizon assumed by the text; any poetic constitution, narration, thematic discourse, or commentary format; common small forms and small-scale relationships governing neighbouring parts; compilations; dominant subject matter; and similarities to the canonical books of the Hebrew Bible. By treating works of diverse genres and periods by the same conceptual grid, the new framework breaks down artificial barriers to interdisciplinary research and prepares the ground for new large-scale comparative studies. The book introduces and presents the new framework, explains and illustrates every descriptive category with reference to specific ancient Jewish texts, and provides sample profiles of Jubilees, the Temple Scroll, Mishnah, and Genesis Rabbah. The books publication is accompanied by a public online Database of hundreds of further Profiles (literarydatabase.humanities.manchester.ac.uk). This project was made possible through the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

The Bible and Jews in Medieval Spain examines the grammatical, exegetical, philosophical and mystical interpretations of the Bible that took place in Spain during the medieval period. The Bible was the foundation of Jewish culture in medieval Spain. Following the scientific analysis of Hebrew grammar which emerged in al-Andalus in the ninth and tenth centuries, biblical exegesis broke free of homiletic interpretation and explored the text on grammatical and contextual terms. While some of the earliest commentary was in Arabic, scholars began using Hebrew more regularly during this period. The first complete biblical commentaries in Hebrew were written by Abraham Ibn ‘Ezra, and this set the standard for the generations that followed. This book analyses the approach and unique contributions of these commentaries, moving on to those of later Christian Spain, including the Qimhi family, Nahmanides and his followers and the esoteric-mystical tradition. Major topics in the commentaries are compared and contrasted. Thus, a unified picture of the whole fabric of Hebrew commentary in medieval Spain emerges. In addition, the book describes the many Spanish Jewish biblical manuscripts that have remained and details the history of printed editions and Spanish translations (for Jews and Christians) by medieval Spanish Jews. This book will appeal to scholars and students of medieval Spain, as well as those interested in the history of religion and cultural history.