Jewish Interpretation of the Bible

Ancient and Contemporary

Karin Hedner Zetterholm

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780800697983
• eBook ISBN: 9781451424386
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

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Rabbinic Biblical Interpretation—Midrash

The rabbis’ expansions on the Bible always take as their point of departure something in the verse that appeared problematic to them. Such problems could be anything from a textual detail—an unusual word, grammatical form, or spelling, a repetition, omission, or a contradiction between two verses—to wide-ranging theological problems caused by actions by the biblical characters or by God not in keeping with the moral code of the rabbis. For instance, the story of the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22 raises the theologically difficult question of why a good and omniscient God would test Abraham by commanding him to kill his beloved son, Isaac, thus necessitating interpretation. A completely different kind of difficulty—but nevertheless one that needed to be addressed in the eyes of the rabbis—is the reality of the different rules for the preparation of the Passover lamb in Exodus and Deuteronomy. According to Deut. 16:7, it should be boiled, whereas Exod. 12:9 says that it should be roasted over fire, thus creating a contradiction that needed to be solved.

While a modern reader of the Bible may likewise be troubled by the theological problem raised by God’s command to sacrifice Isaac, he or she is unlikely to be bothered by repetitions and contradictions between different parts of the Bible or by odd wordings and unusual spellings. Most modern readers would simply attribute these things to the fact that the Bible consists of a number of different sources that date from different time periods and to the change that language naturally undergoes over time.

Assumptions about the Biblical Text

It is evident, then, that the difficulties perceived in the biblical text are dependent on the reader’s understanding of the Bible and his or her expectations of it. In spite of the great variety of styles, genres, and interpretive methods of ancient biblical interpreters, a common approach nevertheless seems to underlie their interpretations and they seem to share a common set of assumptions about the biblical text, as observed and described by James Kugel. He identifies four fundamental assumptions about the Bible that underlie all ancient biblical interpretation. First, ancient exegetes seem to take for granted that the Bible is a fundamentally cryptic document, that is, they assume that behind the apparent meaning there is some hidden esoteric meaning. Even though it says X, what it really means is Y, or while Y is not openly stated, it is hinted at or implied in X. When Isaac says in Gen. 27:35 that Jacob “came with deceit” and took the blessing that rightly belonged to his brother Esau, it really means that he acted with wisdom (Gen. Rab. 67.4). The belief that it had been God’s will all along that Jacob gain his father’s blessing justifies Jacob’s conduct since he was only doing what was necessary to carry out the divine plan. The same assumption that the Bible is a cryptic document allowed early Christian interpreters to claim that the suffering servant in Isaiah 52 alludes to Jesus.

The second assumption is that the Bible is a fundamentally relevant text. It is not primarily a book about Israel’s ancient history but speaks to its readers’ present situation and was written down for later generations to learn moral lessons from it. The patriarchs are held up as models of conduct, and their lives considered a source for inspiration. It is this view of the lives of the patriarchs as models of conduct that necessitated the reinterpretation of Jacob’s taking of the blessing and his lying to his father. The idea that all of the Bible could be applied to the present made even prophecies and genealogies relevant to the rabbinic present.

The third assumption is that the Bible is perfect and perfectly harmonious. This means that it contains no mistakes (anything that might look as a mistake is only an illusion and will be clarified by proper interpretation) or inconsistencies between its various parts and that any biblical passage might illuminate any other. Taken to its extreme, the idea of the Bible as perfect led to the view that every detail of the text was significant. Nothing is said in vain or for rhetorical flourish and there is divine intention behind every detail. Accordingly, unusual words or grammatical forms, repetitions or omissions, and juxtapositions of one event to another were understood as potentially significant and deliberately placed there by God as an invitation to interpretation.

For instance, the fact that only Abraham is mentioned in Gen. 12:11, even though it is clear that he and Sarah were travelling together, calls for an explanation: “When he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife, Sarai, ‘I know that you are a beautiful woman.’” Assuming that the Bible is perfect and that there is divine intention behind every detail, the verse should have read: When they were about to enter Egypt. Accordingly, the fact that only Abraham is mentioned led the rabbis to suggest that Abraham had hidden Sarah in a box (Gen. Rab. 40.5). Similarly, when the Israelites’ departure from Egypt is mentioned for the third time in Exod. 32:11 in the passage about the sin with the Golden Calf, it cannot merely be a piece of information. Rather, Moses mentions it here in order to remind God that Israel has only recently left Egypt where calf worship is common, and accordingly he must understand that he cannot immediately expect impeccable behavior from the Israelites (Exod. Rab. 43.9). Ultimately, the perfect nature of the Bible also included the conduct of biblical heroes and the content of its teachings, so that they were assumed to be in accordance with the interpreter’s own ideas and standards of conduct.

The fourth assumption is that the Bible in its entirety is divinely inspired: that is, not only the parts that contain divine speeches introduced with “And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying . . .” or prophecies, but also the parts that may appear to be of human fashioning, such as the intrigues in King David’s court, or supplications directed to God, are actually divinely inspired. Even if Moses or King Solomon are said to be the authors of this or that biblical book, they are merely a human conduit of the divine word.

As a consequence of these assumptions, ancient biblical interpreters scrutinized every detail of the biblical text in search of hidden meaning. Any apparent contradiction, superfluous detail or repetition, any action by God or by a biblical hero not in accordance with the rabbis’ expectations, were seen by them as an invitation from God to look deeper into the text and discover its true meaning intended by God.^[1]

This common set of assumptions about the biblical text was not unique to the rabbis but shared by all ancient interpreters, including the Christians. If the Christian interpreters often reached different conclusions from those of the rabbis this is because they were driven by a different set of anxieties. While the Jews were anxious to find evidence in the Bible that they remained God’s chosen people in spite of Christian claims to the contrary, the Christians needed to defend their status as God’s chosen people and demonstrate that the New Testament was the key to understanding the Hebrew Bible.^[2]

The assumptions about the biblical text outlined above did not originate with the rabbis and Christian interpreters in the first centuries CE. but underlie much of earlier interpretation as well. The oldest form of biblical interpretation is found within the Bible itself where biblical authors frequently revised earlier texts in order for them to remain relevant or better conform to the worldview of later times. A classic example is 1 and 2 Chronicles, whose author retells the books of Samuel and Kings and reshapes them by omitting some things and adding others. In a similar fashion, the author of Genesis 20 essentially retells the story of Abraham and Sarah in Egypt (Gen. 12:10-20), but places it in Gerar, removing or glossing over elements that seemed offensive to him. In chapter 12, for instance, Abraham asks Sara to lie and tell the Egyptians that she is his sister rather than his wife because he is afraid that they will otherwise kill him, a behavior not fitting a patriarch and a model of conduct. As a result, Sarah is “taken into Pharaoh’s palace,” and in return Abraham is given sheep, oxen, camels, and slaves. In chapter 20, by contrast, Sarah is saved from becoming the wife of the king of Gerar through direct intervention from God, who reveals to him that Sarah is Abraham’s wife. To make sure nobody gets the wrong impression of Abraham, chapter 20 also adds that in addition to being Abraham’s wife, Sarah was also his sister.

As with Chronicles, interpretation here takes the form of a retelling of a biblical story where elements perceived as troublesome or offensive are simply replaced, a practice that developed into a genre known as “rewritten” Bible. This practice can operate on the level of a single word, whereby a term whose meaning had shifted and was no longer widely understood is replaced by a more common word, or on the level of a whole phrase, whereby an ideologically problematic phrase such as “with deceit” as a description of Jacob’s actions was replaced with the more acceptable “with wisdom.” This practice of substitution or replacement rather than openly commenting on a biblical verse produces an interpretation that is barely discernable. Only someone who is very well acquainted with the Bible would recognize the somewhat odd expression in 2 Chron. 35:13, “They cooked the Passover lamb with fire,” as a subtle harmonization of Exod. 12:9, stating that the Passover lamb should be roasted over fire, and Deut. 16:7, saying that it should be boiled.

Likewise, the passage from the Wisdom of Solomon (first or second century BCE), “She [Wisdom] brought them over the Red Sea, and led them through the deep waters; but she drowned their enemies and cast them up from the depth of the sea,” may be recognized as a harmonization of the contradiction created by the statement in Exod. 15:5, “They [Pharoh’s army] went down into the depths like a stone,” and Exod. 14:30, “Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the shore of the sea.” Since both statements must be true, the Wisdom of Solomon explains that the Egyptians at first sank to the bottom of the sea and were then thrown back up on the shore.^[3] Rabbinic interpretation of the Bible, however, only rarely took the form of such “rewritten Bible.” Typically, the rabbis would compile interpretive comments and attach them to biblical verses in a way that made their comments easily distinguishable from the biblical verse.

The approach to the biblical text that produces these kinds of interpretations is often referred to as midrash, a word derived from the Hebrew root darash whose basic meaning is “to seek out” the will of God. In the early parts of the Bible, it is often used in the sense of asking God, or exploring his will through consulting Moses or a prophet (Gen. 25:22; Exod. 18:15). In later times, when prophecy was believed to have ceased,^[4] there was a shift in focus to interpreting the text of the Bible, which was then considered the only place where God’s will was to be found. In this broad sense of biblical interpretation, midrash includes pre-rabbinic interpretations (such as, for instance, the Wisdom of Solomon) as well as the early Aramaic translations of the Bible (targumim). In addition to interpretive activity, the term midrash also denotes the corpus in which these interpretations are preserved as well as the smallest interpretive unit in such a corpus.^[5]

Textual Problems

Although biblical interpretation was by no means an invention of the rabbis, it reached its peak during the rabbinic period. Rabbinic biblical interpretation often goes beyond the simplest solutions to the difficulties perceived in the biblical text and commonly involves the reconstruction of events and conversations between biblical characters. For instance, literally translated, Gen. 4:8 reads: “Cain said to his brother Abel . . . and when they were in the field, Cain set upon his brother Abel and killed him,” an odd wording that suggests something is missing. What Cain said to Abel is somehow omitted...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table Of Contents
• Copyright
• Abbreviations
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Timeline
• Continuity and Change in Rabbinic Judaism
• Tradition in the Making--The Mishnah and the Talmuds
• Rabbinic Biblical Interpretation—Midrash
• The Jewish Character of the Early Jesus Movement
• Continuity and Change in Contemporary Judaism
• Glossary
• Bibliography