Table of Contents: Jewish Biblical Interpretation and Cultural Exchange

1 of 10

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/toc/14438.html

Jewish Biblical Interpretation and Cultural Exchange

Comparative Exegesis in Context
Natalie B. Dohrmann and David Stern, Editors
2008 | 352 pages | Cloth $69.95
Religion
View main book page
Table of Contents
Introduction: On Comparative Biblical ExegesisInterpretation, Influence, Appropriation
David Stern

Biblical interpretation is not simply study

of the Bible's meaning. This volume
focuses on signal moments in the
histories of scriptural interpretation of
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam from the
ancient period to the early modern, and
shows how deeply intertwined these
religions have always been.

1. Interpreting Torah Traditions in Psalm 105

Adele Berlin
2. Cain: Son of God or Son of Satan?
Israel Knohl
3. Manumission and Transformation in Jewish and Roman Law
Natalie B. Dohrmann
4. Lessons from Jerome's Jewish Teachers: Exegesis and Cultural Interaction in Late Antique Palestine
Megan Hale Williams
5. Ancient Jewish Interpretation of the Song of Songs in a Comparative Context
David Stern
6. Patriarchy, Primogeniture and Polemic in the Exegetical Traditions of Judaism and Islam
Reuven Firestone
7. May Karaites Eat Chicken?Indeterminacy in Sectarian Halakhic Exegesis
Daniel Frank
8. Early Islamic Exegesis as Legal Theory: How Qur'anic Wisdom Became the Sunna of the Prophet
Joseph Lowry
9. Interpreting Scripture in and through Liturgy: Exegesis of Mass Propers in the Middle Ages
Daniel Sheerin
10. Exegesis and Polemic in Rashbam's Commentary on the Song of Songs
Sara Japhet
11. Literal versus Carnal: George of Siena's Christian Reading of Jewish Exegesis
Deeana Copeland Klepper
12. Christians and Jews on Job in Fifteenth-Century Italy
Fabrizio Lelli
Notes
List of Contributors
Index
Excerpt [uncorrected, not for citation]
Introduction
On Comparative Biblical ExegesisInterpretation, Influence, Appropriation
David Stern
Over the last thirty years, the study of ancient and medieval Biblical interpretationJewish and
Christian alikehas undergone a sea-change. Forty years ago, if a scholar in Bible studies were asked
about pre-modern biblical exegesis and its value, the answer would almost certainly have been
dismissive; at best, it would have acknowledged the historical significance of these texts as putative
sources for their authors' lives or theology. Only rarely would an ancient or medieval commentary
have been treated as genuine exegesis, and even more rarely as possessing an enduring value. As late
as 1970, the eminent Origen scholar R. P. C. Hanson, could write in regard to the Church Fathers
(early and late) that "no admiration of the beauty or skill displayed in their typological and allegorical
interpretation should be allowed to disguise the distorting effect which these ideas [about exegesis] has
upon [the Church Father's] understanding of the Bible."
Today it would be difficult to find such sentiments stated so baldly and categorically. Ancient and
medieval biblical commentary alike have undergone a large-scale rehabilitation, and are now

16-Aug-15 10:50 AM

Table of Contents: Jewish Biblical Interpretation and Cultural Exchange

2 of 10

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/toc/14438.html

appreciated both for their value in elucidating the Bible (with obvious qualifications, of course), and as
literary documents worth reading in their own right. Several reasons lie behind this decisive change. In
the first place, there has been a growing disillusionment with historical criticism of the Bible and its
positivistic approaches to the text as self-sufficient guarantors for understanding the meaning of the
biblical text. So, too, the increasing sophistication of general hermeneutics and literary studies has
worked to undermine the positivism of historical scholarship, and to justify on philosophical grounds
some of the more outlandish or seemingly dated characteristics of pre-modern exegesis (which on
occasion turn out not to be so un- or pre-modern after all). Indeed, as literary theory has increasingly
emerged as a field in its own right, some literary theorists have looked back upon the history of
exegesis to discover their own past. A prominent theorist once remarked to me personally that he now
recognized that modern "literary criticism" was the mere tip of an iceberg whose gigantic foundations
lay submerged beneath the surface in the vast shoals of the history of ancient and medieval biblical
exegesis. The second major change that has occurred in the field of biblical exegesis has been its
growing enlargement and inclusiveness. Forty years ago, pre-modern biblical exegesis (ancient and
medieval) meant, essentially, Christian exegesis. Robert M. Grant's A Short History of the
Interpretation of the Bible (1963) has all of about three paragraphs on "Jewish" interpretation in the
time of Jesus and Paul; and not a mention of Qumran or any later Jewish exegesis. Less than ten years
later, in 1970, the three-volume The Cambridge History of the Bibleperhaps the first major project
in English to attempt to situate the development of biblical exegesis within the Bible's larger
historygave the space of a full chapter to Geza Vermes to write on "Bible and Midrash: Early Old
Testament Exegesis," but in the space of some twenty pages, under the rubric of "midrash," Vermes
had to cover all ancient Jewish exegesis from Philo to Qumran, the targumim (or Aramaic translations
of the Bible), the various pseudepigraphic and apocryphal texts, and of course all rabbinic literature
Now compare those publications with a more recent one like Mikra (1988)the Hebrew term for
Scripturewhich has separate chapters by different scholars on Josephus, on Hellenistic Jewish
authors, on Samaritan exegesis as well as rabbinic, and chapter-length treatments of Gnosticism and
(of course) multiple chapters on early Christian exegesis in its various types and schools. And even
more impressive are the massive two first volumes of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament (1996/2000), a
multivolume series that will eventually cover all of the history of interpretation of the Hebrew Bible
and Old Testament and whose first two volumes alone (nearly 1600 pages) treat exegesis until the year
1300. These volumes have chapters on everything found in Mikra (and lengthier ones at that) as well
as extensive coverage of early medieval Jewish exegesis from the Geonim through all the various
schools of peshat in both Ashkenaz and Sefarad (with individual chapters devoted to figures like
Moshe Ibn Ezra, Nahmanides, and the Kimhis). Needless to say, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament's
coverage of Christian exegesis is no less comprehensive.
The two volumes of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament are an impressive indication of the field's
maturation. Yet they also reflect its growing pains, and what remains most problematic about it. For all
the excellence of its many individual chapters, the two volumes as a whole lack what one might call a
controlling vision, an idea of what the history of biblical interpretation means beyond all its particular
moments. Rather than a continuous history of the development of Jewish and Christian exegesis, the
two volumes present fragments of a history. This problematic has not escaped the notice of the
volumes' editor, Magne Sb. In an epilogue to the first volume, in attempting to sum up the history
covered in the volume, he writes, "In the end, then, a long double story . . . has been followed. . . .
These two main roads [of Jewish and Christian exegesis], with several minor deviating paths, have
mostly been kept apart by the ancient Synagogue and Churchwho have moved forward in relatively
great isolation from one another, with only few signs of combining tracks."
On strictly historical grounds, Sb is correct that there are not many moments when Jewish and
Christian biblical interpretation openly intersect. But is the story of Jewish and Christian exegesis a
long "double story?" Perhaps it is really two essentially separate stories (which is what the volumes
actually seem to present). Or, alternately, is it one story, with both Jewish and Christian scriptural
exegesis deriving from a single set of reading practices that first develop in the aftermath of the Bible's
canonization (if not earlier, within the Bible itself, in inner-biblical exegesis) and then diverge on
seemingly separate tracks as the two religious traditions also separate and diverge? If such is the case,
is it possible to write a single history of biblical exegesis, to look at Jewish and Christian (not to
mention Islamic) exegesis in tandem? On the other hand, if their subsequent development has so little
to say to each other, what is the point of studying them together? Or to phrase these questions from a
different vantage point, namely, that of reading practice as it develops and changes historically and in
different cultural centers: How do Jewish and Christian traditions of biblical interpretation and their
reading practices resemble the reading practices applied to other books? How does this resemblance
(or lack of it) affect the difference between the two interpretive traditions? And finally, how does the
history of Bible-reading fit into the history of reading practice in Western culture? But in that case,
whose story are we telling? The story of biblical interpretation? Of Western reading practices? Of their
intersection?

16-Aug-15 10:50 AM

Table of Contents: Jewish Biblical Interpretation and Cultural Exchange

3 of 10

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/toc/14438.html

The essays in this volume do not offer definitive answers to these questions, but they address them by
exploring intersections between the three exegetical traditions and the problems that study of these
intersections entails. Before turning to these individual explorations, however, it is worth tracing the
background to the field of comparative exegesis as it has emerged in scholarship over the last
half-century. Most of the scholarship I will discuss deals with the earlier periods of biblical
interpretation in Judaism and Christianity in Late Antiquity but its relevance can easily be extended to
the medieval and even early modern periods about which I will write more at the conclusion. So, too,
virtually all the scholarship I will talk about deals with the intersection of Jewish and Christian
interpretation but the problematics are largely identical for Islam and its intersection with Jewish (and
Christian) exegetical tradition.
We can begin with the term "comparative exegesis" itself. To the best of my knowledge, the first
person to write about "comparative exegesis" in connection with the scholarly study of ancient
scriptural interpretation was the French scholar, Renee Bloch, in a 1955 article entitled "Note
methodologique pour l'etude de la literature rabbinique." Bloch's aim in that article was to demonstrate
the importance of rabbinic literature for understanding the Bible and its interpretation in postbiblical
tradition and to set forth a method for pursuing such scholarship. According to Bloch, the major
challenge a scholar faces in using rabbinic texts vis--vis the Biblebeyond penetrating their inherent
obscurityis dating its various texts and placing them in sequence so as to be able to trace the
development of an exegetical motif or theme. These motifs or themes were the specific focus of her
study, and it was specifically to solve the difficulty of situating their different versions in various
postbiblical texts that Bloch first conceived of what she called her "comparative" method. In order to
illustrate the method, Bloch presented in the article a sample exercise in which she traced the motif of
the prophecy of Moses's birth by Pharaoh's magicians through various ancient exegetical works.
Beginning with the targumim, she proceeded through Josephus, classical rabbinic midrash, and even
late medieval midrashic compilations like Yalkut Shimoni and the Chronicle of Moses, situating each
version in relation to its predecessors and later successors, and setting methodological guidelines for
doing so. She concluded her study with the impact of the motif upon the story of Jesus's birth.
To be sure, Bloch was hardly the first to study the history of traditions in ancient Jewish literature.
From the inception of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism) at the beginning of the
nineteenth century such studies were among the favored preoccupations for Jewish scholars. Perhaps
the greatest example of the genre is Louis Ginzberg's monumental Legends of the Jews (1909-38)
many of whose footnotes remain to this day the definitive monographs on their subjects. Bloch,
however, was (to the best of my knowledge) the first scholar to attempt to study such traditions
systematically, and it is here that her importance lies, as well as that of her foremost student, Geza
Vermes (who, after Bloch's premature death in an airplane crash in the fifties, continued her work in
numerous studies that applied and developed her methodology). Their common work remains to this
day the model for what is still probably the most widespread type of scholarship on biblical exegesis
namely, the tracing of interpretive motifs and their development through early postbiblical literature
(particularly the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha) into subsequent Jewish and Christian interpretation
in Late Antiquity through the Middles Ages.
Bloch herself came out of French biblical studies; she was a student of A. Robert who was among the
first to discuss what we today call "inner-biblical exegesis." Bloch herself was a firm believer in the
biblical origins of midrash, or more accurately, of "the midrashic genre," which she defined as "an
edifying and explanatory genre closely tied to Scripture, in which the role of amplification is real but
secondary and always remains subordinate to the primary religious end, which is to show the full
import of the work of God, the Word of God." For Bloch, as for Vermes, midrash was very much a
fully-fledged literary genre with a lengthy career in ancient Jewish literaturethat is to say, not just
the name for a particular type of scriptural study or exegesis practiced by rabbinic sages in Palestine in
the first five or six centuries in the common era. "Nothing could be more wrong than the idea that
midrash is a late creation of rabbinic Judaism," she wrote the key word here being "late." Writing in
the wake of the publication by Paul Kahle of the Palestinian targumim from the Cairo Geniza, Bloch
(and after her, Vermes) followed Kahle in giving the Palestinian targumim a very early dating which
preceded the rise of rabbinic Judaism. In Bloch's eyes, the targumim were indeed the first real
flowering of the midrashic genre after the close of the biblical canon. Because she saw midrash as an
"early" phenomenon, she also included in her comparative studies much late Second Temple material,
placing great emphasis in particular on the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, and the New Testament.
Indeed, when Bloch wrote about the utility of midrash to illuminate the Bible, she meant the New
Testament as much asperhaps even more thanthe Old. This was her Bible.
Which is to state, simply, that Bloch and Vermes' method had a not-always-explicit agenda that can be
seen best in the historiography of ancient exegesis that the two scholars proposed. Not only were the
origins of the "midrashic tendency" within "the inspired Scripture themselves," Bloch wrote, but they
reached their real culmination and full fruition in the New Testament. "With Paul, especially in the

16-Aug-15 10:50 AM

Table of Contents: Jewish Biblical Interpretation and Cultural Exchange

4 of 10

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/toc/14438.html

major epistles," she writes, "we find the most characteristic and authentic form of midrash, what might
be called the great midrash: confronted with the immense problem of a change in economysalvation
by faith in Christ, the call of the Gentiles, the rejection by official Judaismthe Apostle, guided by
the Spirit, searched ceaselessly in the ancient Scriptures to find divine answers to the questions posed
by the new situation."
Vermes, in his Cambridge History of the Bible essay on midrash, gave a far more nuanced and subtle
presentation of what was essentially the same argument. He, too, began with the biblical origins of
postbiblical Jewish interpretation, and then divided its later history into two periods, that of "pure
exegesis" and "applied exegesis." "Pure exegesis" was "organically bound to the Bible;" its purpose
was "to render every word and verse in Scripture intelligible and its message acceptable and
meaningful to the interpreters' contemporaries," and it was mainly to be found (on the basis of the
works Vermes cites) in the targumim, the Septuagint, Qumram texts (like the Genesis Apocryphon),
the Apocrypha and Pseuedepigrapha, and, on a few occasions, in rabbinic literature. In contrast, the
point of departure for "applied exegesis" "was no longer the Torah itself but contemporary customs
and beliefs, which the interpreter attempted to connect with scripture and to justify." This type was
anticipated in Qumran literature and in the New Testament but it was found most extensively in
rabbinic literature. One of the differences between "pure" and "applied" exegesis is that where the
former is closer to what we call exegesiswhich derives meaning out of the Biblical textthe latter
more closely resembles eisegesis, which reads meaning into the text. The earliest, most authentic
practitioners of the "midrashic genre" were exegetes who interpreted meaning out of the Bible. In
contrast, the rabbis were eisegetes who used midrash to read whatever meanings they wanted (or
needed) into Scripture.
The work of Bloch and Vermes remains foundational for all scholarship concerned with comparative
exegesis, but there have been several important changes in scholarly conceptions and assumptions
about the field since their time. For one thing, scholars today think very differently than did Bloch and
Vermes about tradition and the way it develops. Bloch and Vermes had a very linear notion of
tradition; for example, it was axiomatic to their work that the simpler and shorter version of a motif
was always earlier than a more elaborate or lengthier version. We now know that this is not always the
case. So too we know that the oral does not always or necessarily precede the written, nor that the
written phase always or necessarily follows the oral. A tradition can be transmitted orally, then
committed to writing, then pass back into oral transmission. The written and the oral can also coexist.
Further, the written stage of tradition can exhibit many of the same features that were once exclusively
attributed to the oral.
What has changed most since Bloch and Vermes, however, is a shift in focus from tradition itself, or a
particular motif of tradition (like the birth of Moses), as if it were a kind of objective datum with an
independent existence, to the reading practices of ancient interpreters as the producers of tradition and
traditional motifs. This shift in particular has been the contribution of James Kugel, the most recent
practitioner of 'comparative exegesis" (even if, to the best of my knowledge, he has never referred to
himself that way). In several books, Kugel has eloquently argued that ancient Israel's greatest
contribution to the West was not solely the Bible but equally so, a way of reading the Bible, namely,
the earliest set of reading practices, or what we call "early Biblical interpretation." Of all these
practices, the most basic is the fact that "ancient Biblical interpretation is an interpretation of verses,
not stories"that is to say, the smaller textual units (like a verse, a phrase, even an unusual word) that
would be remembered in a culture that was essentially memorial, to use Mary Carruthers phrase. In
addition, Kugel argues, all ancient interpreters of the Bible shared four basic beliefs about the Biblical
textfirst, that it is "fundamentally a cryptic document;" second, that Scripture "constitutes one great
Book of Instruction, and as such is a fundamentally relevant text;" third, that it is "perfect and
perfectly harmonious," that is, without contradictions or inconsistencies or superfluities; and fourth,
that it is of "divine provenance." These four assumptions or presuppositions were, according to Kugel,
brought to the Bible by all its ancient interpreters, and were the practices that created most early
postbiblical "traditions." As a result, nearly all ancient biblical interpretationsincluding all those
preserved in the varieties of Second Temple period literature, not to mention rabbinic and early
Christian exegetical traditionshare a profound common ground.
In making this case, Kugel has been one of the major proponents of the view that ancient biblical
interpretation should be appreciated as a legitimate mode of reading (once, that is, its assumptions are
understood) rather than a product of imaginative fancy or a reflex of theological or ideological
baggage that ancient readers brought to and read "into" the text. Hence Kugel's insistence that every
ancient interpretation derives from a "problem" or "difficulty" in the biblical text, and that "the formal
starting point" of all ancient exegesis "is always Scripture itself." Indeed, Kugel's virtually telepathic
ability to transport himself into the minds of ancient readers and to look at the text through their eyes
may be the closest that many of us today, Kugel's own readers, will ever come to witnessing how
ancient Jews (and Christians) read the Bible.

16-Aug-15 10:50 AM

Table of Contents: Jewish Biblical Interpretation and Cultural Exchange

5 of 10

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/toc/14438.html

Even so, Kugel's almost exclusive concentration upon reading practice comes at the expense of
accounting for extra-textual motivations and predispositions that ancient interpreters brought to their
reading of the Biblein the case of the rabbis, for example, the axiomatic conviction that the Written
Torah and the Oral Torah will always be complimentary and never in contradiction; or for Qumranic
readers, the belief that the Bible is essentially oracular and prognostic and directed to the history of the
community itself; or for (at least for some) early Christians, that the meaning of the Old Testament
will always be in some way christological. Kugel himself is not unaware of these factors, but his
approach, if only because of its emphasis on the exegetical side, never fully accounts for the extratextual motivations. It thus inevitably ends up reducing the very real differences that distinguish
ancient interpretations even when they derive from a common exegetical problem.
How does one decide whether a given tradition derives from an interpretive urge (i.e., a reading
practice) or from an ideological or other extra-textual desire that may later take on an exegetical
coloration? This problematic, which is actually inherent in all comparative study, becomes only more
complicated when the tradition is preserved or recorded in a non-exegetical context (like the narrative
contexts so common in Second Temple literature), and still more complicated when there exist
multiple versions of a given tradition whose chronological relation is not easily determined (which
was, as we have seen, a problem that already bothered Bloch). Further, even a reading practice itself is
not necessarily ideology-free. Take, for example, the basic hermeneutical axiom of the Bible's divine
origins. Kugel is appropriately cautious about assigning too much weight to this particular assumption
(like making it the basis of all the other assumptions, something that is commonly done). But the real
problem with divine authorship is that it directly depends upon the nature of the divinity imagined to
be the divine author. For example, Philo's middle-Platonic First Principle produces a certain kind of
allegorical exegesis that is consonant with its Middle Platonism, and that is very different from the
profound anthropomorphism of the rabbis' God which is reflected in the playfulness and intimacy of
midrashic exegesis. Similar parallels could be drawn between other notions of divinity and the types of
sacred texts and exegesis produced by their divine "authors."
The new attention to reading practice I have outlined is nonetheless the first of several major changes
in comparative exegetical scholarship that have taken place since Bloch and Vermes initially defined
the field. The second major change since their time is the way scholars now think about the origins and
beginnings of ancient biblical exegesis. Bloch was neither alone nor the first to take account of what
we today call inner-biblical exegesis, that is, interpretive activity within the Bible itself, as the source
for all postbiblical exegesis. Nahum Sarna in America and Isaac Seeligman in Israel as well as others
made early important contributions to understanding this phenomenon. Bloch, however, was among
the first to integrate evidence of inner-biblical exegesis into studies of postbiblical exegesis, drawing
her primary examples from Chronicles which she correctly saw as retellings of the books of Samuel
and Kings from a particular ideological/theological perspective; she also included texts like Ezekiel 16
with its allegory of the history of Israel. For Bloch, these compositions were so important as early
examples of exegesis both because they proved that her view of midrash as a meditation upon the
meaning of the Bible existed even within the biblical corpus as an authentically native modality, and
because these examples also anticipated the rereading and rewriting of the Old Testament in the New.
As we have seen, the latter document marked for Bloch the real fruition of the midrashic genre. In her
reconstruction of the early history of biblical interpretation, between Old Testament protomidrash and
New Testament midrash there lay a virtually uninterrupted line of succession.
Scholars today look at inner-biblical exegesis from a completely different perspective. In this field, the
most important recent contributions have been made by Michael Fishbane, for whom inner-biblical
exegesis is less a "meditation upon the Bible's meaning" as it was for Bloch than a cluster of dynamic
tendencies or habitsfor lack of a better termthat underlie the Bible's own process of composition
and that later, after the closing of the Bible and its canonization, resurface in midrash as full-blown
exegetical techniques. Such tendencies include the harmonization of contradictions and
inconsistencies, the systematization of diverse and unconnected sources, the recasting of motifs and
imagery in new contexts, the transformation of old imagery into new, the historicizing of ahistorical
texts (like the addition of superscriptions to the Psalms), and the rehistoricizing of past historical texts,
prophecies in particular, into newly historical or prophetic texts. These habits or tendencies have little
to do with a particular text "meditating" upon the meaning of an earlier text. Rather, they are more like
ways of thinking (or of reading and writing) that underlie the Bible's very own process of composition,
a kind of deep dynamics behind the very making of the Bible. Later, they reappear in midrash as
explicit if not formal techniques of interpretation which are self-consciously applied to the explication
and elaboration of the Bible.
Fishbane's view of inner-biblical exegesis is not unproblematic. Whether or not the presence of these
tendencies within the Bible actually constitutes exegesis remains open to question. By definition,
exegesis seeks to explain somethinga difficulty or complexityin a primary text; Fishbane's innerbiblical examples rarely elucidate or clarify anything about the passages of old Bible that lie behind

16-Aug-15 10:50 AM

Table of Contents: Jewish Biblical Interpretation and Cultural Exchange

6 of 10

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/toc/14438.html

the new ones even if they help to compose the latter. Yet even if the tendencies he has identified are
more like compositional forces than exegetical ones, Fishbane's claim that they nonetheless lie behind
the explicitly hermeneutical tendencies that emerge in postbiblical midrash is compelling. In fact,
Fishbane's tendencies explain, in my view, the inner workings of midrash far more cogently than do,
say, the middot (or hermeneutical principles) like the kal va-homer (the argument a fortiori) or the
gezerah shavah (verbal analogy) which have traditionally been invoked as the logic behind midrash
and the primary mechanics of its exegesis.
The connection between inner-biblical exegesis and rabbinic midrash is, for Fishbane, intrinsicas
intrinsic as inner-biblical meditation and midrash in the New Testament was for Bloch. Indeed, for
Fishbane, the connection between inner-biblical exegesis and rabbinic midrash is not only indisputable
proof of the continuity of rabbinic tradition with its biblical predecessor; it also obviates the need for
the intervention of foreign or non-Jewish influence to explain the emergence of rabbinic commentary.
"To say, then," he writes in one of his more recent restatements of ancient Israelite exegetical history,
"that Rabbinic exegesis was fundamentally dependent upon trends in contemporary Greco-Roman
rhetoric or among the Alexandrian grammarians is to mistake ecumenical currents of text-study and
the occurrence of similar exegetical terms for the inner-Jewish cultivation of preexistent native
traditions of interpretation." Rather, the Hebrew Bible itself is "the product of an interpretative
tradition," and midrash is a direct continuation of that tradition.
These remarks are polemical in intent, aimed at the work of scholars like David Daube and Saul
Lieberman who sought to show that rabbinic interpretation must be seen within the context of
contemporary Greco-Roman culture. This view, as Lieberman himself indicated, goes back at least to
the twelfth century when the Karaite Judah Hadassi first broached the connection in order to disparage
and delegitimate midrash as a form of alien wisdom that had contaminated native Israelite biblical
tradition. In the nineteenth century, however, the link between rabbinic interpretation and
Greco-Roman sources was revived as a productive explanation for the peculiarities of rabbinic
exegesis, and Lieberman was only among the last of these scholars to study the connection.
Characteristically, Lieberman gave the argument a subtle spin of his own. In the first place, unlike
earlier scholars, he did not believe the rabbis "owed" their exegetical modes to Greco-Roman culture.
Many of the techniques they used, he claimed, were universally practiced in the ancient world, drawn
from a fund of interpretive techniques that derived from rudimentary legal and literary hermeneutics as
well as from still more ancient traditions of dream interpretation that were common to nearly every
culture in the larger Mediterranean area. Yet if there was no evidence for substantive influence of
Greco-Roman interpretation upon the rabbis, Lieberman showed that the rabbis borrowed the names
for some of their exegetical techniques from Greek technical interpretive terminology. This borrowing
was not merely nominal. If nothing else, it showed that rabbinic biblical exegesis did not take place in
a historical vacuumthat the rabbis were aware of the exegetical activity taking place in the culture
around them, and that there must have been some kind of exchange between the rabbis and that
culture. Although Lieberman hedged on the question of influence (whether the rabbis actually
borrowed anything substantive from the Greeks), he clearly viewed rabbinic exegesis as part of a
larger Late Antique, Greco-Roman phenomenon. Even if the rabbis borrowed only the technical
terminology of exegesis, this was because they must have realized that these exegetical forms were
unprecedented in their native tradition; as a result, they had to consult Greco-Roman culture for what
to call these new things. Historians do not generally deal with counterfactuals, but I strongly suspect
that Lieberman, as a scholar of ancient Judaism, would have found the idea of midrash inconceivable
outside Greco-Roman culture. Not so Fishbane.
Now there is no necessary reason to see a Greco-Roman genealogy for ancient Jewish exegesis and
that of inner-biblical exegesis as mutually exclusive. To the contrary: the two genealogies and their
respective hermeneutical corollaries seem to be best taken as complimentarythe one, the innerbiblical tendencies, explaining the dynamics underlying midrash; the other, the impact of
Greco-Roman exegesis, explaining why these tendencies suddenly change from being mainly
compositional forces working within the text and become full-fledged, self-consciously used
exegetical techniques operating upon Scripture from outside, as it were. After all, why should an
authentically Jewish mode of exegesis, like midrash, be only a purely, genetically, Jewish one,
untouched by foreign intervention or influence?
Here, too, then, in this scholarly debate over the origins of ancient Jewish exegesis, we encounter a
polemical subtext about the purity of genealogy. In this case, the polemic is not over the theological
rivalry between Judaism and Christianity but rather, it seems, a reenactment of the even more ancient
struggle between Hellenism and Hebraism. In fact, the polemic touches upon an even more
fundamental debate about the nature of change in Jewish tradition. Are new developments (like the
emergence of midrash) impelled by imminent internal forces? Or are they shaped by historical context,
namely, the influence of the foreign host cultures in which Jews have lived since the time of the

16-Aug-15 10:50 AM

Table of Contents: Jewish Biblical Interpretation and Cultural Exchange

7 of 10

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/toc/14438.html

Babylonian exile? As this last debate is constructed, midrash essentially comes to serve as a figure or
trope for Judaism itself. This may seem an unlikely figuration, but it is one that has come to play an
increasingly prominent role, particularly in recent attempts to connect literary theory and classical
Jewish exegesis.
The impact of theory upon the study of ancient exegesisJewish and Christian alikehas been
considerable. For one thing, it has given scholars the lens through which to look at exegesis as
literature in its own right, not just as a secondary or supplementary text. The blurring of the distinction
between the two orders of discourse, between "literature" and commentary, has enabled scholars to see
exegetical activity within the biblical narrative, just as it has enabled them to appreciate the
imaginative excess of exegesis. So, too, literary theory has contributed valuable categories like
intertextuality that have illuminated the workings of ancient exegesis along with the semiotic tools to
connect hermeneutics to other forms of cultural practice, like attitudes towards the body and gender,
not to mention theological and political stances.
At the same time, theory has also contributed its own set of polemical polarities to the history of
exegesis. Contemporary (mainly poststructuralist) theory's "re-discovery" of ancient and medieval
exegesis actually began, somewhat paradoxically, with midrash, and this new fascination was
legitimated, if not rationalized, by positing midrash (and classical Jewish exegesis generally) as a kind
of antecedent or ancestor for a nonlogocentric hermeneutic of the sort sought by poststructuralist
theory itself. This identification, in turn, quickly extended into the positing of an antinomy between
midrash and allegory, with the latter representing the hermeneutic of the reigning so-called GrecoChristian logocentrism that heretofore had dominated Western thought and was now about to be
dislodged. The opposition between the two went as following: In allegory, meaning was seen as an
abstraction lying "behind" the text, grimly awaiting its purported revelation by theologians obsessed
with metaphysical presence. In midrash, in contrast, meaning was "in front" of the text, an endlessly
playful game of interpretive jouissance (which, contra Derrida, is not always not Jew-issance), less
concerned with meaning than with extending the unlimited conversation of textuality. This antinomy,
in turn, turned into an even more essentialized opposition with the terms midrash and allegory now
becoming virtual code-words for the different, even opposed ontologies that presumably produced
them, the homologous "ways of being" in the world that include gender-constructions and social and
political embodiments.
Happily, this antinomy, with its hyper-polarized oppositions, has now passed from the academic scene,
but its specterthe tendency to view the history of Jewish and Christian exegesis as dueling rivals
remains a temptation and a threat. The specter is Janus-like. On the one hand, if Jewish and
Christian exegesis can be seen only as opposites, then there is little chance of viewing exegesis as an
arena for productive cultural exchange because there is no real connection between them. On the other
hand, if their relationship is viewed solely as a battle over the possession of originality and influence,
how can comparative exegesis not be philosophically and hermeneutically a divisive project?
Part of the answer to this question may lie in shifting the terms of the argument. If the study of ancient
exegesis over the last two decades has taught us anything, it is the lesson that interpretation is
inevitably over-determined. Multiple forces and sources seem always to feed into it in the case of
midrash, for example, inner-biblical compositional tendencies turned into exegetical habits; modes of
Greco-Roman literary and legal interpretation; oneirological and esoteric techniques of interpretation;
problems and clues in the biblical text demanding explanation and clarification; the rhetorical and
ideological needs of ancient interpreters and of their audiences that required authoritative licenses and
justifications from the biblical tradition. Nor is this over-determination unique to midrash. It is even
more pronounced in the case of medieval Jewish biblical interpretation where, until now, most
scholarship has approached the different commentators and their commentaries in terms of their
proximity to or distance from peshat, that code-word for the "plain" or "literal" or "contextual'
meaning, which is usually treated as a systematic approach to the biblical text. In fact, as Sara Japhet
has pointed out in an under-appreciated article, this conception of peshat is a Wissenschaft
anachronism. Most medieval Jewish exegetes, far from being systematic interpreters, are powerfully
individualist personalities, each with his own unmistakable voice and identifiable way of reading. But
rather than seeing these ways of reading as systematic, it may be far more accurate to view them as
"negotiations" in which each exegete struggled on his own to juggle various requirements and
needsthe words of the text itself, the imputed meanings of tradition, other contemporary
interpretations, polemical intents, ideological desires, and so on. To be sure, each negotiation has its
own economy (and, accordingly, a balance of profit or loss), but in either case, ancient or medieval,
the task of comparative exegetical scholarship today would seem to be to unpack the multiple
determinants and factors that went into making an interpretation rather than to set up different
interpretations as rivals or competitors.
In this world of exegetical negotiations, every interpretation is also a not-another-intepretation.

16-Aug-15 10:50 AM

Table of Contents: Jewish Biblical Interpretation and Cultural Exchange

8 of 10

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/toc/14438.html

Although it is not always possible for us to know what the exegetical alternative was, it is safe to
assume that, as far back as we can go, every exegesis was an additional interpretationa davar aher,
"another opinion," as the rabbis saidor a refusal of an existing exegesis. This is to say that there will
always be an inherently and unavoidable polemical dimension of some sort to exegesis. In most
comparative exegetical studies to date, however, there has been a tendency to view the relationship
between different traditions of exegeses as being either purely polemical or a matter of ascertainable
influence with one tradition of exegesis "subject" to another. In the former case, one interpretation
wars against another, refutes it, or "proves" from Scripture that the belief-system upon which its
"enemy" exegesis is based is wrong. In the latter case, a given exegesis is viewed as a copy or a
borrowing from another exegesis, a so-called "original" interpretation. Where the latter is primary and
authoritative, the formerthe interpretation under-the-influenceis dependent, secondary, and
belated. Inevitably, these characterizations have extended in scholarship to apply to the religious
traditions from which the exegeses stem. Thus, Judaism and Christianity have vied for the laurelwreathe of originality and struggled to be proclaimed the source of influence upon the other. Islam, in
turn, has invariably been viewed (by non-Muslims) as under-the-influence, secondary, derivative.
Recent cultural theory has done much to dismantle the privileged status of influence as a critical
category. As cultural theorists have noted, influence invariably implies an imbalance of power, and as
Peter Schaefer has recently reminded us, Western notions of influence are equally determined by
categories of cause and effect which go back to antiquity. Citing the pseudo-Aristotleian Liber de
causis, Schaefer summarizes its hierarchy as "the higher a cause, the greater the influence it exerts on
its effect." The implied metaphysics of this formulation helps to explain the power that "influence" has
exerted in literary studies, not to mention comparative exegesis scholarship, and it also indicates the
degree to which the intertextual relationship is essentially one-sided, with the less powerful party, the
one influenced, a passive participant in a cultural exchange whose parameters are determined solely by
the active, all-powerful source.
If one views the act of interpretation as a negotiation, however, it is possible to flip the perspective, as
it were, and to look at the act of exchange called "influence" from the perspective of the recipient of
influence rather than from that of the alleged original or source. From the recipient's perspective, the
cultural exchange will appear not as a process of influence but as one of appropriation in which he, the
less powerful party, nonetheless exercises what power he has and appropriatesliterally "makes his
own"what he takes from the more powerful other party. In this case, appropriation is both an act of
possession and a reproduction of meaning, which may sometimes involve "killing off" the source; or
theft; or friendly borrowing. In all instances, though, it is a creative act in which the agent of
appropriation, the less powerful party, the one being influenced, chooses to appropriate and, by
making it his own, transforms the new possession. It is that transformed exegesis that now appears as a
new exegesis. Further, the agent of appropriation is a human agent. Particularly in the case of early
Jewish interpretation from its beginnings through the rabbinic period, because it is nearly all an
anonymous literature of interpretation, which preserves at best the names of tradents but little more
(since the voices behind the names all pretty much sound alike), it is easy to forget that the exegetes
were individuals and not religious traditions or literary texts. By restoring human agency to the
equation, appropriation allows us to see interpretation as a genuine work of culture that will always be
greater than simply being one exegetical tradition or approach.
In selecting and editing the essays for this volume, my coeditor Natalie Dohrmann and myself have
intentionally sought to highlight papers that have chosen to address the appropriative side of exegesis
in the ancient and medieval worlds by using the comparative context to explore the different ways in
which exegesis can be understood only by understanding one interpretation and its tradition in the
context of others. The essays in the volume all derive from a year-long seminar held at the Center for
Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania whose participantsvisiting fellows in the
fields of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic exegesisconstituted a group that was itself a weekly exercise
in comparative exegesis. The positive results that such comparative study can produce are, we hope,
reflected in the excellence of the papers in this volume and in their implicit dialogues with each other.
Because of limitations of space, not all fellows in the seminar are explicitly represented in this volume,
but their invisible presence as commentators and critics upon earlier drafts of these papers is
acknowledged with gratitude.
In organizing this volume, Natalie Dohrmann and I have chosen to order the essays chronologically
(as best as we could) rather than by exegetical or religious tradition. It is our hope that, by "mixing it
up" in this way, by mingling exegetes and separate traditions, the reader will also be encouraged to see
his or her own connections between the individual essays and their subjectsmoments of comparative
relevance that may have eluded even the authors of the essays themselves (not to mention the editors).
The following remarks about the separate essays should therefore be taken less as summaries of their
contents or judgments on their significance than as pointers in the direction of avenues of connection
that the reader may wish to explore.

16-Aug-15 10:50 AM

Table of Contents: Jewish Biblical Interpretation and Cultural Exchange

9 of 10

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/toc/14438.html

The first two essays in the volumeby Adele Berlin and Israel Knohlbegin, appropriately enough,
with biblical exegesis within the Bible and in early postbiblical literature. The common effect of the
essays, if they are taken together, is to blur the line between inner-biblical exegesis and early
postbiblical interpretation. In her study of Psalm 105, Berlin shows how the psalmist/exegete
appropriated earlier Israelite traditions. Rather than viewing the Psalm as historical in genre, as
constituting a repository of alternative historical traditions to those preserved elsewhere in the Bible,
as scholars have previously done, Berlin approaches the text as an act of creative exegesis, a
re-interpretation of past traditions which the Psalmist has deliberately reshaped in order to connect the
past to the exilic present in which he lived.
Like Berlin, Knohl also deals with the interpretive dimension of compositional elements within the
Bible, as well as with the compositional force of interpretive elements in postbiblical literature. In
tracing the lineage of the dual views of Cain as Son of God and as Son of Satan, Knohl offers a
speculative reconstruction of the text of the genealogies in Genesis 4 that provides a prehistory for the
two traditions which, as he shows, resurface in Second Temple literature and early Christian exegesis
only to reemerge a third time (albeit in an even more extreme form) in an early medieval rabbinic text.
Rather than proving the antimony of Jewish and Christian exegesis, the history of this motif, in
Knohl's reconstruction, demonstrates how the two religious traditions became parallel conduits in
transmitting tradition, and simultaneously pushes the inner-biblical exegetical moment back still
further, before the Bible, to the traditions that helped compose it.
The next three essays in the book follow biblical interpretation into the Roman imperial and late
antique period and into the sphere of formal biblical exegesis in both rabbinic Jewish and early
Christian tradition. As each essay demonstrates, biblical interpretation can do much more than just
exegesis. In her study of rabbinic interpretation of the biblical laws of slavery, Natalie Dohrmann
shows how the rabbis not only reinterpret the biblical injunctions but also their larger cultural
experience under Roman imperial rule by appropriating Roman views of slavery in order to define, via
exegesis, their own place in the empire. Exegesis here become cultural work in a literal sense.
The next essay by Megan Williams, a study of Jerome's relationship to Jewish exegesis, picks up
Dohrmann's argument about exegesis as cultural work and carries it into the early Christian realm. In
this case, Williams demonstrates how Jerome exemplifies an early Christian exegete who appropriated
Jewish exegesis in order to define his own identity as a Christian in the Empire, both vis--vis other
Christians as well as towards contemporary pagans. As Williams shows, Jerome proudly appropriated
Jewish exegesis precisely in order to representor misrepresentit for his own rhetorical ends.
Through his translations and commentaries iuxta Hebraeos, he sought "to take the place of the Jewish
teachers from whom he had learned so much"an almost perfect example of cultural appropriation
that seeks literally to eliminate its source
In my own essay, I study ancient Jewish interpretation of the Song of Songs from a double
comparative perspectiveboth within rabbinic Judaism by comparing midrashic and esoteric
intepretations, and in relation to early Christian exegesis of the Song. In both cases, I try to shift the
focus of scholarly attention from hermeneutics to reading practice arguing that, in all three cases, the
same allegorical reading is simply used differently; while the different interpretations have different
contents, they share the same structure includingin the case of the rabbinic and early Christian
interpretationsa conception of the Song itself as a struggle over being God's true love vis--vis the
other tradition. As with both Dohrmann's study and Williams', exegesis here does cultural work.
The next group of three essays moves to the Near East and the Islamic world. The first of these,
Reuven Firstone's comparative study of the Abrahamic traditions in rabbinic and Islamic exegesis,
explicitly interrogates the notion of influence; as Firestone shows, of all the monotheistic faiths Islam
generally has struggled most with the burden of influence because it is the latest of the three. As he
demonstrates in his comparative study, however, both rabbinic and Islamic interpretations are impelled
by parallel polemical motives, and those motives may in fact reflect inner-biblical ambiguities as well
as the mutual competition the two faiths felt towards each other, and which produced parallel
interpretive approaches.
The next essay, Daniel Frank's study of Karaite halakhic (legal) exegesis, directly confronts what is
certainly the most polemically charged exegesis in all medieval Jewish interpretation; even so, as
Franks shows, the polemic is restricted to exegesis, not necessarily practice. In tracing Karaite and
Rabbanite exegesis of the specific laws regarding permissible fowl (and focusing on the permissibility
of chicken), Frank shows in effect how a Karaite "tradition"independent of the Bible yet with legal
authoritycame into existence through an accommodation with Rabbinite practice yet without
compromising Karaite exegetical principles. This tradition, identified by Karaite legislators with
consensus, allowed them to eat chicken yet did not diminish the Karaite ability to tolerate
indeterminacy in the Bible in a way that their Rabbanite contemporaries could not.

16-Aug-15 10:50 AM

Table of Contents: Jewish Biblical Interpretation and Cultural Exchange

10 of 10

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/toc/14438.html

The final essay in this group, Joseph Lowry's study of how traditions attributed to the prophet
Muhammad were elevated to the level of Quranic revelation, is also in effect a study in the creation of
an Oral Law next to a Written Law. The specific focus of Lowry's study is the history of interpretation
of the word hikma and its identification with sunna, which he explores through every conceivable
venue, including the possibility of rabbinic influence on the interpretation. While Lowry is properly
cautious about the speculative nature of this suggestion, he nonetheless demonstrates a powerful
structural parallel in the two traditions in respect to their creation of an extrabiblical body of tradition
with the authority of Scripture itself. This parallel would not be visible without comparative study,
which again yields a profound commonality between the two traditions.
The final group of essays in the volume returns to Christian Europe and its exegetical traditions. The
first of these, Sara Japhet's study of Rashbam's commentary on the Song of Songs, addresses the
question: How does this foremost peshat-exegete deal with a text whose meaning was understood to
be allegorical rather than literal? Japhet answers the question by juxtaposing Rashbam's approach to
those of Rashi and Abraham Ibn Ezrathat is, through comparative studyand thereby defines the
uniqueness of his reading, which sees the Song not merely as a love poem (its "literal" meaning), but
as a poetic address to contemporary Jews designed to overcome their despair at the endless travails of
exile by recalling the love of their youth.
The next essay by Daniel Sheerin explores a very different aspect of the cultural work of exegesis in
the Middle Ages by studying the use of Scripture in the Christian liturgy, specifically in the Mass
Proper, where scriptural excerpts were combined montage-like with liturgical passages to create what
were essentially new quasi-scriptural compositions. As Sheerin points out, the liturgy was the medium
through which Scripture was in fact known by most medieval laypersons; if so, he asks, what does this
tell us about knowledge of Scripture and its interpretation? Using the comparative method in an
original fashion, Sheerin shows how the methods and procedures of scriptural exegesis were applied to
the Mass proper in order to prove its coherence, meaningfulness, and timeliness. In doing this, he
shows how comparative exegesis extends beyond even the formal purview of Scripture both as a
medium for imparting meaning and for connecting text to the life of its audience.
In the following essay, Deeana Copeland Klepper continues to explore the topic of the reception of the
Bible and its interpretation in the late Middle Ages by analyzing the work of George of Sienna, a
popular Dominican preacher and exegete of the late fourteenth century. As Klepper shows, George
sought to provide biblical proofs of Christianity for a Christian audience, and in doing so, drew upon a
venerable tradition of anti-Jewish polemic, but he also insisted that the Christian sense of Scripture lay
in the proper understanding of the Bible's literal sense. By reframing Nicholas of Lyra's presentation
of Rashi's quasi-literalist commentary in a more polemical vein, George's corpus is a brilliant example
of the inadequacy of purely hermeneutical terms like peshat or the literal meaning to capture the
uniqueness and richness of creative exegetes who sought to make their exegesis do more things than
merely explain the Bible.
The final essay in this volume, Fabrizio Lelli's study of Jewish and Christian interpretation of the
figure of Job in fifteenth-century Italy, both brings the comparative study of ancient and medieval
Jewish and Christian exegesis to a kind of conclusion, and opens the way to the new types of
humanistic biblical exegesis that would shortly mark the early modern period. As Lelli shows, both
Jewish and Christian theologian/philosopher exegetes shared a common commitment to revealing the
universal truths of "the pristine traditions," thus making possible for the first time a true collaboration
between Jews and Christians in interpreting the Bible. The collaboration, however, was not solely
philosophical or theological. As Lelli shows, it extended even to the material dimension of the book
where both Jews and Christians collaborating in producing and enjoying a common iconography for
figures like Job (who, as Lelli illustrates, possessed in fact a double iconography).
The material collaboration that Lelli reveals in Jewish-Christian Renaissance circles only intensifies in
the course of the subsequent century. In the printing houses of Venice as well as other European
centers, Jews and Christians continued famously to collaborate in producing the Bible, and that
material collaboration inevitably left its impact upon biblical interpretation, as the evidence of the
rabbinic Bible, the Mikra'ot Gedolot, in both its early sixteenth-century editions, with the increasingly
canonical selection of commentaries, manifestly shows. In this new period, the project of comparative
exegetical study takes on a somewhat different direction, as both Jewish and Christian exegesis face
the assaults of modernity and more critical approaches to the Bible's meaning. Even so, the thrust of
exegesis remains powerfully at work in culture. But that story, as the saying goes, is the subject for
another book. The rest is commentary.

Penn Press | Site Use and Privacy Policy | University of Pennsylvania

Copyright 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.

16-Aug-15 10:50 AM