Rabbinic Midrash Research Articles

Midrasj in, en, op de bijbel? Kritische kanttekeningen bij het onkritische gebruik van een term

Although the attention paid to rabbinic literature in recent biblical scholarship is laudable, some criticism on the way the term ‘midrash’ is used, is required. It tends to become a fashionable word that has lost all specific meaning. The main reason for this is the scarce experience of biblical scholars with detailed study of rabbinic texts. In this paper, two solutions for this problem are offered. Firstly, exegetes should depart from the factual study of rabbinic midrash, and only on the basis of the characteristics found there, turn to the biblical text; further, they should realize that ‘midrash’ is a very specific form of rabbinic dealing with Scripture, and therefore a 'stretched' use of the term is more often than not inaccurate. To illustrate this subject, some studies in the field of biblical exegesis have been examined.

History and Martyrological Tragedy: The Jewish Experience in Sholem Asch and Andre Schwarz-Bart

In Isaiah 43:11-12, God, after instructing His servant, Israel, that beside Me there is no saviour, imposes the awesome obligation: Therefore ye are my witnesses . . . that am God. A rabbinic midrash or exegesis offers this meaning: When you are my am God, and when you are not my am, as it were, not God.(1) The biblical text and response embody the potentially tragic crisis for both individual and community who may be called upon to the [of God]--Kiddush haShem--by suffering martyrdom, the act of witnessing whose imperative is declared in Lev. 22:32: Neither shall ye profane my Holy Name, but will be hallowed among the children of Israel: am the Lord which hallow you. While the act of Kiddush haShem affirms God's spiritual sovereignty, there also seems little doubt that a major consequence of martyrdom bears directly upon the necessity of witnessing God's salvational history grounded in and shaped by the Covenant, exile, testing, suffering, faith, sin and punishment, expiation and messianic hopes of redemption. God's divine primacy, as the biblical narratives (Exodus, above all) and their commentaries attest, is manifested in His power as a Lord of history. Thus, when the crisis of whether or not to the Name appears in times of persecution and ideological strife, the very meaning of history itself is placed in theological jeopardy. When you are not my witnesses, the midrash insists, I am, as it were, not God. To remove God from history is, then, a desecration of the Name--Hillul haShem--perhaps the most shattering violation of all. For while the failure to witness cannot affect the ontological nature of God or thwart His providential design, it can, for those seeking order and purpose in the apparent chaos of history, either destroy it or render it so problematic that what remains is a form of existential despair. And yet the grand irony is that there is also an inherent tragic knowledge in the reality that countless individuals have witnessed with their lives to the honor of God and the integrity of His revealing historical plan. The putative martyr is nevertheless faced with a tragic dilemma: if the individual fails to witness, God and divine history are betrayed; but to pass the test of sacrifice and to sanctify God's presence in the historical moment means death. As Max Weber has termed it, martyrdom is the of absolute ends.(2) Moreover, it is an ethic fraught with a genuine tragic content which has been thematically exploited by both secular and religious writers, most markedly from the seventeenth century to the present.(3) This ethic energizes the very form of martyrological drama and other genres whose appearance and popularity in Judeo-Christian culture characterize the response of the artist to those historical and ideological clashes which rarely admit of a reconciliation or solution except through death. Most significantly, martyrological tragedy in particular becomes a theological commentary on both the tragic and redemptive nature of history itself. Conceived as either an irony-laden providential order or a random process upon which meaning must be subjectively conferred, history inevitably creates those situations which demand the need for a total commitment to some abiding or absolute truth. Martyrdom is thus a fated condition of the historical process. The testimony incarnated in the martyr's death is the tragic ground of this process. From this perspective, individual artistic statements about the nature of God, martyrdom, and history independent of any formal dogma, may be fairly--if loosely--called literary theologoumena or, in generic terms, the trauerspiel (mourning-tragedy), whose influence on the development of a non-Aristotelian esthetic of tragedy Walter Benjamin seminally analyzed in 1928. A central tenet of Benjamin's study is that the royal martyr-tyrant tragedies of seventeenth-century German baroque drama embody the shift from the classical mythos of heroic sacrifice to the realm of history. …

"And You Shall Tell Your Son..." The Concept of the Exodus in the Bible (review)

Hebrew Studies 35 (1994) 238 Reviews "AND YOU SHALL TELL YOUR SON•••" THE CONCEPT OF THE EXODUS IN THE BIBLE. By Yair Zakovitch. Pp. 144. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1991. Cloth, $10.00. Yair Zakovitch is a professor of Bible at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has published a number of books and articles on inner-biblical and post-biblical Jewish interpretation of the Bible. In this study he traces the influence of the Exodus tradition on the literary and conceptual shaping of biblical historiography. He shows that the Exodus theme affected the recounting of events both before and after it. It is for the most part a wellproduced book, but unfortunately a number of lines are missing at the bottom of p. 83 and the top of p. 84. The author's most important interpretive argument, presented in the third and last chapter, is that the Exodus myth was created to "encourage the Israelites to accept the revolution of monotheism and to believe that they make up an exceptional creation completely different from the nations surrounding them..." (p. 133). Because the ancestors of the Israelites were actually Canaanites, it was all the more important to reinforce and intensify the Exodus myth in order to inculcate a strong sense of separate identity. Focusing on this theme of the people dwelling apart (Num 23:9), which is centered in the Exodus story, Zakovitch shows how it informs much of the biblical corpus. It functions in Genesis to explain why the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt: the enslavement was a "measure for measure" punishment for the sins of the ancestors. Abraham left Canaan for Egypt and abandoned Sarah to spare his own life; Sarah and Abraham mistreated the Egyptian Hagar and her son Ishmael; Joseph's brothers cast him into a pit and sold him to traders traveling to Egypt; and Joseph enslaved Egyptians and showed favor to his own brothers. In "The Many Covert Faces of the Exodus Pattern," chap. 2 of the book, the author demonstrates a "W" pattern from Genesis through 2 Kings. That is, crises and journeys form a geographical schema that can be drawn as a W: Haran Canaan Egypt Haran Canaan Canaan Egypt Mesopotamia Canaan Zakovitch makes a case that various biblical stories, ranging from the wifesister tale in Genesis to Esther, have been cloaked in the Exodus pattern. Especially noteworthy is his lengthy discussion of the shadow that Moses Hebrew Studies 35 (1994) 239 Reviews casts over other biblical figures such as Joshua, Gideon, David, Jeroboam, Elijah, and Elisha. He maintains that some features of the original Moses traditions were blurred but their echoes may be found in other figures, for example, Jeroboam as king and priest supervising the worship of the bull calves (Exodus 32/1 Kings 12) and the ascent of Elijah (Deuteronomy 34/ 2 Kings 2). On the whole, this is a very instructive work, whose appeal is all the greater for the author's extensive citation of rabbinic midrash. His literary and hermeneutical delineation of the Exodus myth would mesh well with Norman Gottwald's historical-sociological hypothesis that Israel began as an indigenous revolution of Canaanite peasants against their overlords. There is much good material here for exegesis and hermeneutic reflection . At times, however, I wonder whether the use of the overarching Exodus pattern is overstated. For example, the wife-sister tale in Gen 12:10-20 and its similarity of structure to the Esther story: may this be an example of a convention that was widely employed rather than the influence of the Exodus tradition as such? (See R. Alter, The Art ofBiblical Narrative [New York: Basic Books. 1981] and J. Williams. Women Recounted [Sheffield: Almond, 1982]). Likewise the book of Ruth, which Zakovitch describes as "an Exodus-like story" (p. 82), could be considered a variation on the betrothal convention in stories of Abraham's servant and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel, and Moses and the seven daughters of Midian. (Again, see Alter and Williams.) My own view of these conventions is that they are adaptations of a common stock of mythic-literary motifs which have been transformed in the Israelite setting by a generative structure operating at the...

Reading the Book: Making the Bible a Timeless Text (review)

Hebrew Studies 34 (1993) 216 Reviews READING THE BOOK: MAKING THE BIBLE A TIMELESS TEXT. By Burton L. Visotzky. Pp. 240. New York: Anchor BookslDoubleday, 1991. Paper, $12.00. The goal of this stimulating volume is to introduce laymen to the excitement of active biblical study. The strategy is to explore a number of Pentateuchal texts through the lens of rabbinic midrash, though analogous and roughly contemporaneous Christian, Samaritan, and Muslim materials are brought to bear on rare occasion. Among the topics considered are Abraham and Sarah at Pharaoh's court; Abraham's descent into the fiery furnace; the binding of Isaac; incidents in the life of Jacob; Moses's recovery of Joseph's bones; the death of Moses; Miriam and Aaron's grumbling about Moses's marriage to the Cushite women; the death of Nadav and Avihu; the creation of Adam and Eve; and the creation of the world. There does not seem to be any compelling logic to the order in which the topics are discussed, and the transitions within the chapters are sometimes abrupt. In addition to the textual explications, there are also introductory chapters on the nature and assumptions of rabbinic interpretation and a similar concluding chapter focused on how to generate new interpretations and insights today. Professor Visotzky writes in a breezy, conversational tone that makes the reading go fast and easily, and he spices his discussion with abundant witticisms. At times these work well, as when he cites a midrash in which frogs bite the Egyptians on the derriere in order to show that the rabbis "believed that justice was duly requited in the end" (p. 126). On other occasions, however, the attempt at colloquialism is so precious as to be counterproductive. For example, Abraham asks his guests, "Who gave you deli in the desert?" (p. 73), and the rabbinic exegetes are said to have held that "Israel's offspring ain't bums" (p. 120). Visotzky seems to be so eager not to sound like a stuffy clergyman that he errs on the other side, resembling a Borsht Belt comedian pulling out all the stops to win the favor of a skeptical audience, or a teacher underestimating his class's intelligence, thus insulting when he intends to set at ease. In any event, flippancy toward scripture is hardly the great cultural need of the moment, especially among the class likely to make use of this book. The specific textual studies are always learned and often illuminating as well. Professional scholars will, however, regret the omission of references by which to locate the passages studied, and they will also note a number of Hebrew Studies 34 (1993) 217 Reviews careless misstatements. It can be doubted, f

In Potiphar's house: the interpretive life of biblical texts

In this study of early biblical interpretation, James Kugel examines a series of exegetical stories that elaborate on the Joseph narrative in Genesis. These stories - which appear in such diverse sources as rabbinic midrash, early Christian writings, liturgical poetry, and the Qur'an - often contain details of whole incidents not found in the Bible itself. In tracing the development and function of these tales, Kugel reveals a dynamic interpretive process: the living, changing significance of texts through generations of discussion, analysis and application.

Gary G. PORTON, Understanding Rabbinic Midrash. Texts and Commentary (The Library of Judaic Learning. Volume V. Edited by Jacob Neusner), Ktav Publishing House, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey 1985. XXIV and 232 pp., paper, $ 11.95

Gary G. PORTON, Understanding Rabbinic Midrash. Texts and Commentary (The Library of Judaic Learning. Volume V. Edited by Jacob Neusner), Ktav Publishing House, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey 1985. XXIV and 232 pp., paper, $ 11.95

Mythologies of Nuclear War

Mythologies of Nuclear War Get access Ira Chernus Ira Chernus Ira Chernus (Ph D, Temple) is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder He is the author of Mysticism in Rabbinic Judaism (Berlin Walter de Gruyter, 1982) and articles on the history of Rabbinic midrash which have appeared in various journals This article was read as a paper before the Religious Social Ethics Group at the 1981 annual meeting of the AAR in San Francisco Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume L, Issue 2, June 1982, Pages 255–274, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/L.2.255 Published: 01 June 1982

“A Wall of Fire round about”: The Development of a Theme in Rabbinic Midrash

“A Wall of Fire round about”: The Development of a Theme in Rabbinic Midrash