Table of Contents_ Jewish Biblical Interpretation and Cultural Exchange

8/19/2019 Table of Contents_ Jewish Biblical Interpretation and Cultural Exchange

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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.

Jewish Bibl ical Interpretation and Cultural Exchange

Comparative Exegesis in ContextNatalie B. Dohrmann and David Stern, Editors2008 | 352 pages | Cloth $69.95ReligionView main book page

Table of Contents

Introduction: On Comparative Biblical Exegesis—Interpretation, Influence, Appropriation —David Stern

1. Interpreting Torah Traditions in Psalm 105 —Adele Berlin2. Cain: Son of God or Son of Satan? —Israel Knohl3. 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 Williams5. Ancient Jewish Interpretation of the Song of Songs in a Comparative Context —David Stern6. Patriarchy, Primogeniture and Polemic in the Exegetical Traditions of Judaism and Islam —Reuven Firestone7. 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 Lowry9. Interpreting Scripture in and through Liturgy: Exegesis of Mass Propers in the Middle Ages —Daniel Sheerin10. 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

NotesList of ContributorsIndex

Excerpt [uncorrected, not for citation]

IntroductionOn Comparative Biblical Exegesis—Interpretation, Influence, AppropriationDavid Stern

Over the last thirty years, the study of ancient and medieval Biblical interpretation—Jewish and Christian alike—has 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 beendismissive; at best, it would have acknowledged the historical significance of these texts as putativesources for their authors' lives or theology. Only rarely would an ancient or medieval commentaryhave been treated as genuine exegesis, and even more rarely as possessing an enduring value. As lateas 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 allegoricalinterpretation should be allowed to disguise the distorting effect which these ideas [about exegesis] hasupon [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

of Contents: Jewish Biblical Interpretation and Cultural Exchange http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/toc/14

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appreciated both for their value in elucidating the Bible (with obvious qualifications, of course), and asliterary documents worth reading in their own right. Several reasons lie behind this decisive change. Inthe 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 hasworked to undermine the positivism of historical scholarship, and to justify on philosophical groundssome of the more outlandish or seemingly dated characteristics of pre-modern exegesis (which onoccasion turn out not to be so un- or pre-modern after all). Indeed, as literary theory has increasinglyemerged 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 foundationslay submerged beneath the surface in the vast shoals of the history of ancient and medieval biblicalexegesis. The second major change that has occurred in the field of biblical exegesis has been itsgrowing 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 thetime of Jesus and Paul; and not a mention of Qumran or any later Jewish exegesis. Less than ten yearslater, in 1970, the three-volume The Cambridge History of the Bible —perhaps the first major projectin English to attempt to situate the development of biblical exegesis within the Bible's larger history—gave 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," Vermeshad to cover all ancient Jewish exegesis from Philo to Qumran, the targumim (or Aramaic translationsof 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 Scripture—which has separate chapters by different scholars on Josephus, on Hellenistic Jewishauthors, 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 evenmore impressive are the massive two first volumes of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament (1996/2000), amultivolume series that will eventually cover all of the history of interpretation of the Hebrew Bibleand 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 wellas extensive coverage of early medieval Jewish exegesis from the Geonim through all the variousschools of peshat in both Ashkenaz and Sefarad (with individual chapters devoted to figures likeMoshe Ibn Ezra, Nahmanides, and the Kimhis). Needless to say, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament 'scoverage of Christian exegesis is no less comprehensive.

The two volumes of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament are an impressive indication of the field'smaturation. Yet they also reflect its growing pains, and what remains most problematic about it. For allthe excellence of its many individual chapters, the two volumes as a whole lack what one might call acontrolling 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, thetwo volumes present fragments of a history. This problematic has not escaped the notice of thevolumes' editor, Magne Sæbø. In an epilogue to the first volume, in attempting to sum up the historycovered 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, havemostly been kept apart by the ancient Synagogue and Church—who have moved forward in relativelygreat isolation from one another, with only few signs of combining tracks."

On strictly historical grounds, Sæbø 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 along "double story?" Perhaps it is really two essentially separate stories (which is what the volumesactually seem to present). Or, alternately, is it one story, with both Jewish and Christian scripturalexegesis deriving from a single set of reading practices that first develop in the aftermath of the Bible'scanonization (if not earlier, within the Bible itself, in inner-biblical exegesis) and then diverge onseemingly 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 tomention Islamic) exegesis in tandem? On the other hand, if their subsequent development has so littleto say to each other, what is the point of studying them together? Or to phrase these questions from adifferent vantage point, namely, that of reading practice as it develops and changes historically and indifferent 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 thehistory 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?


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The essays in this volume do not offer definitive answers to these questions, but they address them byexploring intersections between the three exegetical traditions and the problems that study of theseintersections 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 lasthalf-century. Most of the scholarship I will discuss deals with the earlier periods of biblicalinterpretation in Judaism and Christianity in Late Antiquity but its relevance can easily be extended tothe 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 Christianinterpretation 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 ancientscriptural interpretation was the French scholar, Renee Bloch, in a 1955 article entitled "Notemethodologique pour l'etude de la literature rabbinique." Bloch's aim in that article was to demonstratethe importance of rabbinic literature for understanding the Bible and its interpretation in postbiblicaltradition and to set forth a method for pursuing such scholarship. According to Bloch, the major challenge a scholar faces in using rabbinic texts vis-à-vis the Bible—beyond penetrating their inherentobscurity—is dating its various texts and placing them in sequence so as to be able to trace thedevelopment 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 toillustrate 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 evenlate medieval midrashic compilations like Yalkut Shimoni and the Chronicle of Moses, situating eachversion 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 thenineteenth century such studies were among the favored preoccupations for Jewish scholars. Perhapsthe 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 traditionssystematically, and it is here that her importance lies, as well as that of her foremost student, GezaVermes (who, after Bloch's premature death in an airplane crash in the fifties, continued her work innumerous studies that applied and developed her methodology). Their common work remains to thisday 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 interpretationin Late Antiquity through the Middles Ages.

Bloch herself came out of French biblical studies; she was a student of A. Robert who was among thefirst 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 "anedifying and explanatory genre closely tied to Scripture, in which the role of amplification is real butsecondary and always remains subordinate to the primary religious end, which is to show the fullimport of the work of God, the Word of God." For Bloch, as for Vermes, midrash was very much afully-fledged literary genre with a lengthy career in ancient Jewish literature—that is to say, not justthe name for a particular type of scriptural study or exegesis practiced by rabbinic sages in Palestine inthe first five or six centuries in the common era. "Nothing could be more wrong than the idea thatmidrash is a late creation of rabbinic Judaism," she wrote— the key word here being "late." Writing inthe 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 realflowering 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 NewTestament as much as—perhaps even more than—the Old. This was her Bible.

Which is to state, simply, that Bloch and Vermes' method had a not-always-explicit agenda that can beseen best in the historiography of ancient exegesis that the two scholars proposed. Not only were theorigins of the "midrashic tendency" within "the inspired Scripture themselves," Bloch wrote, but theyreached their real culmination and full fruition in the New Testament. "With Paul, especially in the


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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 economy—salvation by faith in Christ, the call of the Gentiles, the rejection by official Judaism—the Apostle, guided bythe 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 "pureexegesis" 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 theworks 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 customsand beliefs, which the interpreter attempted to connect with scripture and to justify." This type wasanticipated in Qumran literature and in the New Testament but it was found most extensively inrabbinic literature. One of the differences between "pure" and "applied" exegesis is that where theformer is closer to what we call exegesis—which derives meaning out of the Biblical text—the 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. Incontrast, 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 comparativeexegesis, but there have been several important changes in scholarly conceptions and assumptionsabout 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 thecase. So too we know that the oral does not always or necessarily precede the written, nor that thewritten phase always or necessarily follows the oral. A tradition can be transmitted orally, thencommitted 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 exclusivelyattributed 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 anindependent 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 tohimself that way). In several books, Kugel has eloquently argued that ancient Israel's greatestcontribution 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) thatwould be remembered in a culture that was essentially memorial, to use Mary Carruthers phrase. Inaddition, Kugel argues, all ancient interpreters of the Bible shared four basic beliefs about the Biblicaltext—first, that it is "fundamentally a cryptic document;" second, that Scripture "constitutes one greatBook 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 interpretations—including all those preserved in the varieties of Second Temple period literature, not to mention rabbinic and earlyChristian exegetical tradition—share a profound common ground.

In making this case, Kugel has been one of the major proponents of the view that ancient biblicalinterpretation should be appreciated as a legitimate mode of reading (once, that is, its assumptions areunderstood) 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 everyancient interpretation derives from a "problem" or "difficulty" in the biblical text, and that "the formalstarting point" of all ancient exegesis "is always Scripture itself." Indeed, Kugel's virtually telepathicability to transport himself into the minds of ancient readers and to look at the text through their eyesmay be the closest that many of us today, Kugel's own readers, will ever come to witnessing howancient Jews (and Christians) read the Bible.


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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 Bible—in the case of the rabbis, for example, the axiomatic conviction that the WrittenTorah and the Oral Torah will always be complimentary and never in contradiction; or for Qumranicreaders, the belief that the Bible is essentially oracular and prognostic and directed to the history of thecommunity itself; or for (at least for some) early Christians, that the meaning of the Old Testamentwill always be in some way christological. Kugel himself is not unaware of these factors, but hisapproach, if only because of its emphasis on the exegetical side, never fully accounts for the extra-textual motivations. It thus inevitably ends up reducing the very real differences that distinguishancient 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 exegeticalcoloration? This problematic, which is actually inherent in all comparative study, becomes only morecomplicated when the tradition is preserved or recorded in a non-exegetical context (like the narrativecontexts so common in Second Temple literature), and still more complicated when there existmultiple versions of a given tradition whose chronological relation is not easily determined (whichwas, as we have seen, a problem that already bothered Bloch). Further, even a reading practice itself isnot necessarily ideology-free. Take, for example, the basic hermeneutical axiom of the Bible's divineorigins. 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 changesin 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 whatwe today call inner-biblical exegesis, that is, interpretive activity within the Bible itself, as the sourcefor all postbiblical exegesis. Nahum Sarna in America and Isaac Seeligman in Israel as well as othersmade early important contributions to understanding this phenomenon. Bloch, however, was amongthe first to integrate evidence of inner-biblical exegesis into studies of postbiblical exegesis, drawingher primary examples from Chronicles which she correctly saw as retellings of the books of Samueland Kings from a particular ideological/theological perspective; she also included texts like Ezekiel 16with its allegory of the history of Israel. For Bloch, these compositions were so important as earlyexamples of exegesis both because they proved that her view of midrash as a meditation upon themeaning 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, themost important recent contributions have been made by Michael Fishbane, for whom inner-biblicalexegesis is less a "meditation upon the Bible's meaning" as it was for Bloch than a cluster of dynamictendencies or habits—for lack of a better term—that underlie the Bible's own process of compositionand that later, after the closing of the Bible and its canonization, resurface in midrash as full-blownexegetical 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 ahistoricaltexts (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 littleto do with a particular text "meditating" upon the meaning of an earlier text. Rather, they are more likeways 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 asexplicit if not formal techniques of interpretation which are self-consciously applied to the explicationand elaboration of the Bible.

Fishbane's view of inner-biblical exegesis is not unproblematic. Whether or not the presence of thesetendencies within the Bible actually constitutes exegesis remains open to question. By definition,exegesis seeks to explain something—a difficulty or complexity—in a primary text; Fishbane's inner- biblical examples rarely elucidate or clarify anything about the passages of old Bible that lie behind


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the new ones even if they help to compose the latter. Yet even if the tendencies he has identified aremore 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 thegezerah shavah (verbal analogy) which have traditionally been invoked as the logic behind midrashand the primary mechanics of its exegesis.

The connection between inner-biblical exegesis and rabbinic midrash is, for Fishbane, intrinsic—asintrinsic 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-Romanrhetoric 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 nativetraditions of interpretation." Rather, the Hebrew Bible itself is "the product of an interpretativetradition," 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 SaulLieberman 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 tothe twelfth century when the Karaite Judah Hadassi first broached the connection in order to disparageand delegitimate midrash as a form of alien wisdom that had contaminated native Israelite biblicaltradition. In the nineteenth century, however, the link between rabbinic interpretation and Greco-Roman sources was revived as a productive explanation for the peculiarities of rabbinicexegesis, 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, unlikeearlier 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, drawnfrom a fund of interpretive techniques that derived from rudimentary legal and literary hermeneutics aswell as from still more ancient traditions of dream interpretation that were common to nearly everyculture 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 borrowingwas not merely nominal. If nothing else, it showed that rabbinic biblical exegesis did not take place ina historical vacuum—that 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 thatculture. 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 alarger Late Antique, Greco-Roman phenomenon. Even if the rabbis borrowed only the technicalterminology of exegesis, this was because they must have realized that these exegetical forms wereunprecedented in their native tradition; as a result, they had to consult Greco-Roman culture for whatto call these new things. Historians do not generally deal with counterfactuals, but I strongly suspectthat Lieberman, as a scholar of ancient Judaism, would have found the idea of midrash inconceivableoutside 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 complimentary—the one, the inner- biblical tendencies, explaining the dynamics underlying midrash; the other, the impact of

Greco-Roman exegesis, explaining why these tendencies suddenly change from being mainlycompositional 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 anauthentically 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 theologicalrivalry between Judaism and Christianity but rather, it seems, a reenactment of the even more ancientstruggle between Hellenism and Hebraism. In fact, the polemic touches upon an even morefundamental debate about the nature of change in Jewish tradition. Are new developments (like theemergence 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


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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 anincreasingly prominent role, particularly in recent attempts to connect literary theory and classicalJewish exegesis.

The impact of theory upon the study of ancient exegesis—Jewish and Christian alike—has beenconsiderable. For one thing, it has given scholars the lens through which to look at exegesis asliterature 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 seeexegetical 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 likeintertextuality that have illuminated the workings of ancient exegesis along with the semiotic tools toconnect 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 medievalexegesis actually began, somewhat paradoxically, with midrash, and this new fascination waslegitimated, 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 poststructuralisttheory itself. This identification, in turn, quickly extended into the positing of an antinomy betweenmidrash and allegory, with the latter representing the hermeneutic of the reigning so-called Greco-Christian logocentrism that heretofore had dominated Western thought and was now about to bedislodged. The opposition between the two went as following: In allegory, meaning was seen as anabstraction 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), lessconcerned 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 specter—the 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 anarena 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 ancientexegesis over the last two decades has taught us anything, it is the lesson that interpretation isinevitably 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 evenmore pronounced in the case of medieval Jewish biblical interpretation where, until now, mostscholarship 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 powerfullyindividualist personalities, each with his own unmistakable voice and identifiable way of reading. Butrather 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 needs—the words of the text itself, the imputed meanings of tradition, other contemporaryinterpretations, polemical intents, ideological desires, and so on. To be sure, each negotiation has itsown 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 multipledeterminants and factors that went into making an interpretation rather than to set up differentinterpretations as rivals or competitors.

In this world of exegetical negotiations, every interpretation is also a not-another-intepretation.


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Although it is not always possible for us to know what the exegetical alternative was, it is safe toassume that, as far back as we can go, every exegesis was an additional interpretation—a davar aher ,"another opinion," as the rabbis said—or a refusal of an existing exegesis. This is to say that there willalways be an inherently and unavoidable polemical dimension of some sort to exegesis. In mostcomparative 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 ascertainableinfluence with one tradition of exegesis "subject" to another. In the former case, one interpretationwars 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 former—the interpretation under-the-influence—is dependent, secondary, and belated. Inevitably, these characterizations have extended in scholarship to apply to the religioustraditions from which the exegeses stem. Thus, Judaism and Christianity have vied for the laurel-wreathe of originality and struggled to be proclaimed the source of influence upon the other. Islam, inturn, 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 criticalcategory. As cultural theorists have noted, influence invariably implies an imbalance of power, and asPeter Schaefer has recently reminded us, Western notions of influence are equally determined bycategories of cause and effect which go back to antiquity. Citing the pseudo-Aristotleian Liber decausis, Schaefer summarizes its hierarchy as "the higher a cause, the greater the influence it exerts onits effect." The implied metaphysics of this formulation helps to explain the power that "influence" hasexerted in literary studies, not to mention comparative exegesis scholarship, and it also indicates thedegree 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 bythe active, all-powerful source.

If one views the act of interpretation as a negotiation, however, it is possible to flip the perspective, asit 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, thecultural exchange will appear not as a process of influence but as one of appropriation in which he, theless powerful party, nonetheless exercises what power he has and appropriates—literally "makes hisown"—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, bymaking it his own, transforms the new possession. It is that transformed exegesis that now appears as anew exegesis. Further, the agent of appropriation is a human agent. Particularly in the case of earlyJewish interpretation from its beginnings through the rabbinic period, because it is nearly all ananonymous 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 exegeteswere individuals and not religious traditions or literary texts. By restoring human agency to theequation, appropriation allows us to see interpretation as a genuine work of culture that will always begreater than simply being one exegetical tradition or approach.

In selecting and editing the essays for this volume, my coeditor Natalie Dohrmann and myself haveintentionally sought to highlight papers that have chosen to address the appropriative side of exegesisin the ancient and medieval worlds by using the comparative context to explore the different ways inwhich exegesis can be understood only by understanding one interpretation and its tradition in thecontext 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 participants—visiting fellows in thefields of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic exegesis—constituted a group that was itself a weekly exercisein 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 isacknowledged 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 itup" in this way, by mingling exegetes and separate traditions, the reader will also be encouraged to seehis or her own connections between the individual essays and their subjects—moments of comparativerelevance 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 connectionthat the reader may wish to explore.


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The first two essays in the volume—by Adele Berlin and Israel Knohl—begin, appropriately enough,with biblical exegesis within the Bible and in early postbiblical literature. The common effect of theessays, 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/exegeteappropriated earlier Israelite traditions. Rather than viewing the Psalm as historical in genre, asconstituting 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, are-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 theBible, as well as with the compositional force of interpretive elements in postbiblical literature. Intracing the lineage of the dual views of Cain as Son of God and as Son of Satan, Knohl offers aspeculative reconstruction of the text of the genealogies in Genesis 4 that provides a prehistory for thetwo traditions which, as he shows, resurface in Second Temple literature and early Christian exegesisonly 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, inKnohl's reconstruction, demonstrates how the two religious traditions became parallel conduits intransmitting tradition, and simultaneously pushes the inner-biblical exegetical moment back stillfurther, 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 lateantique period and into the sphere of formal biblical exegesis in both rabbinic Jewish and earlyChristian tradition. As each essay demonstrates, biblical interpretation can do much more than justexegesis. In her study of rabbinic interpretation of the biblical laws of slavery, Natalie Dohrmannshows how the rabbis not only reinterpret the biblical injunctions but also their larger culturalexperience under Roman imperial rule by appropriating Roman views of slavery in order to define, viaexegesis, 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 upDohrmann's argument about exegesis as cultural work and carries it into the early Christian realm. Inthis 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-à-vis other Christians as well as towards contemporary pagans. As Williams shows, Jerome proudly appropriated Jewish exegesis precisely in order to represent—or misrepresent—it for his own rhetorical ends.Through his translations and commentaries iuxta Hebraeos, he sought "to take the place of the Jewishteachers from whom he had learned so much"—an almost perfect example of cultural appropriationthat seeks literally to eliminate its source

In my own essay, I study ancient Jewish interpretation of the Song of Songs from a doublecomparative perspective—both within rabbinic Judaism by comparing midrashic and esotericintepretations, and in relation to early Christian exegesis of the Song. In both cases, I try to shift thefocus of scholarly attention from hermeneutics to reading practice arguing that, in all three cases, thesame allegorical reading is simply used differently; while the different interpretations have differentcontents, they share the same structure including—in the case of the rabbinic and early Christianinterpretations—a conception of the Song itself as a struggle over being God's true love vis-à-vis theother 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 Islamgenerally has struggled most with the burden of influence because it is the latest of the three. As hedemonstrates 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 wellas the mutual competition the two faiths felt towards each other, and which produced parallelinterpretive approaches.

The next essay, Daniel Frank's study of Karaite halakhic (legal) exegesis, directly confronts what iscertainly the most polemically charged exegesis in all medieval Jewish interpretation; even so, asFranks 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 permissibilityof chicken), Frank shows in effect how a Karaite "tradition"—independent of the Bible yet with legalauthority—came into existence through an accommodation with Rabbinite practice yet withoutcompromising Karaite exegetical principles. This tradition, identified by Karaite legislators withconsensus, allowed them to eat chicken yet did not diminish the Karaite ability to tolerateindeterminacy in the Bible in a way that their Rabbanite contemporaries could not.


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The final essay in this group, Joseph Lowry's study of how traditions attributed to the prophetMuhammad 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 interpretationof the word hikma and its identification with sunna, which he explores through every conceivablevenue, including the possibility of rabbinic influence on the interpretation. While Lowry is properlycautious about the speculative nature of this suggestion, he nonetheless demonstrates a powerfulstructural parallel in the two traditions in respect to their creation of an extrabiblical body of traditionwith 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. Thefirst of these, Sara Japhet's study of Rashbam's commentary on the Song of Songs, addresses thequestion: 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 tothose of Rashi and Abraham Ibn Ezra—that is, through comparative study—and thereby defines theuniqueness of his reading, which sees the Song not merely as a love poem (its "literal" meaning), butas 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 inthe Middle Ages by studying the use of Scripture in the Christian liturgy, specifically in the MassProper, where scriptural excerpts were combined montage-like with liturgical passages to create whatwere essentially new quasi-scriptural compositions. As Sheerin points out, the liturgy was the mediumthrough which Scripture was in fact known by most medieval laypersons; if so, he asks, what does thistell us about knowledge of Scripture and its interpretation? Using the comparative method in anoriginal fashion, Sheerin shows how the methods and procedures of scriptural exegesis were applied tothe Mass proper in order to prove its coherence, meaningfulness, and timeliness. In doing this, heshows how comparative exegesis extends beyond even the formal purview of Scripture both as amedium 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 theBible 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, Georgesought to provide biblical proofs of Christianity for a Christian audience, and in doing so, drew upon avenerable tradition of anti-Jewish polemic, but he also insisted that the Christian sense of Scripture layin the proper understanding of the Bible's literal sense. By reframing Nicholas of Lyra's presentationof Rashi's quasi-literalist commentary in a more polemical vein, George's corpus is a brilliant exampleof the inadequacy of purely hermeneutical terms like peshat or the literal meaning to capture theuniqueness 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 thefigure of Job in fifteenth-century Italy, both brings the comparative study of ancient and medievalJewish 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, bothJewish and Christian theologian/philosopher exegetes shared a common commitment to revealing theuniversal 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 Europeancenters, Jews and Christians continued famously to collaborate in producing the Bible, and thatmaterial collaboration inevitably left its impact upon biblical interpretation, as the evidence of therabbinic Bible, the Mikra'ot Gedolot , in both its early sixteenth-century editions, with the increasinglycanonical selection of commentaries, manifestly shows. In this new period, the project of comparativeexegetical study takes on a somewhat different direction, as both Jewish and Christian exegesis facethe 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.

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Table of Contents_ Jewish Biblical Interpretation and Cultural Exchange