Jewish texts I

My Bible group have been reading Song of Songs this term. It's run mostly as an academic-style reading group, we look at the text, and sometimes the chaplain brings some scholarly commentary, mostly from Cheryl Exum, and we discuss what we think about it. We got to the end of the book (it's only eight quite short chapters) and I suggested we could use the last session to read SoS as a Jewish text, if the group were keen, which they were.

So today I taught a bunch of midrashic material related to Song of Songs, to a group of people who don't have a very clear idea what midrash is, and haven't heard of the Talmud. I had a lot of fun preparing the quasi-shiur, and I think it went pretty well. So I'll put it up here in case anyone is interested.

( reading Song of Songs Jewishly )

Right, it's bedtime so I'll break there. The rest of the session we discussed some examples of midrashic texts on Song of Songs. I'm generally quite proud of how well it worked, especially for a group with no prior knowledge at all of Jewish text study.