Jewish texts II: Midrash

[Continued from Part I, since several people found my previous post interesting]

So having established the idea of midrash, I gave some examples. Most of what follows is referring to this source sheet. ( shiur summary )

So yes, that was fun. It's not at all the standard way that people do Jewish text in interfaith settings, but I think it worked really well, by connecting the whistlestop tour of midrash to the Bible we'd just been reading.

As an aside, andrewducker linked to Jo Walton's review of the Bible as if it were a generic work of fiction rather than a holy text, which is very clever; Walton is a brilliant reviewer. Happening to see that when I was preparing the Jewish texts session, I sort of wanted to jump in to the discussion and point out a couple of bits where she's speculating about how Jews read the Bible and missing key pieces of the picture. Like Why didn't they start a religion where there are necessarily four contradictory versions of everything? Why wasn't that a standard of truth? That would have been really neat. Well, that's exactly what Judaism is, we have explicit Talmudic authority to read everything with four different layers of interpretations, and it's meritorious to find 49 different explanations for every scrap of text. But particularly, when she wonders: The discussions on what to put in, what was canonical for the Jewish bible must have been epic. I only know about the Christian arguments, and they pretty much took these as accepted. I expect it's too early for there to be good records the way there are for Church councils. But I expect there was a lot of debate on this one. And I just happened to be working on Yadayim right then, the Jewish discussions on what is canonical totally are available, and yes we did argue about Ecclesiastes. She just assumes it's all lost in the mists of time!