Jewish texts II: Midrash
Nov. 29th, 2018 11:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liv[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. Starting with the Mishnah from Avodah Zarah where the rabbis suddenly change the subject from talking about what kinds of cheese are kosher to debating the grammar of the opening verse of Song of Songs. So suddenly that the Mishnah remarks on it specifically, when normally sudden swerves in topic are par for the course.
I used the Mishnah as quoted in the Gemara, because I wanted Steinsaltz' explanatory translation; the straight Mishnah is very hard for non-Jews and non-Hebrew speakers to understand. This is somewhere on the edge between Remes and Drash; it's making a fairly direct inference from the text. The point here is that the vowels are a later edition; without vowels, "singular-your plural thing" is ambiguous as to whether the owner is masculine or feminine. It's important to know whether the person being addressed is male or female, because SoS doesn't clearly specify who the speaker is at any given moment and tends to switch rapidly between the male and female lovers. Or there's a fairly traditional read that it's a love triangle, there's one woman who is torn between a king, maybe Solomon, and a shepherd. The first verse of SoS switches from third person:
Then I really wanted to teach something from Shir haShirim Rabbah, the collection of midrash that's directly related to SoS. (The Rabbah collections are arranged according to books of the Bible.) However I couldn't readily find an English text, but luckily someone had made a Sefaria source sheet quoting Boyarin quoting Shir haShirim Rabbah. The source is slightly unhelpfully titled "Midrash: Imagery", and I haven't sufficiently got my head round the Sefaria interface to work out whether I can change titles for sources pulled from other people's sheets.
This is a midrash on SoS 2:14: O my dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the covert of the cliff, let me see your face, let me hear your voice; for your voice is sweet, and your face is lovely. A fairly typical example of midrash aggadah, the type of midrash where some verse from the Bible is expanded as the basis for a story or parable. The main alternative is midrash halacha, where a law from Torah is expounded to give enough detail to form a somewhat practical observance, using many of the same techniques. And there's also lives of the Rabbis type midrash, which is a subset of midrash aggadah but isn't directly derived from the Biblical text.
Is this similar to the parables in the Christian Bible / New Testament? I would argue that Jesus is at least somewhat in a related literary tradition. Parables, known as mashal in Hebrew, aren't the only kind of midrash aggadah, but they do come up quite a lot, and this is in the form of a mashal where Israel trapped between Pharaoh's pursuing army and the red sea is compared to a dove trapped between a pursuing hawk and a snake in a cleft rock. The midrash is doing several things here. It's explaining SoS, with the assumption that the book is an allegory for the relationship between God and Israel. And it's also explaining Exodus, using an image from nature to explain the otherwise difficult to imagine situation of Israel escaping from Egypt. It seems a little strange that the rather pacific image of a sweet-voiced dove in a cleft rock is used to represent Israel in terrible danger. But the key connection, the hinge, if you like, is between
There's other discussion in midrashic texts about whether the dove in the cleft is analogous to Israel at Mt Sinai, or Israel at the Red Sea. A natural assumption might be that the rock of the SoS is analogous to the mountain, but no, the cleft in SoS is analogous to the cleaving of the sea. One of my Christian learners was reminded of the hymn Rock of ages; I hadn't known this, but apparently it was written about a specific cleft rock, in Somerset, where the author sheltered from a storm.
Here we're getting into slightly more difficult territory when it comes to midrash. I was asked, do we care about authorial intent? I said, no, not really, because the whole rabbinic literature assumes that the "author" is God. God wrote Song of Songs, either directly or via a prophetic vision revealed to Solomon, with the intent, as it were, that Jewish thinkers would interpret it in a midrashic way. The story of the four rabbis going into the Pardes-Orchard is a marker which tells us we can understand texts using midrash, we don't have to stick to inferences about what a human author would be likely to mean according to a common understanding of language.
For comparison, I brought in Rashi on the same verse. Rashi, in 11th century France, was the major Mediaeval commentator on both the Bible and the Talmud. His commentaries generally summarize various midrashic traditions, and he also attempts to explain the detailed linguistic basis for some of the interpretations. His philology, being a millennium out of date, is sometimes not up to modern scientific standards, but he's always aiming for a real etymological explanation. He sometimes resorts to translating a Hebrew or Aramaic word into French, and is a key source for modern scholars of Mediaeval French vocab. The other thing that's important about Rashi is that his commentary has been included with most editions of both Bible and Talmud at least from the start of the print era if not before, up to the 20th century. So for most traditional Jews reading scripture, they're always taking Rashi's interpretation and Rashi's midrashic positions as the baseline.
I couldn't find an English language version of this particular section of Rashi's commentary on Tanach on Sefaria, so I used the version from Chabad.org (scroll down to v14). Rashi starts off repeating a variant of the midrash we've just looked at in Shir haShirim Rabbah. I didn't at this stage go through the exact variations in detail, just showed an example of how Rashi summarizes / paraphrases the midrashic tradition, which indeed he may have from more than one source. He then goes on to explain the somewhat obscure vocabulary in the SoS verse. He's justifying the connection between a sheltering cleft and the peril of the Red Sea, by comparing a word which he thinks might be a somewhat irregular plural of the word for dread. He also follows the standard midrashic technique of assuming that when something is described by a doubled phrase,
At this point we are somewhat incredulous at the sheer volume of Rashi! Did he really write multiple paragraphs of explanation for every single verse of the entire Bible, plus similar ratio for Talmud? Yes, yes, Rashi was exactly that prolific. An edition of a single book of the Bible, with its Rashi and a few additional commentators is about the size of this whole Bible in English (we've been working from an edition of the NRSV which includes the OT, the apocrypha, and the NT in fairly small print). He had help from his three daughters and his three sons-in-law, but basically, yeah.
Having shown people a typical-ish midrash, plus given a condensed history of how Jewish text works and the roles of Talmud, midrash, and Rishonic (early but post-Talmudic teachers) commentary, I wanted to teach the midrash about why the Song of Songs is relevant to Passover. Rashi has a version of this, and the edition on Sefaria helpfully links to a probable source in Midrash Tanchuma. I felt like both were needed to make the connection between the bronze laver, the mirrors, and women's seduction of the men during the period of slavery clear. But actually we really only had time to discuss Rashi's version. At first reading, people were saying, this is a midrash about Exodus, what does Song of Songs have to do with it? I said, the connection to SoS is important, because it's refuting the idea that mirrors and femininity are about vanity and frivolous stuff. Femininity and sexuality are important and holy and part of the redemption from Egypt, as well as part of the structure of the Tabernacle itself, just as the highly erotic poetry in SoS is holy enough to be in the Bible, and indeed R' Akiva compares it to the Holy of Holies, the central part of the Temple where the High Priest directly encounters God. One of the learners said, aha, it's like the story of Mary Magdalene anointing Jesus' feet, and people complaining that she's frivolous and overly sexual, but the Gospels condone her actions as part of the right way to do religion. I do think there's some similarity of theme there.
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
So having established the idea of midrash, I gave some examples. Most of what follows is referring to this source sheet. Starting with the Mishnah from Avodah Zarah where the rabbis suddenly change the subject from talking about what kinds of cheese are kosher to debating the grammar of the opening verse of Song of Songs. So suddenly that the Mishnah remarks on it specifically, when normally sudden swerves in topic are par for the course.
I used the Mishnah as quoted in the Gemara, because I wanted Steinsaltz' explanatory translation; the straight Mishnah is very hard for non-Jews and non-Hebrew speakers to understand. This is somewhere on the edge between Remes and Drash; it's making a fairly direct inference from the text. The point here is that the vowels are a later edition; without vowels, "singular-your plural thing" is ambiguous as to whether the owner is masculine or feminine. It's important to know whether the person being addressed is male or female, because SoS doesn't clearly specify who the speaker is at any given moment and tends to switch rapidly between the male and female lovers. Or there's a fairly traditional read that it's a love triangle, there's one woman who is torn between a king, maybe Solomon, and a shepherd. The first verse of SoS switches from third person:
Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!to second person mid-verse:
For your love is better than wine, so it's plausible that it's also switching speakers mid-verse. But the Mishnah argues that the immediately following verse is unambiguously masculine, so the whole of this opening section is in the voice of a woman talking about a man. Steinsaltz points out that this is also important on an allegorical level, because the masculine character usually represents God and the feminine character the people of Israel. (Not always, sometimes SoS is allegorized as a love story between masculine Israel and the feminine Torah.) My learners felt comfortable with this debate because they said, it's similar to some of the discussions we've had looking at the text.
Then I really wanted to teach something from Shir haShirim Rabbah, the collection of midrash that's directly related to SoS. (The Rabbah collections are arranged according to books of the Bible.) However I couldn't readily find an English text, but luckily someone had made a Sefaria source sheet quoting Boyarin quoting Shir haShirim Rabbah. The source is slightly unhelpfully titled "Midrash: Imagery", and I haven't sufficiently got my head round the Sefaria interface to work out whether I can change titles for sources pulled from other people's sheets.
This is a midrash on SoS 2:14: O my dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the covert of the cliff, let me see your face, let me hear your voice; for your voice is sweet, and your face is lovely. A fairly typical example of midrash aggadah, the type of midrash where some verse from the Bible is expanded as the basis for a story or parable. The main alternative is midrash halacha, where a law from Torah is expounded to give enough detail to form a somewhat practical observance, using many of the same techniques. And there's also lives of the Rabbis type midrash, which is a subset of midrash aggadah but isn't directly derived from the Biblical text.
Is this similar to the parables in the Christian Bible / New Testament? I would argue that Jesus is at least somewhat in a related literary tradition. Parables, known as mashal in Hebrew, aren't the only kind of midrash aggadah, but they do come up quite a lot, and this is in the form of a mashal where Israel trapped between Pharaoh's pursuing army and the red sea is compared to a dove trapped between a pursuing hawk and a snake in a cleft rock. The midrash is doing several things here. It's explaining SoS, with the assumption that the book is an allegory for the relationship between God and Israel. And it's also explaining Exodus, using an image from nature to explain the otherwise difficult to imagine situation of Israel escaping from Egypt. It seems a little strange that the rather pacific image of a sweet-voiced dove in a cleft rock is used to represent Israel in terrible danger. But the key connection, the hinge, if you like, is between
Your voice is lovelyand
the children of Israel cried out unto GOD. In SoS the male lover finds his female beloved's voice lovely, and in the allegory, God finds Israel's prayers lovely. So we're not so much reimagining SoS as a text about peril and drama, we're reimagining Exodus as a tender expression of love even though on the surface it seems to be about rescuing from peril.
There's other discussion in midrashic texts about whether the dove in the cleft is analogous to Israel at Mt Sinai, or Israel at the Red Sea. A natural assumption might be that the rock of the SoS is analogous to the mountain, but no, the cleft in SoS is analogous to the cleaving of the sea. One of my Christian learners was reminded of the hymn Rock of ages; I hadn't known this, but apparently it was written about a specific cleft rock, in Somerset, where the author sheltered from a storm.
Here we're getting into slightly more difficult territory when it comes to midrash. I was asked, do we care about authorial intent? I said, no, not really, because the whole rabbinic literature assumes that the "author" is God. God wrote Song of Songs, either directly or via a prophetic vision revealed to Solomon, with the intent, as it were, that Jewish thinkers would interpret it in a midrashic way. The story of the four rabbis going into the Pardes-Orchard is a marker which tells us we can understand texts using midrash, we don't have to stick to inferences about what a human author would be likely to mean according to a common understanding of language.
For comparison, I brought in Rashi on the same verse. Rashi, in 11th century France, was the major Mediaeval commentator on both the Bible and the Talmud. His commentaries generally summarize various midrashic traditions, and he also attempts to explain the detailed linguistic basis for some of the interpretations. His philology, being a millennium out of date, is sometimes not up to modern scientific standards, but he's always aiming for a real etymological explanation. He sometimes resorts to translating a Hebrew or Aramaic word into French, and is a key source for modern scholars of Mediaeval French vocab. The other thing that's important about Rashi is that his commentary has been included with most editions of both Bible and Talmud at least from the start of the print era if not before, up to the 20th century. So for most traditional Jews reading scripture, they're always taking Rashi's interpretation and Rashi's midrashic positions as the baseline.
I couldn't find an English language version of this particular section of Rashi's commentary on Tanach on Sefaria, so I used the version from Chabad.org (scroll down to v14). Rashi starts off repeating a variant of the midrash we've just looked at in Shir haShirim Rabbah. I didn't at this stage go through the exact variations in detail, just showed an example of how Rashi summarizes / paraphrases the midrashic tradition, which indeed he may have from more than one source. He then goes on to explain the somewhat obscure vocabulary in the SoS verse. He's justifying the connection between a sheltering cleft and the peril of the Red Sea, by comparing a word which he thinks might be a somewhat irregular plural of the word for dread. He also follows the standard midrashic technique of assuming that when something is described by a doubled phrase,
the cleft of the rock / the covert of the cliff, it's not just poetic repetition, both phrases mean something, and he's describing some kind of human-raised, terraced mound containing burrows for birds and animals.
At this point we are somewhat incredulous at the sheer volume of Rashi! Did he really write multiple paragraphs of explanation for every single verse of the entire Bible, plus similar ratio for Talmud? Yes, yes, Rashi was exactly that prolific. An edition of a single book of the Bible, with its Rashi and a few additional commentators is about the size of this whole Bible in English (we've been working from an edition of the NRSV which includes the OT, the apocrypha, and the NT in fairly small print). He had help from his three daughters and his three sons-in-law, but basically, yeah.
Having shown people a typical-ish midrash, plus given a condensed history of how Jewish text works and the roles of Talmud, midrash, and Rishonic (early but post-Talmudic teachers) commentary, I wanted to teach the midrash about why the Song of Songs is relevant to Passover. Rashi has a version of this, and the edition on Sefaria helpfully links to a probable source in Midrash Tanchuma. I felt like both were needed to make the connection between the bronze laver, the mirrors, and women's seduction of the men during the period of slavery clear. But actually we really only had time to discuss Rashi's version. At first reading, people were saying, this is a midrash about Exodus, what does Song of Songs have to do with it? I said, the connection to SoS is important, because it's refuting the idea that mirrors and femininity are about vanity and frivolous stuff. Femininity and sexuality are important and holy and part of the redemption from Egypt, as well as part of the structure of the Tabernacle itself, just as the highly erotic poetry in SoS is holy enough to be in the Bible, and indeed R' Akiva compares it to the Holy of Holies, the central part of the Temple where the High Priest directly encounters God. One of the learners said, aha, it's like the story of Mary Magdalene anointing Jesus' feet, and people complaining that she's frivolous and overly sexual, but the Gospels condone her actions as part of the right way to do religion. I do think there's some similarity of theme there.
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!
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(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-29 11:53 pm (UTC)Must learn Hebrew....
Coincidences and authorial intent
Date: 2018-12-01 12:55 am (UTC)One question when you say about not needing to worry about authorial intent. Does that apply just to the original biblical text, to the biblical text and to the Talmud, or to the biblical text, Talmud and midrashes?
(1) In that I wasn't expecting that to be what the book was about.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-12-03 03:52 pm (UTC)It also seems to me, from reading these summaries, like the practice of proof-texting that certain of the evangelical movement of Christians is in the same tradition of midrash (although much less tolerant of the discussion and multiple perspectives on reading.)