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In this video,
we'll be learning about a rabbinic method of reading the Bible called legal midrash.
In the next video, we'll see how a particular form of legal midrash plays out
in a passage of Talmud from our chapter.
One of the central activities of the rabbis,
who produced rabbinic literature, was midrash.
Midrash is a rigorous reading of the Hebrew Bible.
In the Tannaitic period, before the publication of the Mishnah,
the core exercise of midrash was focused on the pentateuch or Torah, and
much of the intense work was directed at determining the particulars of the laws
dictated by the Bible.
Biblical legal text, like other legal texts, are gapped.
There are cases or subsets of cases that are not explicitly considered.
These interstices in the law are filled in by midrashic reading.
While we think of midrash as a playful, creative activity that allows the rabbi's
tremendous leeway in adding all sorts of stories to the biblical epic.
When it comes to legal passages, the midrashik readings are mostly conservative
and often can be persuasive contextual readings about the passage might have
meant historically to the people who composed it.
A primary principle of rabbinic legal midrash is the notion that
a text has to be marked in some way as requiring interpretation.
If you were reading the Biblical text, you might come up with your own standard for
identifying the textual bits that require explanation.
For the rabbis, the list of marks make it possible to
read using midrash includes contradictions, redundancies in meaning or
spelling, juxtapositions of passages or verses, and a few others.
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You might be familiar with lists of rabbinic interpretive principles.
One such list of 13 principles found it's way into the Jewish daily prayer book.
These principles are strategies of midrashic reading.
They include various forms of reasoning by analogy and logical statements.
We have already seen examples of in earlier videos.
Legal midrash employs all of these as tools for
solving the problem of a marked text.
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The first two cases, A and B, are analogized to case C.
and some legal particulars that apply to both A and
B are then attached to C as well.
Rabbinic Midrash, as a method of reading, changed over time.
In the tannaitic period, there was no limit
on the number of resolutions that could be offered to add meaning to a marked text.
Our works of tannaitic midrash frequently cite the opinions of multiple rabbis
who attempt to add elements of meaning to the marked texts.
For reasons unknown, leader rabbis began to feel differently
about this notion of interpretive pluralism.
Around the turn of the fourth century CE,
Babylonian rabbis began to insist that a singular textual marking,
redundancy or extraneity, can only produce a single new legal element.
And also, importantly, every legal element should be justified
through a marked element of the biblical text.
This transformation in thinking produces two types of questions
that are ubiquitous in talmudic passages involving midrash.
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One, if you have a meaningful element of the law,
where is it's marker in the biblical text?
And two, if you have an available marker in the bible, what does it mean?
Because of the new restrictions on pluralism,
the Talmud's leader rabbis felt that an individual rabbi must
have a single interpretive approach to every legal passage.
If one rabbi uses a marker to teach an element that another rabbi uses to
teach a different element, one can now question how
each of those rabbi's produces the element introduced by the other's interpretation.
In the next video, we will see a Talmudic passage that employs an interpretive
strategy that looks similar to the Binyan Av, because it, too,
is an analogy from cases A and B to case C that adds legal elements to case C.
The Talmud's interpretive strategy called a mah hatzad combines cases A and
B together only after a direct analogy from both A to C and
B to C fall short, because of a substantive distinction between the cases.
The mah hatzad is based on the premise that the combination of A and
B can overcome the substantive dissimilarities between the cases.
But the Talmud will always ultimately reject the mah hatzad argument.
In the next video, we will see the mah hatzad at
work in a segia exploring the complexities of
scenarios involving multiple punishments.
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Barry Scott WimpfheimerAssociate Professor
