Video16a What is Legal Midrash?

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The Talmud: A Methodological Introduction

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Northwestern University

The Talmud: A Methodological Introduction

128 classificações

The Talmud is one of the richest and most complicated works of literature the world has ever known. Since being composed around 1500 years ago it has inspired not only religious reverence but significant intellectual engagement. In this course learners will be introduced to the unique characteristics of this text and the challenges that inhere in studying it while studying a chapter of the Talmud. Students of the course can expect to develop an appreciation for how the Talmud works and why it continues to inspire religious and intellectual devotion. They will be challenged to employ critical reading skills and to analyze legal and historical concepts.

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The Stam as Reader and Writer

The historical range of the different centuries of rabbinic literature makes it possible to take note of changes in the ways the different rabbis thought about the Bible and law. This module will demonstrate how later rabbis have a more abstract way of thinking about law while simultaneously having a more restrictive way of reading the Bible.

Video16a What is Legal Midrash?5:04

Conheça os instrutores

Barry Scott Wimpfheimer
Associate Professor
Religious Studies

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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.

When a text is marked,

the midrashic reader is empowered to add something to the text.

Commonly added elements include limiting the lost subject

to certain classes of people or periods of time.

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.

One of the strategies that appears in this list is called a Binyan Av.

The binyan av is an argument by analogy involving three cases, A, B, and C.

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.

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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