BiblioVault - Books about Midrash

Dirshuni

Contemporary Women’s Midrash

Edited by Tamar Biala

Brandeis University Press, 2022

A unique compilation of contemporary women’s midrashim.

Dirshuni: Contemporary Women’s Midrash, is the first-ever English edition of a historic collection of midrashim composed by Israeli women, which has been long-anticipated by multiple American audiences, including synagogues, rabbinical seminaries, adult learning programs, Jewish educators, and scholars of gender and religion. Using the classical forms developed by the ancient rabbis, the contributors express their religious and moral thought and experience through innovative interpretations of scripture. The women writers, from all denominations and beyond, of all political stripes and ethnic backgrounds, contribute their Torah to fill the missing half of the sacred Jewish bookshelf. This book reflects dramatic changes in the agency of women in the world of religious writings. The volume features a comprehensive introduction to Midrash for the uninitiated reader by the distinguished scholar Tamar Kadari and extensive annotation and commentary by Tamar Biala.

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Encyclopaedia of Midrash

Biblical Interpretation in Formative Judaism

Jacob Neusner

SBL Press, 2016

Now in Paperback!

The Encyclopedia of Midrash provides readers with a deep, broad treatment of midrash unavailable in any other single source. Through the writings of top scholars in each of their fields, it sets out the current state of the question for the many topics discussed throughout the two-volume set. The encyclopedia treats interpretations of Scripture that came to closure prior to, or outside of, the framework of rabbinic midrash: Hellenistic Jewish midrash, Josephus, Pseudo-Philo, Jubilees, as well as to the New Testament, Karaite and Samaritan writings, and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Features:

Paperback format of an essential Brill hardcover reference set
A general introduction to rabbinic midrash and its traits
Discussion of rabbinic midrashic documents focused on specific books of Scripture, the theology expressed by rabbinic midrashic compilations, and the historical context in which rabbinic Midrash took shape

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Eternally Eve

Images of Eve in the Hebrew Bible, Midrash, and Modern Jewish Poetry

Anne Lapidus Lerner

University Press of New England, 2007

The biblical accounts of Eve's life are central to Western culture, occupying a privileged place in our literature and art, culture, and society. For both Judaism and Christianity, these stories involving Eve have for centuries been entangled with the religious and social construction of gender. The ambiguous biblical record of her life from the two versions of her creation, through her encounter with the forbidden fruit, to her expulsion from Eden, and followed by the tantalizing glimpses of her life in the real world has served through the ages as a mirror of commonly held views about women. For Jewish readers, Eve's role as metonym -- signifying womanhood, or Jewish womanhood, as a whole -- is of prime importance. By tracing the imagined character of Eve from ancient times to the present, Eternally Eve opens a window on the transmission and persistence of cultural and social values. Eternally Eve takes as its subject the many ways these stories can be read, interpreting the biblical narratives as well as their iteration by rabbinic midrashists and modern poets. Anne Lapidus Lerner argues that we must set aside, or at least rethink, a series of assumptions about Eve that have been dominant in Jewish thought for centuries and instead return to the original texts to rediscover meanings implicit in them. Using modern poetry about Eve as a touchstone for reinterpreting older texts, Lerner discovers that Genesis is often more open to contemporary values than are later rabbinic texts. Linking sacred texts to works of the classical and modern imagination, Lerner restores to her sources meanings suppressed or neglected over many years and demonstrates their power to speak today.

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The Exegetical Imagination

On Jewish Thought and Theology

Michael Fishbane

Harvard University Press, 1998

Exegesis--interpretation and explanation of sacred texts--is the quintessence of rabbinic thought. Through such means and methods, the written words of Hebrew Scripture have been extended since antiquity, and given new voices for new times. In this lucid and often poetic book, Michael Fishbane delineates the connections between biblical interpretation and Jewish religious thought.

How can a canon be open to new meanings, given that it is believed to be immutable? Fishbane discusses the nature and rationale of this interpretative process in a series of studies on ancient Jewish speculative theology. Focusing on questions often pondered in Midrash, he shows how religious ideas are generated or justified by exegesis. He also explores the role exegesis plays in liturgy and ritual. A striking example is the transfer of speculative interpretations into meditation in prayer. Cultivation of the ability to perceive many implicit meanings in a text or religious practice can become a way of living--as Fishbane shows in explaining how such notions as joy or spiritual meditations on death can be idealized and the ideal transmitted through theological interpretation. The Exegetical Imagination is a collection of interrelated essays that together offer new and profound understanding of scriptural interpretation and its central role in Judaism.

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Judaism and Christianity in the Age of Constantine

History, Messiah, Israel, and the Initial Confrontation

Jacob Neusner

University of Chicago Press, 1987

With the conversion of Constantine in 312, Christianity began a period of political and cultural dominance that it would enjoy until the twentieth century. Jacob Neusner contradicts the prevailing view that following Christianity's ascendancy, Judaism continued to evolve in isolation. He argues that because of the political need to defend its claims to religious authenticity, Judaism was forced to review itself in the context of a triumphant Christianity. The definition of issues long discussed in Judaism—the meaning of history, the coming of the Messiah, and the political identity of Israel—became of immediate and urgent concern to both parties. What emerged was a polemical dialogue between Christian and Jewish teachers that was unprecedented.

In a close analysis of texts by the Christian theologians Eusebius, Aphrahat, and Chrysostom on one hand, and of the central Jewish works the Talmud of the Land of Israel, the Genesis Rabbah, and the Leviticus Rabbah on the other, Neusner finds that both religious groups turned to the same corpus of Hebrew scripture to examine the same fundamental issues. Eusebius and Genesis Rabbah both address the issue of history, Chrysostom and the Talmud the issue of the Messiah, and Aphrahat and Leviticus Rabbah the issue of Israel. As Neusner demonstrates, the conclusions drawn shaped the dialogue between the two religions for the rest of their shared history in the West.

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Midrash and Theory

Ancient Jewish Exegesis and Contempory Literary Studies

David Stern

Northwestern University Press, 1998

In Midrash and Theory, David Stern presents an approach to midrashic literature through the prism of contemporary theory.

As midrash--the literature of classical Jewish Scriptural interpretation--has become the focus of new interest in contemporary literary circles, it has been invoked as a precursor of post-structuralist theory and criticism. At the same time, the midrashic imagination has undergone a revival in the larger Jewish community and shown itself capable of exercising a powerful influence and hold on a new type of contemporary Jewish writing. Stern examines this resurgence of fascination with ancient Jewish interpretation from the persepctive of the cultural relevance of midrash and its connection to its original historical and literary contexts.

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Midrash, Mishnah, and Gemara

The Jewish Predilection for Justified Law

David Weiss Halivni

Harvard University Press, 1986

An eminent authority on the Talmud offers here an analysis of classical rabbinic texts that illuminates the nature of Midrash, Mishnah, and Gemara, and highlights a fundamental characteristic of Jewish law. Midrash is firmly based on—draws its support from—Scripture. It thus projects the idea that law must be justified. The concept, David Weiss Halivni demonstrates, is at the heart of Jewish law and can be traced from the Bible (especially evident in Deuteronomy) through the classical commentaries of the Talmud. Only Mishnah is—like other ancient Near Eastern law—apodictic, recognizing no need for justification. But Midrash existed before Mishnah and its law served as grounding for the non-justificatory Mishnaic texts. Indeed, Halivni argues, Mishnah was a deviant form and consequently short-lived and never successfully revived, a response to particular religious and political conditions after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. He chronicles the persistence of justificatory Midrash, the culmination of its development in Gemara in the fifth and sixth centuries, and its continuation down through the ages. David Weiss Halivni has given us a lucid and compelling picture of the several modes of rabbinic learning and disputation and their historical relation to one another.

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Midrashic Women

Formations of the Feminine in Rabbinic Literature

Judith R. Baskin

Brandeis University Press, 2002

While most gender-based analyses of rabbinic Judaism concentrate on the status of women in the halakhah (the rabbinic legal tradition), Judith R. Baskin turns her attention to the construction of women in the aggadic midrash, a collection of expansions of the biblical text, rabbinic ruminations, and homiletical discourses that constitutes the non-legal component of rabbinic literature. Examining rabbinic convictions of female alterity, competing narratives of creation, and justifications of female disadvantages, as well as aggadic understandings of the ideal wife, the dilemma of infertility, and women among women and as individuals, she shows that rabbinic Judaism, a tradition formed by men for a male community, deeply valued the essential contributions of wives and mothers while also consciously constructing women as other and lesser than men. Recent feminist scholarship has illuminated many aspects of the significance of gender in biblical and halakhic texts but there has been little previous study of how aggadic literature portrays females and the feminine. Such representations, Baskin argues, often offer a more nuanced and complex view of women and their actual lives than the rigorous proscriptions of legal discourse.

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Parables in Midrash

Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature

David Stern

Harvard University Press, 1991

David Stern shows how the parable or mashal—the most distinctive type of narrative in midrash—was composed, how its symbolism works, and how it serves to convey the ideological convictions of the rabbis. He describes its relation to similar tales in other literatures, including the parables of Jesus in the New Testament and kabbalistic parables. Through its innovative approach to midrash, this study reaches beyond its particular subject, and will appeal to all readers interested in narrative and religion.

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