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Ishay Rosen-Zvi, "How to Read Mishnah and Midrash: An Introduction to Early Rabbinic Literature" (U California Press, 2026)
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Foreign. Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to New Books in Late Antiquity, presented by Ancient Jew Review. I'm Mike Motila, and today we're talking with Ishai Rosenzevi about how to read the Mishnah and Midrash, An Introduction to Early Rabbinic Literature. Students often complain that religious readings are just too abstract, like they have no idea what somebody means by transcendental deduction or eschatology, and they think what they want is more walls and food and money, things they can picture. But sometimes doing away with the concepts and getting thrown right into the particulars has that same dizzying effect. Readers get lost when reading the Mishnah because the discussions like they make sense word by word, but then they finish the passage and just kind of think like, what? What was the point of that? Or they'll sit with a playful reading of the Mishnah, which is a reading that kind of, I don't know, at least on the surface, it has very little to do with the text that it seems to be commenting on. And again, you know, word by word, it's not that hard to read. But what's hard is having the context or the concepts that will help make sense of this commentary. And so people end up saying things like, you know, the Mishnah has no rules when it comes to interpretation, or, you know, because the Mishnah has no preface or no explicit aim, therefore the Mishnah has no self conscious aim, that it's all kind of practical stuff without any self reflection. But behind these texts there is a kind of logic. And Rosenzevi has given us a book that really helps us read these familiar and yet kind of odd texts. And more, he helps us think about what all these legal discussions have to do with the commentaries that were often written in parallel. So Dr. Rosensevi can tell us a lot more about this, but just to make sure we don't get too lost too soon. The Mishnah it is the first and the oldest part of the Rabbinic Oral Torah. It doesn't have one author, but instead, by about the beginning of the third century ce, there's groups of scholars who had been collecting, arranging and passing on teachings from earlier rabbis. A few of the rabbis lived before the destruction of the temple in 70 CE, and then there's about five generations of rabbis after them. These rabbis, these generations of rabbis are what we call the Tenaim, the, the repeaters or the teachers. They have names like Hillel, Akiva, Gamaliel, things like that. And these sages, their, their teachings were taught just orally. So a lot of people would kind of know some of these sayings. Nobody knew all of the sayings, but people would kind of, you know, they would tell other people about what they had heard and what they, they knew. And this is the way these teachings were passed on until around 220 when Judah Hanassi, Judah the Patriarch, edited these sayings and gave it the six orders that are generally still used today. The Mishra's language is Hebrew rather than the Aramaic that was being spoken at the time. It's about 200,000 words long. The most recent annotated English edition of it is well over a thousand pages. So it's a big, long book. And often it's called a long treatise on Jewish law or Ha ha. And it's, it's been a way that people think about law, but if you hear law and think like contract law, you're, you're gonna be confused. There are laws about contracts, but they're often given with dissenting opinions. And they're more like test cases than conceptual clarifications. And those contract disputes too, they're, they're put right next to questions about like, ritual laws and impurities. So, you know, I think that's enough for now. For now, it's compiled around 220. It preserves debates about Jewish law that go back hundreds of years. Midrash, on the other hand, is less a single text and it's more like a style or a mode of interpretation. The word Midrash means to seek. And sometimes this is found in a single text like Genesis Rabba, but it's also something found in the Mishnah and even in medieval treatises like the Alphabet of Rabbi Akiva, which is an interpretation of the letters of the Hebrew Alphabet. The texts that Dr. Rosensevi is examining here, they're the earliest Midrashim. They're more or less edited at the same time, it's the Mishnah and sometimes they're being edited or written by the same people, which, of course, raises questions about what the Mishnah has to do with Midrash. And we'll talk about that as well. But for now, Dr. Shai Rosenzevi teaches Rabbinic literature at the Department of Jewish Philosophy and Talmud at Tel Aviv. Previous books include Israel's Multiple Others and the Birth of a Gentile, written with Adi Ophir, the Mishnayak Sotah, Ritual and Demonic Desires, Yetser Zir, Yetser Harah, and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity. And this book, how to Read the Mishnah and Midrash, was originally written in Hebrew, and it was translated into English by Daniel Tabak. So long introduction. But, Shai, hi. Welcome. Thank you for being here. Can you introduce yourself?
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C
Who are you?
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B
How'd you come to write this book? And why'd you write a book about how to read Mishnah and Midrash?
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C
Yeah, Michael, I'm happy to be here. And I teach Talmud. And for years, I have been teaching An Introduction to the Mishnah Midrash, two parallel courses, and constantly changing the examples and refining the method, until one day I said to myself, you know, why not write it down? But to be wholly precise, it was a suggestion of the Open University to make it into a written course. And then once it was published, American colleagues said to me, you know, what about our students? And that is how we arrived here.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great.
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C
Yeah, yeah. But let me say something on a deeper level. I've been always trying to get to the roots of the rabbinic discourse. In my book on the evil Yetzel inclination, I asked not how the rabbis discussed the yetzer, but why is there such a thing as the evil inclination in the first place? Right. How the yetzer became the basis of rabbinic anthropology. In my book on the concept of the goy, I asked not what is the attitude toward the gentile, but when Jewish sources began to divide the world in binary terms into Jews and nunjis, you know, to begin with. And so it is with the Mishnah. Nidra, for me, these are two riddles, but I think I'm running ahead of myself now.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it gives us a little kind of, you know, sneak peek into what's. What's to come here. So, I mean, this is a. It's a how to book. And like you said, it emerged from, like, years of. Of teaching, but I just get us oriented. Like, this is a. Like a how to. So I Don't know. What are some like, misconceptions that you want to correct? Like, how should we not read the Mishnah and Midrash?
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C
Okay, so let me start with the Mishnah, because that's easier. The basic assumption has been that it is law, largely due to the adoption of the Christian notion of Pharisaic legalism. Right. But much of this law is not applicable at all, for example, Temple laws. And because the Temple was destroyed by the time the rabbis start discussing these laws, and in any case, there is no enforcement mechanisms behind it, nor is there any distinction between law in the Roman sense and ritual. This is all Torah, oral Torah, and in its totality it is an intellectual, not a heuristic enterprise. In fact, I increasingly entertain, you know, the idea of the basic affinity of the sages with the wisdom teachers like Ben Sira, you know, rather than with Roman jurist, as too often and too uncritically claimed, today the rabbis call themselves sages, chachamim, not lawyers. Now with regard to midras, this is trickier. The common scholarly dichotomy between real interpretation and the mere presentation of ideas and traditions under the guise of interpretation stems from a particular modern conception, one that the rabbis did not share. So the real question for me is what is the rabbis own conception of text? Right, but what understanding of the sacred text allow them, in fact requires them to read as they did?
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B
Yeah, that's really helpful just to get us started there. And we're going to come back to all this. I know, but okay, for now, the book has two parts, right? There's the Mishnah part and the Nidraj part, just like your two courses. And I know it's kind of the same people writing the same texts, but what do we know about the context for these? Of course, everything that survives gets edited. So these aren't transcripts of conversations. Exactly. But you do see this as more or less like what was happening in the second, third centuries. Right. Can you give us some of the backstory here? Who's writing these? Who's the audience? What kind of problems are these texts trying to solve?
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C
Right, so the thing is that we know the realm of the study house of the Beit Midrash, mainly from, you know, the rabbinic sources themselves. There is almost no external evidence. Archaeological evidence appears only with Rabi El Azala Kapal from the time of the reduction of the Mishnah, where an inscription of his study house, his actual study house, was found in the Golan. And external testimonies appear also only in the third century, for example, Origen, right in Caesarea. So we basically depend mostly on rabbinic sources, Tanaitic sources themselves. So we're dealing probably with a small group, hundreds of individuals organized around charismatic teachers and networks. Initially in Judea and later in the Galilee, large academies were established only much later, especially in Babylonia. Now the rabbis created a culture of study intended to replace temple based Judaism. They drew for sure from the Greek and Roman world of Paideia as well as from Pharisaic and scribal traditions. But they created something new. Their public status, should I say, developed only gradually. They served as arbiters and religious functionaries, but the broader population became Talmudic, if you will, only in the postal Mudic period, that is in the Middle Ages. I think that's, you know, enough for an introduction.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is a how to book. And a lot of it is teaching people, like, different ways that scholars have of answering different kinds of questions. And one of the things that a student or scholar might try to understand is how do you read this text in order to understand this text's origins? Like, it's a tricky problem. And you discussed these layers of the Mishnah. And so one way to do this is to kind of trace the characters. So like a dispute between Hillel and Shammai is going to be older than one between Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael. But beyond that, you go as an example of this debate between Bethelel and Beth Shemai about eating a second tithe in a building that are only partly within the boundary of Jerusalem. And that example is a kind of way in to how the Mishnah took shape. So can you tell us like, that, that story and then like, how do you get from the story to like, how does this giant book kind of come to be?
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C
Yeah, yeah. The problem is that all these examples are so, you know, meticulous and specific. So let's, let's take a step back. And you're right. Large part of the scholarly task is to uncover the layers within the redacted text. And this may seem simple since we have sages from different universities, know generation, and thus one could collect all disputes of Hillel and Shammai or of Eliezer and Rabbi Yeshua, as for example, Jacob Meisner did in the 1970s and 80s. But there's two problems. First, can we trust the attributions? Right. Did statements attributed to Rabbi Akiva really originate with him? Now, I'm not among the radical skeptics. The consistency of the sages positions across different corpora and the absence of dispute between different generations suggests that the attributions are generally reliable. But the real issue is different. We meet the earlier generations through the prism of the later ones. The sources themselves acknowledge this. This is the mission of Roby Akiva. Right? That is, this is how he formulated the dispute. Now, in the example you mentioned, the Mishnah present an early temple time dispute, but the Toseftah shows that Rabbi Akiva actually reshaped it. And the earlier version was different and simpler, but you can see it from the Mishnah itself. The Mishnah present the later formulation as if it were the original. So the comparison between the Mishnah and the Toseftah and the Toseftah, let me just remind us, is an expansion and interpretation of the Mishnah edited a generation after. This comparison is one of the most powerful tools we have for it reveals how things were shaped and reshaped. And therefore I dedicate a large chapter in the book to the Mishnah at Hasefta. Relationship.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it is a way of trying to understand like, okay, how do you do this? Because there's not a lot of ways you can textualize it. But that, that is like one nice comparison. It's going to let you kind of peer into some of these origins. You said this before, but one of the things the books really does emphasize is that both the Mishnah and Midrash are really different and like self consciously different from anything that came before them. So there's been like a lot of great work that has been contextualizing these texts to say, you know, like, if you understand something about, you know, Origin of Alexandria or in Caesarea or, you know, other Roman philosophical schools, that will help you understand what's going on in these, you know, Jewish or rabbinic like study centers. And that's true, but these texts are just like, they're really different and they're trying to be different. And so, you know, there's, when we think about this in terms of legal texts, like there's, you know, there's other legal codes that are going on at, at the same time. Right. Like, you know, Roman law was the law of the land. And it was, you know, there was the law with the army behind it also. But the Bible has laws. There were temple laws. You know, traditions coming out of Qumran had laws. And the Mishnah is influenced by all of those. But also, like, there's nothing quite like the Mishnah. Right. So can you give us a sense of, like, how it differs and, and maybe like how these authors are, I don't know, like, metabolizing these other traditions while also, you know, making the Mishnah kind of a world unto itself.
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C
Yeah, yeah, sure. So by the time of the Tanaim, the early sages, there already exists a long halachic legal right tradition. Take the Book of jubilees from the 2nd century BCE, which recounts the stories of the patriarchs while injecting laws into them. Right. Or the Temple scrolls from Qumran.
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B
Right.
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C
Which construct laws for the utopian temple. Or Philo, who recasts the Torah's commandment in a philosophical framework. But in all these, note that there is no attempt to encompass everything. All existing Halachut, okay. That is an entirely new ambition. And the novelty is revealed in its independence from the Pentateuch, the written Torah, the Mishnah's independence, which we should, you know, return to because it's a really fundamental characteristic. And this is also what distinguishes the rabbis from Roman jurists. The ambition to include domains that are not at all, right. Written within the jurisdiction of the jurist. Right. But of priests, of economists. Right. Household managers, of politicians and so on.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then we should come back to that kind of distinction between kind of Roman law and what's going on in the Mishnah. But one of the other things, like in emphasizing that the Mishnah does become kind of a world unto itself, like, it raises this question of, like, well, isn't it kind of constantly talking about the Bible and in the written Torah and the world Torah have this like, symbiotic relationship? But you, you're showing us how, how even when, you know, the Mishnah is, is, you know, leaning on or, or citing a biblical source, it's going to take it in kind of a new direction. That, that kind of, then again, like, makes the Mishnah a kind of, you know, closed off world or a world unto itself. And, and you give this example of the love, the, the kind of the, the fond. From a palm tree on, on Sukkot. Can you tell us about that, that example and kind of how the Czechs. That goes from written Torah to. Or Torah.
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C
Yeah, no, no, that's a great example because the Mishnah discusses the lulav and the other species of Sukkot without even mentioning that these species correspond to those mentioned in the book of Leviticus. Now, not only there are no cications there, but even the biblical terms, prietz hadar, fruits of a beautiful tree, kapot Marim palm branches are not preserved. Right. So they use different terminology. So they don't care at all to preserve the connection. Right. That is there, but is not made explicit. Only the Tosefta and the Midra supply this lost connection. Now, this is for sure not accidental. It is part of the Mishnah's claim to independent authority, which would be compromised had the Mishnah would, you know, keep this connection each time it mentioned a halacha.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's really. That's helpful. I mean, the other thing you were talking about was the editing question. And so, like, this raises, like, who edited it and how did it get edited? At least tradition has it. I think people think that Judah Hanasi, Judah the patriarchy, edited the Mishnah. Can you tell us about him? Like, who. Who was he? What was he doing there? You know, in my head, I'm thinking he's like a kind of, I don't know, Proto Gibronian, the. The lead editor of Justinian's Code. So, I mean, what he was doing was like taking these laws that were scattered all over the Empire, right? And. And he's then kind of making them uniform and these. These kind of contradictory laws that were, you know, all over the Roman Empire. And. And, like, I get the sense of that's not exactly what Judah Hanasi was doing. Right. He's going to preserve all of. All these different kinds of laws. But tell us about Judah Hanasi and kind of what did editing actually mean?
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C
Yeah, so this is really a critical question because we tend to think in terms of modern editing, right? Extreme makeover, right? Do whatever you need in order to make it right into a kind of unified composition. And also in contrast to the code of Justinian, which has an introduction, right, explaining its mandate, for example, to eliminate redundancies or irrelevant legislation, here in the Mishnah, we have no such introduction. So we learn about the editing only from the Mishnah itself, and especially through comparison, as I said, with parallel sources. So what we see is that on the one hand, the Mishnah is full of contradiction. The Mishnah in its final, you know, kind of state is full of contradictions, duplications, and different styles. On the other hand, comparison with parallel composition like the Tosefta reveals traces of clear editorial activity, right? But it is a subtle and delicate kind of editing because the material was traditional. And it is this kind of, you know, tension that led to these major debates about the, you know, the purpose of the Mishnah. Is it a legal code? Is it an anthology and so on and so forth.
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B
Yeah, I mean. Well, I mean, so on and so forth. Like what? Like, at least towards the end of that chapter about editing, you give us a. I think you call it a Costa suggestion. But, like, once you see how it was edited, you get some sense of. Of, like, what the purpose is. Like, it was edited. There was some intention with, like, making it the shape that it was. So what does the editing reveal about the purpose of the Mishnah?
- [24:30]
C
Yeah. Okay. So at the end of this chapter, I do kind of entertain my own, you know, suggestion, although really tentatively, because all the proposed answers felt to me partial. If it is a legal code, why no clear rulings? Right. And if it's an anthology, why omit views? As we can see from the parallel sources, if it is a textbook, why begin in media? Right. Which the Mishnah does in most cases. So I argue that it is a far more ambitious project. Okay. And so here's the spoiler for the kind of thesis in this part of the book. The project is to gather the entire tradition and present it as a single system. What they called, for the first time, Oral Torah.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, the fact they're starting to call it Oral Torah raises this. This other question that you. You bring up about oral transmission. You know, like. Like, it's right now it's written down until people, they read it. But can you say a little bit about orality and kind of how orality kept this text changing? You emphasize that it's important for the way these things were taught, but also that the way that the book eventually gets organized makes it easier to memorize. And so when so much of this is being done orally, um, the ability to, like, actually kind of hold it all in your head becomes a big part of the, you know, the possibility of it surviving. Right. Like, as a, like, real cultural force. So can you tell us about orality and read the Mishnah?
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C
Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is really one of the more surprising aspect. It is truly an oral Torah. And you can see it in. In. In the, you know, the constant engagement with memorization and forgetting. Right. All along the Tanaitic, Anamoraic, you know, the early and later sages, until the Geonic, the postalmudic period, when it was actually, you know, written down in the. We're not sure, let's say, 7 8th, you know, century CE and you already mentioned this constant use of mnemonic techniques. But above all, you can see this orality. And that's something that Yaakov Zusma, the great Talmud scholar, has shown you can see it in the fact that they never consult a written text when there is a dispute over wording. And there is quite, you know, a lot of dispute over wording in the Talmuds, yet they never consult a book because there was no one. So this may seem strange to us since Roman culture is fundamentally textual, but if one looks to the east, for example, in India or Sasanian Babylonia, it is quite common. Now, of course, the question is, why do they do this? There are various explanations, but maybe the simplest is that it served to distinguish this Torah from, from the written Torah so that it does not compete with it. So there is one written Torah and the other Torah is kept only oral.
- [28:00]
B
Yeah. And it becomes a kind of, I don't know, like a way to prove yourself too. Right. That, that just like, you know, like the ability to hold this stuff in your head is, is partly what gives you like, cultural capital. Right? And. Yeah, yeah.
- [28:14]
C
And also in a kind of constant, you know, toil. Right. And never ending, you know, so it, it, it makes sure that this study house will be an all consuming endeavor.
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B
Right, right, right, right. Yeah. Because you can't just kind of, I don't, I don't know, like you, you could get out of practice and then you're a little rusty and then you're, you're like, you're not quite as quick with the, the reference or the, I mean, even the jokes. Right. Like that, that like you, you got to be able to, to do it quickly enough that, that people like you. Yeah. All right, let's move to Midrash. You know, Midrash often gets glossed as biblical interpretation, but that's not quite right if what we're looking for is like a commentary on Scripture, like the Hermenia commentaries or something like that. And partly, like you said, it's because that assumes that we know both what, like the Bible meant at the time and what interpretation meant at the time. And usually both of those things are kind of wrong. Like we're talking about, you know, scrolls that were expensive. And then like, the rules of interpretation are just like, really different from what we would expect today. And so you start us off in that kind of second half of the book with this definition that you say. Midrash is an amplified reading of a verse in the Torah that creatively applies certain interpretive techniques in a relatively fixed format and with a set of technical terms. It often ascribes a surprising meaning to a text which one would not expect. It to bear. And so it's a just really helpful, clear, like, introduction. But when you say a surprising meaning, what you don't mean is that like, anything goes in this, like, meaning making process. Like, there's still rules and assumptions to the game. So it's not a Bible commentary like you might expect today. And it's also not association. So how should we think about it? Like, I know intertextuality becomes important here. Like, you know, any verse in the Bible can become the relevant context or comparison for any other verse. But, but maybe it's helpful to just like jump into an example and then you can back up and like explain the broader principles. You, you spent some time talking about this verse from Exodus 15:22 that says they went three days in the wilderness and they did not find water. So can you tell us, like, how do the rabbis read this? And then what does that teach us kind of more broadly about Midrash?
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C
Yeah, yeah, that's a great example to kind of open this huge topic with. Because in the Mihilta, the Tanaitic midrash on the book of Exodus, on Exodus 15:22, the very beginning of the journey into the desert after the Exodus, we find a series of interpretations that in fact present different modes of exegesis. So first, rabbiazar reads, and they did not find water as saying that the water was there, but the Israelite did not find it in order to test them. Right? So in that he transformed seemingly neutral information into a moral lesson, right? Or a theological drama. Right? So you can see that the telos here, others read it intertextually, as you mentioned, comparing it to the description of the drought in Jeremiah 14. Why? Because this is the only other place where the words they did not find water appeared, right? And so for them it was a hint that you should read these two verses together, right? And the result is once again introducing a religious drama into their narrative. Because all this plastic description of the drought from Jeremiah is now injected back into, you know, into the book of Exodus. And then come Dorsheumot, that is the allegorists, right? Who read water as referring to Torah, naturally, right? For them. And in contrast to all these rereadings, at the very outset stands Rabbi Yeshua, and he insists to read it as it sounds, Kishmuo', o, that is to leave the verse as it is, right? Sometimes water is only water. But here's another twist. The editor who placed Rabbi Yoshua's opinion at the very beginning, before all the other fancy interpretations, did not accept this as the final word, but rather as a springboard, as if saying, look, we know the plain sense, but we're not satisfied with it.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it gets to the like, broader principle that you, you raised that the question for the modern Bible scholar is what does the text say? And the question for the rabbis is more like, why does the text say what it says? Is that, is that, is that right? Like that distinction?
- [33:06]
C
Because, and therefore the basic motivation is precisely to make sense of repetitions and seemingly superfluous information such as they went three days, right? Why do you, why do you tell us these just, you know, kind of mundane, informative facts? Right? What's the lesson? Right. Matal Mudlamad, what's the lesson? And for this reason, the darshan must work on every word, right? Not only, not even primarily on difficult verses. For Scripture says nothing in vain. Right. Something is to be learned from every phrase and therefore they cannot, you know, be, you know, contained with Rabbi Yeshua's suggestion to leave the verse as, you know, as is. So it becomes like the first stage, but then the more fancy, you know, interpretation come along and, you know, fill it with meaning.
- [34:05]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's, you kind of break this down helpfully in between these two schools or two ways of finding that, you know, endless amount of meaning. So one is Rabbi Akiva school and the other is Rabbi Ishmael's school. And eventually these get edited into one big text. So, you know, at least to non experts, it's not always clear who is like which school is going on. But there are some like, like some tells about kind of which passages come from which, which schools. Right. So like Rabbi Akiva's usually start with it teaches and Rabbi Ishmael starts with it relates. And there's other tells like this. You know, people should get the book and you can find more. But I think it's worth getting more into the details of these kind of modes of interpretation. So like, broadly speaking, tell me if I get this right. Right. Rabbi Akiva's school takes a more like, tactic that like every word, every letter can like shoot off and form its own like, unit of meaning. And, and then Rabbi Ishmael's, it's also creative, but it's a little bit more like, I don't tethered to the text. So it's not like just a literal reading, but, but it's, it's gonna like do some comparison or something like that. You, you point to a debate between, between these, these two, around the biblical punishment of Kareth or being, like, cut off and what that means. So maybe you can tell us what they're debating and then how those modes of interpretation, how do we see those and how they differ.
- [35:32]
C
Yeah, sure. So from this double expression, right, this biblical expression, which we translate as, you know, should surely be cut off, but it's actually a double. Right. Expression. Rabbi Akiva derives that it refers to two forms of excision. Right. Of kare, one in this world and one in the world to come. Right? So note the assumption about the correlation between text and reality. Right. Double worlds. Double worlds, Right. And by the way, a similar reading appears in Philo with regard to Mot Yumat, he shall surely die, which is likewise translated in a Septuagint as he shall die by death. And Philo breathes it as referring to physical versus psychic death. So it's an interesting comparison. But Rabbi Ishmael argues, look, there is yet another instance of Kareth in this verse. So this would imply three worlds, right? And of course, this is a classic reductio ad absurdum argument. And his solution is, is that the Torah speaks in human language. That is, the doubling is merely stylistic. And this, of course, reflect a fundamental hermeneutic difference between these schools.
- [36:54]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, I mean, I think you said like that, you know, Rabbi Akiva's Halaha interpretation, it occurs at the smallest level. I just love this line that you had. So it occurs at the smallest level, releasing textual molecules from their bonds so they can form inclusions and exclusions just like that. That idea of like a molecule getting unbound, like, that's just a helpful image when it comes to thinking about Rabbi Akiva there.
- [37:22]
C
Yeah, no, this. You know, these inclusions. And inclusions are actually. Are actually a very important litmus test between these two schools. Because, look, in the Pentateuch, in the Torah, we find generalized rulings side by side with specific casuistic examples. Right? For example, on the law of returning lost items. Right? The Torah speaks generally, but then mentions specifically a garment, Simla. So how are these to be reconciled? Now, the Midrashim offer two different ways. Rabbi Akiva employs ribui umiut, inclusion and inclusion, which is essentially a 10 technical matter of counting. Right? So if there is one, it's inclusion. If there is two, it's exclusion. If there is another one, it's an inclusion again, Right? In contrast, Rabbi Ishmael uses general in particular, which is tied to the structure of the verse. Right? So it's semantic rather than technical. So in general, Rabbi Akiva as you said, he's more local. He breaks the verse down into its individual words without taking syntax too much into account. And Rabi Ismael is more attentive to context, less local, more comparative, working through interpretive rules. Midot. But this is, and I emphasize this point in the book. It's important for me, it's a matter of degree and not of assets. Rabishmal is also a Darshan. He does not possess a concept of pshat. Right. Of plain sense as an interpretive theory in the sense that developed in the Middle Ages. And that's something, I think, that scholars kind of tend to glore. Right. This. And to compare Rabbi Ishmael with much later theory of, you know, of interpretation and claiming Rabbi Ishmael is a Darshan. And this is an. A kind of. Yeah, yeah. Inner Darshanic kind of, you know, debate.
- [39:31]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and I mean, it gets it how? Like, like there are different schools, but they share, like, similar motivations. Like, there is a. There, there's an assumption here that there's like a. I don't know, like, like infiniteness to the text. And the question is, how do you get at that, that bigness? Not like, you know, one is a literalist and one does kind of creative stuff. You, you talk about, like, different motivations in, in reading Scripture. And there's a bunch of these, you know, sometimes they're trying to justify scripture or harmonize scripture or anchor tradition or elaborate a law or bridge. I think you call them conceptual worlds. And, and like all of those reading practices, they show that midrash isn't just like, commentary trying to explain the clearest meaning, but they're, they're also like, like, I don't know, like, they're, they're, they're still bound to the text. Like, they're, they're totally indebted to it. And this raises the question that you, you brought up right at the very beginning when we asked, like, you know, what are some misconceptions? And he said, like, one of the things I want to do is ask, you know, how does this way of reading shape what people end up thinking about the written Torah or the Bible? Right? Like, and so you bring up this, I don't know, semi famous definition, like, famous in our world's definition about a sacred text from James Kuble that says, what we mean by a sacred text is that it's cryptic, it's relevant, and it's perfect. The meaning isn't totally clear. It's not just a historical document. And you can't. It's perfect. So you can't just say, well, that was just a mistake or something like that, and that it's divine. It kind of overflows with meaning. And that last point about the kind of immensity of meaning, it leads rabbis to try to extract as much meaning as possible out of a text. And one of the ways that they do this is a process that you call the islanding of meaning. Can you tell us about the islanding of meaning and how it was a way to get as much out of a text as possible?
- [41:24]
C
Right. Yeah. Right. So as you said, I split it kind of into two questions, right. There is the question of the constraints that. That led them to interpret the way they do. For example, the need to match between Bible and tradition, and that the other question is what allowed them to do that? Their conception of the text, of the secret that allow them. And as you mentioned, I use this classic definition of Kugel, right, about the assumption of, you know, ancient biblical interpretation in general. Now, Kugel kind of really used ancient biblical interpretation as a, you know, as a kind of umbrella, you know, definition where, as I ask how this applies specifically to midrash. So, for example, the notion that the text is cryptic. Now, true, it requires interpretation, but the midrashic assumption is that the text is intelligible to a speaker of the language. Right. There's no need for allegory, as in Philo, in order to penetrate the deeper meaning. Right. And nor there's much of a kind of reading that breaks words down into their constituent part, as in the mystical interpretation that will develop later. Right. But the rabbis can indeed read atomistically, as you mentioned. And this mode of reading stems, and this is, I think, a very kind of delicate point. This atomistic reading stems from the idea that the sequence is only one possible option, that a sacred text is not a newspaper, but a kind of combinatorical structure that can be assigned, assembled in different ways, albeit according to rules. And I know it's complex, and this is what I try to explain in the book. That's why it takes the length that it takes.
- [43:39]
B
Yeah, yeah. Is that what you mean by the islanding of meaning? Like, can you tell us about that?
- [43:45]
C
Exactly. That's what. That's what I tied. I call in the book islanding or atomistic reading. But then I also talk about context, right? So there's the atomistic, the kind of island reading, and then there's the context. And Rabbi Ishmael, as you would expect, emphasizes context, and he Calls it. That's an interesting word because it is used differently in modern Hebrew, but in Yanin, in Midrashi's context. Yet Rabbi Ismael, too, is willing to set, you know, context aside when necessary. For example, when the verse in its context contradicts tradition. Right. And so then he says, IME noi nyan to X, let it be nyan to Y. So if the, you know, context does not work, we have to recontextualize it. Right. So they are familiar with the plain sense, and Rabbi Ishmael, you know, emphasize it more than Rabbi Akiva, but they're not willing. Both of them, and both of these schools are not willing to be constrained by it. Right. As we just saw with the case of did not find water.
- [45:03]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, there's. I. I think I fell into this trap too. There. There's a tendency to see the Mishnah as getting, like, increasingly complex, that it starts with a literal reading kind of in the shallow end of the pool, and then it gets further and further out until eventually it's swimming in the deep end and it can't actually touch the biblical ground anymore. And there's something to this, Right. Like moving from the plain text into these kind of more creative readings. But there's a way to overplay that. And so it ignores these passages that you talk about where the phrase is, like, it's unnecessary come up. And so, like, a rabbi could get shot down for making things too complicated. Can you tell us about. About that? About how, like, there is more and more complexity, but there's also, like, efficiencies that get brought into this process. You give a really good example of this from Exodus 20:26 that establishes the need for priests to cover their genitalia. And the passage says, you shall not go up by steps to my altar, so that your nakedness may not be exposed by it. And so, like, there's a way that you can read this and kind of go nuts. But then the rabbis kind of come back and say, no, this is unnecessary for actually learning about the halacha. Can you tell us about that process and this idea of, like, narrative efficiencies?
- [46:27]
C
Sure, yeah. Yeah. So you're right. We usually think of Midrash as striving forever. Greater complexity. Right. Rococo style. Right. But in fact, there is also a tendency towards simplicity. And the expression it is not necessary means that no fancy midrash is required when a simpler inference is available. And in the example you just cited, right. Regarding the priest, so they say, there's no need to derive the prohibition of exposing nakedness in the temple from the law that a ramp, right, rather than stairs, must lead to the altar, since it is stated explicitly right. Elsewhere that the priest should cover the nakedness. So the simple direct inference is preferable to the complex. And this is something we don't usually kind of tend to ascribe to Midrash. Right. And that's something I, you know, I keep realizing that kind of really local, specific reading of the mechanism of Drasha yields a different, you know, conclusion than kind of the impressionistic, you know, looking at Midrash. And therefore I focus much attention in the book and in general on terminology such as einotzarich, because it allows us to see Midrash in action and reveals that it is far more structured than it first appears. And I, I compare this to micro history, right? By examining the small stories, you can see things that a broader top down views usually misses.
- [48:11]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and one of the ways that, that you do that has to do with you know, kind of careful reading of, of particular passages. And then the other way is to think about kind of contrasts. So, you know, Midrash was not always the way that Jewish intellectuals spread scripture. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about kind of how different, you know, like first century, second century Jewish communities were reading these texts. So, like, we've got the Qumran community, we've got Jubilees that you brought up. How are those different from what goes on in these later Midrashic readings?
- [48:42]
C
Yeah, yeah. So in the second Temple period, a variety of interpretive techniques were in use. So in Jubilees, we have a rewritten Bible, right? Rewritten scripture. The text is retold in a way that resolves problems along the way. So for example, the story of the binding of Isaac is retold. So it is not God, but Satan. Mastema, right, is the one who initiate the dreadful act. At Qumran, we have pesher. And pesher is a translation of the prophetic text into meanings that are relevant to the community, right. That are about their own history, their own real. And the peshal there is carried out by the leader, right? The leader of the community who is himself a prophet. Okay. So the innovation of the rabbi in this context is that no divine inspiration is required. Rather, there is a technique that can be applied to everything, a running commentary followed by interpretation. Okay. And if you just use this technique, you can apply it to each and every word. And that's why they're so elaborate about this technique, because they want to. To teach you, right. How to do it. Not just the bottom line, but actually how to apply a second innovation that, you know, they want the student, right, to learn, right. The set of techniques so they can use it themselves. Right. At Kumra, by contrast, the technique is not made explicit since this would compromise the presentation of the interpretation as divine truth. Right. And for the rabbis, this is not a divine truth, and it's just, you know, using the right keys in order to open the text. And that has to do with the third innovation, the multiplicity of opinions side by side, Right. What they call. Right, another matter or another interpretation, no claim of a single ultimate truth. And this is quite a revolution in comparison to earlier, you know, modes of biblical interpretation.
- [51:09]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, like, one of the other contrasts that you bring up is that, like, this is a technique and as opposed to something like allegory, Right. That, like, there's still a lot of creativity that goes on in this kind of, you know, like the craft of reading. But it's really different than, like, what Paul's doing in Galatians with allegory. Right, but can you tell us about the difference? Like, you know, like, they're both creative, but allegory is something different from what the rabbis are doing. So what's the difference?
- [51:39]
C
Yes, so allegory is a Hellenistic interpretive method adopted by various Jewish writers, mainly in Alexandria, which he depicts, of course, with Philo in the first century ce. And the idea is that on the surface, the Torah consists of narratives, but at a deeper level, it is an eternal philosophy if only one knows how to interpret it. Thus let me give you an example. Abraham, Sarah and Hagar are not merely characters. They represent the journey of the soul toward wisdom. So Avraham is the seeker of wisdom, and Sarah is the wisdom itself. And Hagar is the path, the basic education one must undergo in order to reach Sara and generate true knowledge. Therefore, now you can understand the story. Avraham must have children with Hagar first and only then with Sarah. Right? That's the right path. So in this way, the story becomes something entirely different. The Torah is a Platonic philosophy concerned with the soul ascent to perfection. Right. And that's for Philo, right? That's what Torah is, if you read it correctly. Right. Paul is an interesting case because he's also familiar with this technique, but employs it differently, giving rise to what later becomes Christian typology. Right. In which the Old Testament prefigures the New. So Sa or Paul represent the believers from among the Gentiles. Right. So it's not a psychic, right. Drama, it's a historical drama. While Hagal represent the Torah given it Sinai. Right. And he has this brilliant move, Sinai Arabia. Arabia is where Hagar come from. Right. So, and I try to clarify these different modes of allegory and the relationship of Midrash to them in my book. But for, you know, Paul and allegory, I also recommend Erich Urbach's essay Figura, which is really, it's a classic piece, but it's really helpful here.
- [54:00]
B
Yeah, yeah. It's the first essay in the Amesis book for people looking at it. Yeah. You know, the, I, I think I set this up at the beginning. But you know, how do you see the Mishnah as like a new Torah relating to the Mishnah's, like Midrash's sometimes like atomistic analysis of the Bible, like the, these are often like the same people in the same places, Right. Like how do these texts end up relating to each other?
- [54:30]
C
Yeah, that's the million dollar question. Which means that I, I, I just don't know. I mean, these are two complementary orientations, right? On the one hand the Torah is the central focus, on the other hand, a body of tradition that no longer fits within the direct study of the Torah and therefore requires an independent container. Okay. But these are also two practices at play, interpretive and heuristic. And it is not clear at all how they were integrated. Did the rabbis study in the morning according to the order of scripture and in the afternoon according to thematic topics? Right. We don't know, but surely, right, they did both. And there is also multiple influences, right, in context, in their surrounding of scribes, of jurist, of priests. And there's also, and that's actually something that we tend to kind of overlook. There's also a diachronic story because one can trace a shift from independent Halachot to their grounding in scripture. Right. And the culmination of this shift is that the Babylonian Talmud ask for every Mishnah minalad, Right. What is the biblical source? Right. So in fact, the Mishnah's claim for kind of independence, right. Did not last long because once you get to the Talmudim, they already expect the Mishnah to dove date perfectly with Midrash, Right? So this process that started already with Midrash, Right. Come to full fruition with the Talmudim. And then the Mishnah is not considered anymore as a kind of independent source of oral Torah, but something that really goes hand in hand with the written Torah and thus, of course, create a whole new set of interpretive moves in order to, to make Mishnah. Right. Kind of work together with Midrash. So you can already see how these interpretive tools that were used in Midrash on the Torah are now used on the Mishnah. Right. And it goes, of course, on and on. So you see many open questions and a few answers.
- [56:58]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it's fascinating. There's so many questions to still keep going with this, you know, more books to be written, I guess. You know, like, I just to kind of, I don't know, start to wrap up. UC Press is, I think, rightly marketing this as a textbook, and I, I hope people use it for their classes. I found it very helpful. But I think, like, both parts of the book end with suggestions for future work. So what kind of scholarship do you hope a book like this ends up inspiring? Like, where do you want to see the field move?
- [57:30]
C
So there's been a long schism between philology and comparative theoretical inquiry in Talmudic studies. And if I'm ambitious, kind of, you know, my ultimate aim is to help bridge this divide. So the emphasis is on hands, on engagement, you know, on the one hand, on literacy. And literacy, and literacy. Because there's no way to, you know, to encounter this text in, you know, kind of generalized mode. You have to actually, you know, see how it works in action. But on the other hand, you know, I, I keep try, you know, linking it to the larger questions of interpretation of law of the sages within the broader context and, and, and, and so on. So both.
- [58:20]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I, it makes me think of the, like, distinction between allegory and kind of rabbinic readings, Right. That you can't just, like, flip to the end and be like, all right, well, here's the takeaway. Like, the book really does, like, move. It, like, works through these examples similar to how these texts work. All right, last question. What are you working on next?
- [58:41]
C
Oh, okay. So I'm writing a more specialized book titled what is Midrash? Which is aimed to present the result of my terminological investigations, which, you know, only a small portion of which I was able to include in this book. But I'm also translating two, you know, of my other books into English. The Secret History of the Jewish Holidays and the Talmud, the History of Learning with, with Yaakov Meil. So there's more things in the, in the pipeline.
- [59:13]
B
Oh, good, good, good, good. Well, I hope you'll come back on and talk with me about those when they're. When they're out, too. This was a real pleasure. Thank you so much. All right. Take care.
- [59:25]
C
Thank you.