From Sermon To Commentary: Expounding The Bible In Talmudic Babylonia
Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, 2005 - 164 pages
The
Bible has always been vital to Jewish religious life, and it has been
expounded in diverse ways. Perhaps the most influential body of Jewish
biblical interpretation is the Midrash that was produced by expositors
during the first five centuries CE. Many such teachings are collected in
the Babylonian Talmud, the monumental compendium of Jewish law and lore
that was accepted as the definitive statement of Jewish oral tradition
for subsequent generations.However, many of the Talmud's interpretations
of biblical passages appear bizarre or pointless. From Sermon to
Commentary: Expounding the Bible in Talmudic Babyloniatries to explain
this phenomenon by carefully examining representative passages from a
variety of methodological approaches, paying particular attention to
comparisons with Midrash composed in the Land of Israel.Based on this
investigation, Eliezer Segal argues that the Babylonian sages were
utilizing discourses that had originated in Israel as rhetorical sermons
in which biblical interpretation was being employed in an imaginative,
literary manner, usually based on the interplay between two or more
texts from different books of the Bible. Because they did not possess
their own tradition of homiletic preaching, the Babylonian rabbis
interpreted these comments without regard for their rhetorical
conventions, as if they were exegetical commentaries, resulting in the
distinctive, puzzling character of Babylonian Midrash.
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