Scripture as Logos: Rabbi Ishmael and the Origins of Midrash (review)

Azzan Yadin is to be congratulated on a lucid and thoughtful account of the hermeneutics of R. Ishmael's school. He shows himself to be in full control of the philological studies while implementing a new approach nurtured by a firm grasp of hermeneutics.

The first five chapters focus on terminology and exegetical rules (middot)¹ employed by the two basic works under scrutiny—the Sifre on Numbers and Mekilta on Exodus. In a nuanced reading, Yadin argues that the terminology and the way it is deployed reveal an approach to Scripture that held that "interpretation ventures into areas that Scripture has vacated of meaning, but recedes in the face of meaning" (p. 61). This is characterized on another occasion as "the restrained interpretive practices found in the Rabbi Ishmael midrashim" (p. 76).² I find this characterization enlightening, though to my mind it does not necessarily contradict the regnant theories of midrash with which Yadin enters into dialogue.³ After a sensitive elucidation of the personification of the words torah and ha-katuv (p. 32) Yadin goes so far as to sum up the view of the Ishmael school in the following manner: Scripture, figured as HA-KATUV, is a teacher of halakhah.

The final two chapters attempt to situate the Ishmael school's approach to Scripture in the broader context of rabbinic literature and theology and Second Temple literature and theology. These chapters are necessarily more speculative but rest firmly on the findings of the previous chapters and are well reasoned and fairly cautious. I have some doubts about how pertinent the comparison of the Ishmael view of interpretation to Christian Logos theology really is. A literary personification of Scripture as teacher, even if we accept that characterization, remains just that. Yadin well delineates the Ishmael school's "reticence" and its distancing approach to divine revelation. Do those findings permit the conclusion that "the understanding of Christ in the Christos Didaskolos tradition and Rabbi Ishmael's representation of Scripture as personified teacher—Nomos Didaskolos—is part of such a shared reservoir of theological language and imagery" (p. 174)? It seems to stretch the personifying characterization a bit far.

The sixth chapter of the book is an intriguing conceptualization of a midrashic technique that attributes to Scripture a literary strategy of being "presponsive"—anticipating the reader's response in order to implant a new teaching (p. 130). This is an interesting and fruitful idea that will surely stimulate scholarly thought.

The book is a mosaic of sources cited in the original, translated, and analyzed in an effort to draw an overall view of the interpretive preferences of the school of Ishmael. Such a large endeavor opens itself to manifold pitfalls. While relying on Lauterbach for translation of the Mekilta and Hammer for the Sifre Deuteronomy, the translations of the Sifre Numbers are the author's own (p. xiii). They are generally precise though here and there less than "literal." Two examples: on page 55: SifreNum 157, le-hafsik ha-'inyan rendered infelicitously as "to divide (or delimit or define) the account"; on page 130 SifreNum 124 ha-'asikin ba-parah rendered "those who have contact with the cow." But the greatest difficulty in canvassing and explicating many individual sources is the concomitant need to fully consult all the possible parallels. Yadin himself demonstrates the importance of following up parallels and alternate views in his treatment of SifreNum 56 on the divine voice that takes on new import when compared to R. Akiva's (and others') views elsewhere (pp. 40–42). One has a nagging feeling that parallels left unreported and/or unexamined attenuate parts of the argument. An example would be the treatment of SifreNum 160 that would very profitably have been compared to tSan 3.6 and even more so to Mekhilta Kaspa 20. Such is the case also with terminology that appears in parallels of both schools and is alluded to but not analyzed...