20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs

Exegesis

Exegesis Moshe Greenberg Jewish exegesis works with a canon, or a set of inspired books, subject to the following conditions: (1) the number and the text of these books are fixed and may not be added to or brought up to date; (2) the books are authoritative-that is, they bind the Jews to a certain worldview and way of life; (3) they are perceived as a harmonious whole, conveying a coherent divine message for the guidance of the individual and the community. Since the Jews have clung to this canon through the ages and amid the most diverse circumstances, an unbridgeable gap in understanding and perceived relevance might well have interposed between them and these books were it not for the succession of exegetes whose ever-renewing interpretation of the Bible maintained its vitality for the faith community. The continuing sacred status of the Bible among the Jews is due entirely to their faithful work. The concerns ofJewish Bible exegesis arise from the aforesaid conditions; they include (1) how to enlarge the content of the closed canon so as to apply it to new topics; (2) how to render the fixed text pliable and subject to change in accord with arising cultural and intellectual needs; (3) how to 212 EXEGESIS relate to the original sense of Scripture after exegesis had departed from it; and (4) in modern times, how to maintain the sacred (or at least the special) status of the canonical literature in the face of scientific and historical challenges to the traditional conceptions of its truth and validity. Among the earliest aims of exegesis was the application of prophecy to current events. In the mid-second century B.C.E., when the canon of the Prophets had long been closed, the Seleucid persecution of pious Jews in Judea awakened interest in the ancient prophecies of consolation. Daniel 9 records the solution of a contemporary visionary to the riddle of the delayed fulfillment of God's promise revealed to Jeremiah (in the sixth century B.C.E.) to restore Jerusalem's glory in seventy years: seventy sabbaths of years-that is, 490-were meant. The sectarians of the Qumran commune in the Judean desert read into the ancient prophecies allusions to their situation in the second or first centuries B.C.E. Thus, their commentary to Habakkuk 2: 15 reads: "Its interpretation concerns the Wicked Priest [the archenemy of the sect] who pursued the Righteous Teacher [the inspired leader of the sect], to destroy him . . . in his exile abode, and at the appointed time of the rest-day of atonement appeared to them to destroy them and make them stumble [= err] on the sabbath-day fast of their rest." Legal exegesis derived new laws from the old scriptural ones, and connected traditional and innovated unwritten laws to biblical verses. For example, Hillel, in the first century B.C.E., once used three modes of interpretation in order to decide that the paschal sacrifice might be slaughtered even if it fell due on the sabbath, when ordinary slaughter is forbidden. These were (1) analogy alone: since the regular daily offering is a public sacrifice and so is the paschal offering, the latter overrides sabbath prohibitions , as does the former; (2) argument afortiori: if the regular daily offering , for whose omission there is no penalty of excision, overrides the sabbath prohibitions, the paschal offering, for whose omission that penalty is exacted, surely overrides it; and (3) argument from identical phrases: in both offerings the expression "in its appointed time" appears, hence rules governing the time of each are the same. Seven hermeneutical principles or modes (middot) are ascribed to Hillel; Rabbi Ishmael, a second-century C.E. sage, is purported to be the author of an expanded list of thirteen.l Reference to these modes is surprisingly infrequent in talmudic literature; in effect the constructive work of the legists proceeded very freely. During this age of exuberant creativity, a period extending from the second century B.C.E. to the sixth century C.E., no preference was given to the plain (contextual) sense of the text over any other sense derived from or based on it, however fancifully. Indeed, it was a cardinal talmudic prin- EXEGESIS 213 ciple that every biblical utterance was polysemous: alongside its contextual sense it might yield many others when taken in isolation. The principle was "heard" in a prophetic passage, itself treated as...