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Preface
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Preface Standing at the conclusion ofthe book that follows, I can barely recall when and how it began. I first engaged, in a serious way, the Sifre's commentary on the Book of Deuteronomy during the 1975-1976 academic year in a midrash text seminar taught by Judah Goldin at the University of Pennsylvania, where I was then a graduate student. We focused our attention on the Sifre's commentary on the lection Ha'azinu, or the Song of Moses (Deut. 32), several parts ofwhich proccupy me again in the course of this book. Although I had and would study in like detail many other rabbinic texts, midrashic as well as nonmidrashic, the Sifre took a special hold on me that it has still not loosened. Why that was and continues to be I am not sure. My guess is that it has to do with two combined features ofthe Sifre's commentary to Deuteronomy, with which I trust the reader will soon become abundantly familiar: the beckoning depths ofits teaching and the beguiling complexities of its text. When, upon revising my doctoral dissertation as my first book (Enosh and His Generation: Pre-Israelite Hero and History in Post-Biblical Interpretations, SBLMS 30 [Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1984]) I sought to set my sights on the next major project, I set them on the Sifre, turning from the history oftradition across many texts of biblical interpretation to the configuration of many traditions within a single text of biblical commentary. I have been pursuing this project now for eight years, leading from its first, tentative fruits ("Sifre Deuteronomy 26 [ad Deut. 3:23]: How Conscious the Composition?" HUCA 54 [1983]: 245-301) to the present, fuller harvest, having turned aside frequently along the way to till adjacent fields. Those adjacent fields, however, have been not only topical and textual but also methodological, and this book represents as much the fruits ofsuch disciplinary cultivation, especially in the unabashedly eclectic intersection of historical and literary criticism. That restless intersection is best denoted as cultural history, and it is toward an as yet unattempted cultural history of ancient Judaism in general, and of ancient rabbinic Judaism in particular, that this study seeks to take a first step. Because of the length oftime that I have thus labored both in the text ofthe Sifre and in the interdisciplinary honing of the methodological tools of that labor, many individuals and institutions have sustained me in my slow progress, and they are now to be thanked. xi xii From Tradition To Commentary From the beginning I have been fortunate to receive the financial support from several institutions to allow me to pursue my studies in periodic freedom from my other academic responsibilities and to offset the costs of research and text processing: a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Research Stipend in 1982, a Morse Fellowship from Yale University in 1983-84, an American Philosophical Society Research Grant in the summer of 1984, when I was a guest at Mishkenot Sha'ananim in Jerusalem, a sabbatical from Yale in the fall of 1986, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for the whole of 1988, and grants from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation for the same period, a fellowship during the fall of 1988 and the summer of 1989 at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and several research grants from the A. Whitney Griswold Faculty Fund at Yale. The following libraries and their keepers graciously provided me with photographs of manuscripts in their holdings, thereby permitting me to glimpse the interpretive fluidy of the Sifre's own text that lies masked behind its printed pages: British Library (London). Bodleian Library (Oxford), Casanata Library (Rome), Hebrew Union College Library (Cincinnati), Jewish National and University Library (Jerusalem), Jewish Theological Seminary of America (New York) Staatsbibliothek (East Berlin). Over the years I have had the opportunity to present parts of this book in far rougher oral form to scholarly audiences: two meetings of the Literary Study of Rabbinic Literature Group of the Society of Biblical Literature (December 1984 and December 1987), Judaic Studies faculty seminars at Yale (November 1984 and May 1985) and Wesleyan University (December 1985), a Midrash Colloquium at Yale (May 1988), a meeting of the Biblical Exegesis Group of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University (October 1988), and a seminar at the Seminary of Judaic Studies in Jerusalem (November 1988). The...