The Midrash on Proverbs (review)

Hebrew Studies 37 (1996) 212 Reviews very familiar with the content Bronner presents or new to the material, she has succeeded in providing a volume which is both illuminating and insightful . Alice L. Laffey College ofthe Holy Cross Worcester, MA 01610 THE MIDRASH ON PROVERBS. Burton L. Visotzky, trans. Yale Judaica Series 27. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Cloth, $28.50. Midrash Mishle, the midrash on Proverbs, is a compact, exegetical midrash that ranges over all thirty-one chapters of the book of Proverbs, but skips large sections of the text (including all of chaps. 3 and 18 and most of chaps. 4, 7, 12, 17,24,27, and 29). It bears some stylistic affinities to Seder Eliahu and the Tanhuma midrashim and shares some materials with Avot de Rabbi Natan. Its castigation of "the person who comes before God with [knowledge of] Scripture in his hand, but none of Mishnah" (chap. 10 [po 56]; cf. Seder Eliahu Rabbah, chaps. [14] 15f.), together with other statements that appear to be directed against Qaraites, suggest a date in the early Islamic period (eighth through tenth centuries C.E.; Visotzky argues for a ninth-century dating). The work's provenance remains uncertain ; while stylistic affinities with other midrashim suggest Palestinian origin, the references to Shi'ur Qomah (meditations on the physical dimensions of God's body; chap. 10 [pp. 57-58]) and the endorsement of at least one synagogue custom mooted by Rabbinites and Qaraites in the diaspora (chap. 1 [po 19]) might support a locale in Babylonia (pp. 10-12). Burton L. Visotzky's literate and thoroughly idiomatic annotated translation of the text, offered here in the format of the Yale Judaica Series, concludes the tripartite study of this work that was inaugurated in his 1982 Ph.D. dissertation at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and continued in his 1990 publication of a critical, annotated edition of the text (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America). Visotzky supplies a carefully reasoned fourteen-page introduction to the work. His annotations to the translation strike an admirable balance between brevity and thoroughness ; nothing critical for an understanding of the text is missing here. (Lengthier annotations may sometimes be found in the dissertation and the Hebrew Studies 37 (1996) 213 Reviews critical edition; for the scholarly reader, none of the three publications renders the other two superfluous.) Useful indices are provided as well. In his introduction, Visotzsky characterizes Midrash Mishle as marking "a watershed in the historic development of midrashic literature. for it stands at the point where Midrash gave way to commentary" (p. 2). This over-dramatizes matters, I believe, for the specific stylistic traits of the text to which he refers-notably the frequent "contextual" linking of a verse to the one that precedes and/or follows it--can be found in other midrashic literature of roughly the same period or slightly earlier (specifically, Seder Eliahu and some of the Tanhuma materials). While not found too frequently in the earlier Byzantine Palestinian midrashim. the technique is nonetheless thoroughly midrashic in its deployment here: a series of sequential verses is shown to be thematically or consequentially linked through the construction of a thematic "essay" or "narrative" that moves the reader from one verse to the next. The transition is often made through the use of a rhetorical question (such as, "What is written following this?" and "How do we know this? From what Solomon said..."). The rhetorical markers thus are common midrashic ones and differ from those found in, for example, Saadia's Ta/sir. The closest stylistic parallel is probably that of the exegetical "essays" in Seder Eliahu. That the use of this style in both documents might relate to cultural preferences in the Islamic milieu, as Visotzky suggests, certainly remains a possibility, but the connection. I think, is not so straightforward. In the context of an excellent translation, the following minor observations may be made: In note 3 on page 36, Visotzky notes the oddity of his English rendering , "for they lent primogeniture to good deeds," for the equally odd Hebrew phrase, lbkrw m(sy rwbym. in the context of a rabbinic interpretation of Exod 4:22, which refers...