“To settle the plain meaning of the verse”: Studies in biblical exegesis Edited by Sara Japhet and Eran Viezel (review)

This is an anthology of papers presented at a conference held in 2009 in memory of Dr. Sara Kamin, a promising young lecturer in the Department of Bible at the Hebrew University at the time she passed away in 1989. She wrote her dissertation on Rashi’s biblical commentaries, published in Hebrew as Rashi: the Peshat and the Derash (Jerusalem, 1986). Central to Kamin’s work was the idea that peshat must be measured not against what the reader thinks it is but rather in light of what Rashi thought it to be. The book initiated a period of serious research into Rashi’s methods of interpretation that widened into a study of the entire northern French school of commentators who followed. No wonder her book is termed a classic by one of the authors in this volume.

Kamin’s ouvre stands at the heart of Mordechai Z. Cohen’s paper (54 pages), “Reflections on the Conception of Peshuto shel Miqra at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century.” He outlines four goals: (1) to sum up Kamin’s ideas as they relate to Rashi and his sense of method in exegesis, particularly his sense of the peshat; (2) to review the criticisms voiced regarding her conclusions and to respond to them; (3) to execute a comparative study of the term peshuto shel miqra as understood in the Babylonian Spanish exegetical tradition; (4) to explicate Maimonides’ ideas about the peshat, despite the fact that he was not, strictly speaking, a biblical commentator.

Cohen finds that Maimonides saw the expression peshuto shel miqra (the contextual meaning of the text) through halakhic lenses: a law written in the Bible had the halakic standing of a mitzvah de-oraita, a biblical ruling. Such laws had to be understood as peshuto shel miqra, the straightforward meaning of the verse. If, however, a law was derived through kias or analogy, namely by one of the rules of midrashic interpretation, then its standing was mi-derabbanan, a rabbinic law. These ideas were based on Islamic law, which made the same differentiation between laws derived from tradition (naqal) and those laws whose origin was human reason (^{aqal). Cohen concludes his paper by noting that the word “peshat” and its variants are culturally bound terms, meaning different things in different times and places.

Haggai Ben Shammai (12 pages) traces the rabbinic maxim, “The Torah speaks in human language,” from its first appearances in the Tannaitic halakic midrash, where it served to prevent deducing laws from doublets (e.g., ish ish, ganov yigganev). In the Middle Ages, the maxim became a wide exegetical principle by which to explain anthropomorphisms in the Bible. The earliest exegete to cite the rule in this sense was Jacob Qirqisani, a Karaite scholar who lived in the first half of the tenth century and a contemporary of Saadya. Under its rubric, Qirqisani included the problem of an incorporate deity who could nevertheless speak and listen to humans.

Ben Shammai then inquires if biblical order, whether chronological or thematic, was also to be judged by this rule: was human literary perception to be the standard of proper arrangement in the Bible? Yusef ibn Nuh, a Jerusalem Karaite from the end of the tenth century, expected the Bible to be perfectly arranged in the way of human literary works, as did Yefet ben Ali and others. However, Saadya disagreed: the arrangement of the Torah was not to be judged by human standards, for if the commandments are not arranged systematically, it is the job of God’s worshippers to study the Torah and organize it as they see fit. It would seem that Saadya Gaon was referring to the composition of the Mishnah, which grouped the Law in six orders (sedarim). The implicit reference to it was intended as a polemical barb against the Karaites, who rejected all rabbinic writings.

Ronela Merdler (30...