The Challenge of Received Tradition: Dilemmas of Interpretation in Radak’s Biblical Commentaries by Naomi Grunhaus (review)

David Kimhi (Radak), the thirteenth-century southern French biblical commentator, stands out as one of the most important and influential offshoots of the school of Jewish scriptural exegesis cultivated in Muslim Spain, which took as its primary aim discovery and communication of scriptural “plain sense” (peshaṭ). Whether in its Spanish variant, or in others developed in diverse centers of medieval Jewish learning, the quest for peshaṭ often yielded biblical interpretations very different from the ones produced by the more fanciful midrashic hermeneutic of the revered rabbinic sages of antiquity. For his part, Radak remained allegiant to his Spanish predecessors’ peshatist orientation. At the same time, he departed from their model by incorporating large amounts of midrash into his exegetical works. This departure raises challenging questions concerning his exegetical method and aims. On what basis did Radak bring together the differing interpretive modes of peshaṭ and derash? More fundamentally, why did he opt for this dual commentarial procedure in the first place? These questions and their cognates lie at the center of Naomi Grunhaus’s study, the first systematic and comprehensive investigation of the interplay of peshaṭ and derash in Radak’s commentaries. In tackling them, Grunhaus furnishes ample evidence for her contention that although Radak remained true to the Spanish peshaṭ tradition, “midrashic methods and rabbinic teachings were often not supplemental, but actually critical to Radak’s exegetical program”(p. 9).

The investigation unfolds in an introduction, six chapters, a brief conclusion, and an appendix that offers an extended analysis of a single exegetical comment. It is filled out by copious endnotes, a bibliography, and some fastidiously wrought indices. Throughout, Grunhaus conducts a respectful dialogue with earlier scholarship, justifying, as appropriate, her final holdings (e.g, p. 169 n. 44, p. 192 n. 21, p. 193 n. 30).

The first chapter explores Radak’s interpretive aims as they emerge from statements of exegetical intent. For example, Radak speaks of his plan to adduce midrashim for “devotees of homiletical interpretation.” Read in larger context, this formulation might suggest that he considered the midrashic dimension of his commentaries merely supplemental but Grunhaus, reading the statement in light of the “earnest nature” of Radak’s engagement with midrash in the commentary in question, proposes that Radak saw such devotion as “a legitimate and desirable attribute in a reader” (p. 30). On the whole, she finds that the methodological statements yield a complex picture. In short, Radak acknowledged the necessity of some rabbinic dicta as “integral to his commentaries,” saw others as “only supplemental,” but “acquiesced” to the notion that these latter were worth quoting despite their secondary role (p. 34).

In the subsequent chapters, Grunhaus classifies and characterizes Radak’s variegated invocations of and responses to rabbinic views as embedded in actual interpretations of particular verses and biblical books. Against the preponderance of earlier scholarship—or rather, as a corrective to the shifting formulations often found therein with respect to Radak’s attitude toward midrash (p. 178 n. 10)—Grunhaus stresses that the acceptance of elements of the rabbinic legacy far outweighs the critical response to it in Radak’s commentaries. At the same time, she gives Radak’s challenges to midrash, both in narrative and legal contexts, their due. Most groundbreaking is the last chapter (pp. 123–142), which studies a very limited but still striking phenomenon: Radak’s departures from legal (halakic) midrashim. As elsewhere in Grunhaus’s book, Radak emerges here as a commentator in step more with segments of northern French biblical scholarship than its Spanish counterpart (pp. 127–128).

Beyond summoning examples from across the totality of Radak’s ample exegetical corpus (which the author glides through with enviable ease), Grunhaus’s analysis incorporates a number of variables that lend it interpretive depth. These include the relationship between “theory” (as set forth in methodological statements) and praxis (as evidenced in actual interpretive acts); chronological evolution in Radak’s...