Midrashic Techniques Between Halakha and Aggada: A New Approach

• In Event: What is Commentary?

Abstract

Scholars tend to distinguish sharply between Midrashic techniques in the legal (halakhic) and the non legal (aggadic) sections of Tannaitic Midrash, and to see the former type as much more technical and restricted, since the legal homilies, so the story goes, are meant first and foremost to ground existing laws. As a result most of the hermeneutic oriented research on Tannaitic Midrash are concentrated on the few large aggadic sections (see e.g. Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash on the aggadic sections of the Mekhilta and Fraade, From Tradition to Commentary, on the aggadic sections of Sifre Deut.), independently of and in isolation from the halakhic sections. This resulted in a dichotomous accounts of Midrash halakha vs. Midrash aggada. In this paper I will argue that this picture is distorted. When leaving the isolated aggadic sections and analyzing the aggada that is imbedded in the legal sections a very different picture raises, and the proximity between the technique, terminology, as well as interpretive assumptions are found to be much greater than assumed. This, in turn, demands a reevaluation of our most basic assumptions regarding Midrashic hermeneutic. In the first part of the paper I will summarize my findings on this issue, and in the second I will exemplify them through a close reading of several homilies from tractate Pascha which opens the Mekhilta.

Author

• Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Tel Aviv University