Concepts of Scripture in the School of Rashi 103Th is opening comment addresses the very essence of Torah.2 Contrary to
the Christian charge that Jews slavishly and carnally adhered to “the Law”
and missed the “true” allegorical meaning of Scripture (that bespoke Chris-
tianity),3 Rashi avers that the Torah is Divine Instruction that includes far
more than law alone. Rashi claims that the Torah deliberately encompasses
as well the sacred, instructive narrative of Genesis and the beginning of
Exodus.4 Th us, for Rashi as for the rabbis of classical antiquity, “Torah” is
not only law but also narrative, poetry, prophecy, indeed, even archival list;
it is pointedly not Christian nomos (law) but rabbinic oraita (instruction),
all-purposeful, Divine teaching and instruction.
To gain an understanding of the Jewish conception of Scripture among
Rashi and the other rabbinic exegetes of the northern French school, one
needs to turn to a quintessential statement of rabbinic thought to which
these medieval scholars were themselves heir: the Mishna famously states,
“Moses received Torah from Sinai.”5 Here one must make clear that what is
not being stated is that “Moses received the Torah (that is, the Pentateuch)
at (the revelation of God to Israel) at Sinai”; such a statement would surely
not have required confi rmation by the Mishna! Rather, the statement in-
dicates the essential rabbinic claim about Torah, namely, that alongside
the Written Torah (the Pentateuch and, for that matter, the entire Hebrew
Bible, Tanakh), God also revealed the Oral Torah, that is, all of the teach-
ings that are typically understood by the rubric “Rabbinic Judaism.” For
Rashi and the northern French rabbinic exegetes whom this chapter will
treat as the “School of Rashi,” this belief about the Divine nature of both
the Written Torah and the Oral Torah is the sine qua non of their entire
“theology of Scripture” (were they to have considered having one).6 For
these French rabbis, as for their ancient forebears and contemporaries, the
concept “Torah” could not only mean the Hebrew Scriptures but rather en-
compassed all of the midrashic teachings of the ancient Sages, both legal
and moral, as well as the conventions of Rabbinic Judaism conveyed by
the term halakhah, the practice of Jewish law. In a sense, a medieval mid-
rash, Exodus Rabba (47:1), envisions this “theology of Torah” most com-
prehensively: “At the moment when the Holy One was revealed at Sinai to
give Torah to Israel, He said it to Moses according to its order: Scripture,
Mishna, Talmud and Aggadah, as it is said: God spoke all these words (Exo-
dus 20:1): even that which a student asks a rabbi was already said by the
Holy One to Moses at that moment [of revelation at Sinai].”
In the foregoing discussion, I have employed the term midrash, and it is
high time that we arrive at an understanding of this concept. Th e Hebrew