Jewish Concepts of Scripture

Concepts of Scripture in the School of Rashi 105

tural supremacy of the Koran and the Arabic language — which themselves
eventually led to the biblical exegesis of Abraham Ibn Ezra.11 Th ese sub-
jects are, alas, outside the bounds of this chapter. For our purposes, the
rise of contextual exegesis in northern France ought to be seen against the
background both of the 12th-century Renaissance (in Christian Europe)
and, ultimately, of the world of Judeo-Islamic scholarship.12 Briefl y put, the
scholars who championed this type of exegesis substituted the approach
of those still committed to “omnisignifi cant exegesis” with other mod-
els rooted in such rabbinic expressions as ain mikra yotzei midey peshuto
(Scripture does not escape the clutches of its context) or dibra Torah kilshon
bnai adam (Torah has spoken according the language of humankind).13
Th ese latter sentiments, although also found in ancient rabbinic sources,
were not much employed in generations immediately aft er the rabbinic pe-
riod and were, in any case, never developed as overarching methodologies
of interpretation.
Granted that medieval peshat or contextual exegesis is not midrashic,
then, what exactly is it? Aft er all, I have just claimed that it is “rooted in
(ancient) rabbinic expressions,” so how may we defi ne it as the essentially
new, non-midrashic type of reading it came to embody? We ought to ad-
mit one problem from the outset: the medieval exegetes who developed
the concept of peshat never defi ned either their terminology or their meth-
odology, and modern scholars have struggled to achieve consensus about
just such a defi nition.14 Perhaps the greatest advance in our understanding
of medieval peshat exegesis was authored by the late Israeli scholar Sarah
Kamin. In writing her magnum opus about the most infl uential of the me-
dieval exegetes, Rashi, Kamin defi ned peshat in the following, concise for-
mulation: Peshat is

an explanation (of a biblical passage) according to its language; its syn-

tactic structure; its (immediate) literary context; its literary type, within

a dynamic interaction among all of these components. Put diff erently, an

interpretation according to peshat is an interpretation that considers all of

the linguistic foundations in its literary composition, and assigns to each

of them an understanding within a complete reading. 15

To be sure, we should keep in mind that this is a modern assessment, how-
ever insightful; again, none of the medieval exegetes ever seemed to feel
the need to off er such a precise defi nition of either the term peshat or of the
method that came to be associated with it. Moreover, we should remember