110 R o b e rt A. H a r r i s
[also] said about it: “No Scriptural passage ever escapes the hold of its
context” (BT Shabbat 63a). For we have no greater principle than contex-
tual exegesis.
Th erefore do I say that you have no greater principle in [the study of ]
Scripture than contextual exegesis. Th us did Solomon, King of Israel, say:
Incline your ear . . . to the words of the sages, apply your heart to my wis-
dom (Proverbs 22:17). Th e explanation [of this verse] is: even though it is a
commandment for you to “hear the words of the Sages,” apply your heart
to knowing me — according to the body of the word, “to know them” [i.e.,
the Sages] Scripture does not say; rather to know me [i.e., God, through
Scripture]. Th us far have I explained them [biblical passages] according
the Bible’s style and its context.Again, what interests us here is Kara’s valuation of Scripture’s status as “To-
rah,” that is, a source of religious teaching in ways that are independent of
the traditional rabbinic posture. While Kara does not articulate precisely
what he might mean by the distinction between knowing God through the
intervention of rabbinic midrash versus knowing God “directly,” as it were,
through Scripture, his latent theology seems to adumbrate the sola scrip-
tura (by Scripture alone) arguments advocated by early, “proto- Protestant”
Christian reformers (Waldensians, Wycliffi tes, and others), to wit, that
study of Scripture alone (independent of the theological and liturgical tra-
ditions of the Western Church) was suffi cient to lead the good Christian
life.24 While ostensibly a similar sentiment animated early Karaite Judaism
as well (particularly in the 9th to 11th centuries), no rabbinic authority ever
came close to the same type of argument.
Th e dedication to wholly contextual, peshat exegesis, irrespective of the
challenges it might off er to traditional, midrashically based rabbinic Juda-
ism, held true for certain northern French exegetes — even when they ad-
dressed biblical legal texts, the rabbinic halakhic (legal) interpretation for
which is far from contextual. R. Samuel ben Meir (Rashbam) was a grand-
son of Rashi and one of his most distinguished disciples, and in the midst
of the 12th-century Renaissance, he became one of the most prominent ex-
ponents of the contextual ( peshat) method of biblical exegesis. Rashbam
famously adjures midrashic interpretation in his own Torah commentary
while steadfastly professing his loyalty to rabbinic interpretations as the
necessary concomitant to ongoing Jewish living; thus, he drew a distinc-
tion between “reading” a text and observing the norms that rabbinic Juda-
ism would posit were inherent in the text. While he never wrote a treatise