112 R o b e rt A. H a r r i s
12th-century exegetes invent “the reader” as we have come to understand
the term. Before their time, Jews and Christians who considered the bibli-
cal text did so primarily as “religious truth seekers” (again, the root de-
rash); they were determined to fi nd in Scripture support for or evidence
of their own (Jewish or Christian) religious views and practices. Follow-
ing the advent of contextual exegesis, “readers” could consider dimensions
of the meaning of biblical texts without necessary regard for religious un-
derpinnings — this was a paradigm shift whose proportions we have yet to
fully comprehend.29 Th us, in Rashbam’s introduction to the legal corpus
of the Pentateuch, he was essentially advocating a place for an indepen-
dent, grammatically based, and literarily intuitive reading whose theoreti-
cal value, he believed, had been established by the ancient rabbinic author-
ity in the axiomatic talmudic ruling oft cited by his grandfather Rashi and
others of his teachers: “no Scriptural passage ever escapes the hold of its
context.” It is true that Rashbam says even less about the possible religious
value of this level of meaning than did his elder colleague R. Yosef Kara.
However, in what Rashbam believed to be the sanctioning of peshat en-
dorsed by the talmudic sages, we might see yet another self-validating ap-
praisal of the Bible’s own context as independent, sacred meaning.
Rashbam’s willingness to engage in contextual exegesis that is at vari-
ance with rabbinic interpretation of legal passages in the Torah is as stead-
fast and constant as he proclaims here programmatically: he will interpret
biblical law as just that — biblical law, not rabbinic halakhah. Whereas
Rashi would, on occasion, deviate from accepted rabbinic interpretation
of biblical law,30 Rashbam does this all through his commentary, as any
perusal of his interpretations of, for example, the entire Deuteronomic le-
gal corpus demonstrates. One famous case involves Exodus 13:9. Talmudic
tradition understands this passage as requiring Jews during their morning
prayers to don a set of leather boxes (known as tefi llin) fi lled with minia-
ture parchment scrolls of selected Torah passages. Rashbam, however, does
not understand these verses as referring to a ritual practice at all. Rather, he
maintains that they present a fi guration of “mindfulness” on an intellectual
or spiritual level. (It is important to recall that Rashbam nonetheless fully
accepted the authority of the Talmudic requirement to practice the tefi llin
ritual daily; the authority of the religious law for him is guaranteed by the
law’s presence in the Oral Torah and does not depend on the talmudic rab-
bis’ attempt to anchor it exegetically in Exodus 13.9.) Again, unlike R. Yosef
Kara, Rashbam does not articulate any ideational or religious orientation
to his contextual interpretations; apparently, he relies on his repeated claim