Jewish Concepts of Scripture

Concepts of Scripture in the School of Rashi 115

northern French rabbinic exegetes. Let us begin with a portion of R. Yosef
Kara’s comment on 1 Samuel 9:9. Th is biblical verse calls attention to the
distance in time between its author and the events being narrated: “Earlier
in Israel, when a man went to inquire of God, he would say, ‘Let’s go to the
seer,’ for what today we call a prophet used to be called a seer.” Reading this
verse, Kara thought it utterly impossible to deduce that Samuel could have
written it:

Th us you learn that when this book was written, people had already re-

sumed calling a seer a “prophet,” from which it follows that this book was

not written during the days of Samuel. For when you review all of Scrip-

tures, you do not fi nd that a prophet was called a “seer” in any place ex-

cept here, where [Saul] says: where is the house of the seer? (1 Samuel 9:18).

Th us, you have learned that it was the generation of Samuel that is called

formerly in Israel (1 Samuel 9:9), or the generation immediately aft erward,

and it is regarding that generation that Scripture says for the prophet of

today [was formerly called a seer]. Our Rabbis, whose memory is a bless-

ing, said that Samuel wrote his own book (BT Bava Batra 14b); May the

One who gives light to the earth turn darkness into light and the crooked

into the straight! 32

Kara’s humorous “prayer” aside, a number of serious issues are at stake
here: “Who wrote the Bible?” is indeed one of them. But perhaps no less
signifi cant is the challenge issued against the authority of the Sages of the
Talmud, whose conclusions could be and were subjected to the rigors of
peshat analysis. However, despite this comment’s invective tone, nowhere
in it does Kara call into question the sanctity of the biblical text or the God
who oversees the conduct of the world. Th is is an important point: from
the vantage of the literary analysis to which he subjected the text, Kara
could consider the human authorship of Scripture — even a diff erent hu-
man authorship than that sanctioned by the authority of the ancient rab-
binic tradition — and still consider it “sacred Scripture.”
In considering the question “Who wrote the Bible?” R. Eliezer of Beau-
gency was one of several northern French rabbinic exegetes who consid-
ered the role of the redactor in the composition of the biblical text. Not
much biographical data is known about Eliezer, though he was most likely
a disciple of Rashbam and was active in the mid-12th century.33 A promi-
nent example of his awareness of the redaction of biblical books is his com-
mentary on Ezekiel 1:1 – 4. Observing that verses 2 – 3, cast as a third-person