Concepts of Scripture in the School of Rashi 117author, and — for Rashi — it probably in some sense did refer to God). Th e
same is pointedly not true with regard to his grandson Rashbam’s gloss,
the implications of which I would like to closely examine. Rashbam writes
as follows:
Th e following is the true contextual meaning of the passage, which fol-
lows the Scriptural pattern of regularly anticipating and explaining some
matter which, though unnecessary to the immediate context, serves the
purpose of elucidating some matter to be mentioned further on, in an-
other passage. . . . Moreover, this entire section, concerning the six days
of creation — Moses wrote it for anticipatory purposes to make explicit to
you (the reader) what God said when he gave the Torah (Exodus 20:8 – 11):
Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy . . . for in six days did YHWH
make heaven and earth and sea, and all that is in them, and he rested on
the seventh day. For this reason it is written (Gen. 1:31), there was evening
and there was morning, the sixth day, a reference to that same sixth day, the
end of the creation process, of which God spoke when he gave the Torah.
Th at is why Moses related to Israel this entire chapter about creation — in
order to inform them that what God said was true. In other words, Moses
said, “Do you think that this world has forever existed in the way that you
now see it, fi lled with all good things? Th at is not the case. Rather, bereshit
bara elohim — that is, at the beginning of the creation of the heaven and
the earth, when the uppermost heavens and the earth had already been
created for some undetermined length of time — then, the earth which al-
ready existed, was unformed and void — that is, there was nothing in it.”I want to call your attention to Rashbam’s observation of the literary device
of prolepsis,36 or literary anticipation (foreshadowing) at play here in the
opening narrative of the Bible: “Moreover, this entire section, concerning
the six days of creation — Moses wrote it for anticipatory purposes to make
explicit to you . . .” More literally rendered, Rashbam writes that “Moses
placed this section early” or “Moses moved this section forward.” In other
words, in contradistinction to the ancient midrash (rooted in Proverbs
8:22), alluded to by Rashi, that God created Torah “at the beginning of
His way” — even before God had created the world — Rashbam considers
Moses to be the author of the Torah: it is Moses who chooses to include
the Creation narrative at the beginning of the Torah, so that the reader will
not “be astonished” (sheh-lo titmah) when reading the Sinai narrative (spe-
cifi cally, Exodus 20:8 – 11) that makes passing reference to God’s creation