118 R o b e rt A. H a r r i s
of the world. Brilliantly, Rashbam imagines even the circumstances that
would lead Moses, as author/redactor of God’s Written Torah, to decide
to include the Creation narrative at the beginning of the Torah: Moses ob-
serves, as it were, the astonished Israelites at the foot of Mount Sinai who
are hearing for the fi rst time that the God who took them out of Egypt
is the same God who created the world! Th is God, while communicating
in oral, Divine speech to the entire nation on Mount Sinai, surprises the
Israelites in the course of commanding them to remember the Sabbath, in
commemoration of God’s own rest following the work of creation. Moses,
in consideration of the Israelites’ surprise and in anticipation of that of the
future reader, decides to include the Creation narrative we call Genesis 1.
Th e point is that, for Rashbam, it is Moses who “authors” the written text of
Torah, or at least “arranges” the structure of the Torah’s contents — and one
can be certain that Rashbam would feel that this does not detract from the
sanctity of the Torah one iota. God communicates to Moses and to the na-
tion — and Moses faithfully represents the Divine communication in writ-
ten discourse. Th is is a far cry from the conception of Torah in the ancient
rabbinic midrash invoked by Rashi — and even farther from the one, cited
by Nahmanides, that imagines the “original Torah” as a mystical “black fi re
on white fi re.”37 For Rashbam, Written Torah is a human document, writ-
ten in historical circumstances, albeit faithfully composed in response to
Divine communication and command.
Th is chapter is perforce an introductory statement; neither is it com-
prehensive in terms of the totality of northern French exegesis, nor does
it engage in examination of the compelling polemic that exists between it
and Judeo-Islamic exegesis as represented by the arc of interpretative his-
tory spanning from Saadia Gaon to Abraham Ibn Ezra. However, even the
sources we have managed to review have given us an idea both of the radi-
cal departure from old forms that the movement from derash to peshat rep-
resented, as well as the range of ideas pertaining to the 12th-century north-
ern French school’s “conception of Scripture.”
Notes- Th is is not Rashi’s own father. Rather, Rashi appears to be citing a version of
the Tanhuma midrash to which he had access. All translations of biblical and rab-
binic texts in this article are my own. - I have treated this comment with a diff erent agenda in an earlier article: