258 M a r c Zvi Brettler
criticizes others’ “prosaic pedantry” in their suggested reworkings of Eze-
kiel’s poetry and claims, “One cannot but admire the imaginative power of
the prophet, in truth a master of fi gures.” I cannot recall instances when
Greenberg criticizes biblical rhetoric or emphasizes infelicities. For Green-
berg, message and form are connected — and the message of the Bible and
the manner in which it is conveyed are both, to use the words of Genesis
1:31, “very good.”45
Th e Signifi cance of Jewish Biblical Interpretation
Traditional Jewish biblical interpretation (Hebrew: parshanut) is of para-
mount importance to Greenberg and served in a variety of ways as his
model. In contrast, parshanut plays a minor role in historical-critical bib-
lical scholarship, in part because most scholars cannot read the diffi cult,
unvocalized postbiblical Hebrew in which the medievals wrote, which is
full of unmarked rabbinic references, but also in part because most schol-
ars have been socialized to believe that precritical biblical interpretation
(both Jewish and Christian) is unimportant. Greenberg argues forcefully
and frequently that this perception is wrong and that engaging parshanut is
important, for diff erent reasons, both for the historical-critical scholar and
for the scholar interested in the place of the Bible in Jewish identity.
Greenberg has a broad defi nition of parshanut, including not only clas-
sical rabbinic sources such as the Talmud and the midrashim and the me-
dieval Franco-German and Spanish commentators but also Jewish fi gures
such as Josephus and obscure commentators not found in the standard
rabbinic Bible. He has written on the important grandfather-grandson pair
Rashi (1040 – 1105) and Rashbam (ca. 1085 – ca. 1174). He is highly critical
of Bible scholars who neglect such medieval scholarship and oft en intro-
duces studies on the historical-critical meaning of a unit with a survey of
its history of interpretation, which he shows oft en sheds light on its mean-
ing. Parshanut is signifi cant enough to Greenberg that in the midst of
writing his Ezekiel commentary, he took time out to edit and write for the
fi rst volume of the Biblical Encyclopedia Library: Jewish Biblical Exegesis:
An Introduction.46 Th ere he claims that biblical interpretation is the pin-
nacle of Jewish expression and that these interpreters kept the Bible alive
as “as the source and resource for Jewish culture” — a goal that Greenberg
clearly shares.47