318 A History of Judaism
attributed directly to the impressive clarity and thoroughness of his
exposition of the two primary texts for rabbinic education in his time,
the Bible and the Babylonian Talmud.
In his Bible commentary, which covered every scripture book apart
from Chronicles (and possibly Ezra and Nehemiah), Rashi emphasized
far more than the commentators before him the importance of estab-
lishing the plain meaning of the text (the peshat ), using reason and
philology, and occasionally confessing ignorance when he could provide
no explanation. This did not mean Rashi rejected the homiletic mean-
ings ascribed to the biblical text by earlier rabbis, only that he claimed
to subordinate such interpretations to the plain meaning. So, for instance,
in his exposition of a passage in Genesis, ‘And they heard the voice of
the Eternal God walking about in the garden in the heat of the day,’ he
noted that ‘There are many midrashic explanations and our teachers
have already collected them in their appropriate places in Bereshith
Rabbah and in other midrashim. I, however, am only concerned with
the plain sense of scripture and with such teachings as explain the
words of scripture in a manner that fits in with them.’ This emphasis on
the need to clarify the plain meaning of the scriptural text was to be
followed by medieval Bible commentators in the twelfth century such as
Abraham ibn Ezra in Spain and Yosef Kimhi in Provence.^9
To some extent Rashi’s claim to prefer the plain meaning acted as a
rhetorical device for the inclusion of much earlier midrashic material, as
in his interpretation of the revelation to Moses on Mount Sinai, in which
he made use of the tannaitic midrashic compilation in the Mekhilta, with
its prohibition against using an iron tool in the making of the altar:
Thus you may learn that if thou liftest up thy iron tool above it thou pro-
fanest it. The reason of this is, because the altar is created to lengthen
man’s days and iron has been created to shorten man’s days, it is not right
that an object which shortens man’s life should be lifted up above that
which lengthens it ... And a further reason is: because the altar makes
peace between Israel and their Father in Heaven, and therefore there
should not come upon it anything that cuts and destroys.The transmission of such moral teachings in the guise of a simple inter-
pretation of a biblical text may be considered an exceptionally effective
method of preaching in disguise.^10
Rashi’s commentary was to be much used by the Christian biblical
exegete Nicholas of Lyre in the fourteenth century and there is plentiful
evidence, not least in Latin– Hebrew bilingual manuscripts, for Christian