Concepts of Scripture in the School of Rashi 111detailing ideological underpinning for maintaining his position, he did
articulate his basic premise in his introduction to the legal section of the
Torah (at Exodus 21:1):
Let knowers of wisdom know and understand that I have not come to
explain halakhot, even though these are the essence of Torah, as I have
explained in my Genesis commentary [e.g., at Genesis 1:1; 37:2]. For it is
from the [apparent] superfl uities of Scriptural language that aggadot and
halakhot are derived. Some of these can be found in the commentary of
our Rabbi Solomon, my mother’s father [i.e., Rashi], may the memory of
the righteous be for a blessing. But I have come to explain the contextual
meaning of Scripture. And I will explain the laws and halakhot according
to realia [literally “the way of the world”]. And [I will do this] even though
the halakhot are the essence, as the Rabbis taught: “halakha uproots Scrip-
ture” (BT Sota 16a, with emendation).Rashbam’s statement raises more questions, perhaps, than it does off er
answers.25 On the one hand, Rashbam establishes that the rabbinic under-
standing of biblical law (halakhot) is the most essential aspect of Torah.
Th is should not surprise us: Rashbam was one of the most respected rabbis
of his generation and composed a commentary on the Babylonian Talmud
that more than established his reputation as one of the greatest rabbinic
scholars of all time.26 He was well known as a rabbinic pietist,27 and de-
spite some medieval criticism that may have been directed against his total
commitment to peshat methodology, no one ever doubted his standing as
a rabbinic authority. Th us, let there be no thought that Rashbam thought
that people should observe biblical law or that Jews could somehow choose
between it and rabbinic halakha. However, that being the case, what value
or meaning does Rashbam see in this purely theoretical law?
However frustrated one might be from Rashbam’s failing to address this
question directly ought not prevent us from assaying an opinion about a
possible answer. Recently, I have been writing about the ways in which the
12th-century exegetes found in the Bible the very literary and structural
devices that, in a later age, came to defi ne what “literature” is.28 My thesis
has been that Jewish and Christian biblical exegetes working primarily in
northern France during the 12th-century Renaissance essentially “invent”
the notion of literature through their contextual ( peshat or ad litteram)
reading of biblical composition and their attention to what we would call
its literary qualities. A corollary of this same point is to consider that the