Concepts of Scripture in Moshe Greenberg 259In the introduction, “Purpose and Method,” to Understanding Exo-
dus, Greenberg notes that the medievals are important for the philology
of the text — what words and phrases mean; as he clarifi es here and else-
where, this is because of their encyclopedic knowledge of the Hebrew text.
Th ey are also useful for understanding “sentences and paragraphs” since
they are less “atomistic” than moderns — they are what Greenberg later
called “holistic.” In his commentaries and essays, he adduces hundreds of
cases where the medieval commentaries, ignored by so many, are helpful
for critical scholarship, and he even observes in reference to his Ezekiel
commentary that the modern scholars oft en take a step backward when
compared to their medieval counterparts. Greenberg is partly responsible
for the additional interest among mainstream biblical scholars in premod-
ern interpreters.48
He off ers additional arguments for the importance of parshanut for
the Jewish and/or Israeli community who views the Bible as Scripture. As
noted earlier, for Greenberg, the Bible is the Jewish foundation document
— but it has only maintained that function through constant interpreta-
tion and reinterpretation, which modern scholars must be aware of and
continue. He is very insistent that those who are teaching Bible in Israeli
schools must be familiar with parshanut and, for diff erent reasons, suggests
it even needs to be included in the Israeli university Bible curriculum: both
because it is part of the student’s heritage and because the history of inter-
pretation is a signifi cant subdiscipline of the humanities. Indeed, as a his-
torian of religion, Greenberg is very interested in “continuities and trans-
formations,” and the two-millennia-long history of Jewish interpretation of
the same core text off ers important insights in this area.49
Moshe Greenberg’s Th eology of Scripture: A Coherent Vision
Th e seven features of Greenberg’s theology of Scripture noted earlier fi t to-
gether. His Scripture is the Jewish Bible, which has been studied through-
out Jewish tradition: the Masoretic Text, in Hebrew, without much con-
cern for its prehistory (points 1 and 2). As medieval Jewish exegetes show
(point 7), we may not change the text, but it is open to a wide variety of
interpretations, which help keep it relevant for the Jewish and general com-
munities (5, 3). In determining these values, we must use criteria to decide
which passages from this composite text are most important; this includes