48 Azzan Yadin-Israel
One of the challenges facing historically conscious collectives is how to
assert their identities over time — that is, to recognize the passage of time
and ensuing change in circumstances, while maintaining some common
elements that anchor the group’s sense of self. Th e publishers of the Abra-
ham book do this by collapsing the historical distance between the present-
day readers and the historical forefathers. Abraham may have lived many
centuries ago, ridden camels,1 and fought with a sword, but he was funda-
mentally identical with his 20th- and 21st-century readers — a Hasidic Jew.
Th ough this is an extreme example, the tendency to retroject present ideas
and assumptions onto the past is strong and can easily pass undetected, and
it is probably nowhere more persistently manifested than in areas consid-
ered canonical and therefore constitutive of a community’s identity. One of
the virtues of a collection such as the present one is that it highlights the rich
variety of ideas and practices that have grown out of the Jewish engagement
of the Hebrew Bible. Even so, and even among critically informed readers,
some assumptions remain largely unexamined. Th e present chapter rep-
resents an attempt to address one such assumption, namely, that the early
rabbis were unproblematically committed to the authority of Scripture.
Legal Midrash
Th e literature of the early rabbis, or Tannaim (roughly 70 – 220 CE), con-
sists of two genres: legal decisions presented as received tradition, with
only minimal reference to Scripture, and legal decisions presented as the
result of sustained interpretation of Scripture, known as legal midrash. Th is
distinction is addressed elsewhere in this collection2 and is here mentioned
solely to clarify the scope of this chapter, which deals with the legal mid-
rashim and not the “received” legal codices (the Mishnah and the Toseft a).
My claim is that even within early rabbinic legal midrash, it is possible to
discern diff erent conceptions and valorizations of Scripture.
Th e texts in question are preserved in a number of collections, each
devoted to a diff erent book of the Bible. Th e most important are the Me-
khilta of Rabbi Ishmael and the Mekhilta of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai, both
commenting on the book of Exodus; the Sifra, on Leviticus; the Sifre to
the book of Numbers; and the Sifre to Deuteronomy.3 Since the late 19th
century, scholars have recognized that these midrashic works or, to use
the Hebrew plural form, midrashim, make up two groups: the Mekhilta of