Concepts of Scripture in the Schools of Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael 61type. Th e ideal scholar to produce a constitutive midrash is one whose fa-
miliarity with the text of the Bible allows him or her to recognize patterns
from which to derive scripturally sanctioned interpretive procedures and
to recognize irregularities to which to apply them. Th e ideal scholar to
produce a supporting midrash is not a midrashist at all but fi rst and fore-
most the recipient of authorized extrascriptural traditions — a link in a long
(idealized) chain of transmission that extends back to Moses himself. If a
scholar is able to link these traditions with biblical verses, this may or may
not be laudable,18 but it does not aff ect the legal standing of his statement
one way or another. Now, if a biblical interpretation is adduced not as the
source of a legal practice, or even as a necessary authorizer of the practice,
it is questionable whether it is functioning as Scripture. Th ese are complex
issues that cannot be addressed in the present study, but it is worth raising
the following interrelated questions: Do the diff erent halakhic midrashim
refl ect a similar or even mutually recognizable conception of Scripture?
And if not, what does this mean for our ability to subsume the groups that
produced them under the same heading of “rabbis”?
Notes- In preparing this chapter for publication, Ben Sommer pointed out to me the
anachronistic nature of the camels in Genesis itself. Th e biblical narrative situates
Abraham in the middle or late Bronze Age, but camels were only introduced into
the eastern Mediterranean in the later Iron Age, during which Genesis was written.
(On the archaeological and textual evidence for camels in the ancient Near East,
see Philip King and Lawrence Stager, Life in Biblical Israel [Louisville, KY: West-
minster John Knox, 2001], 117.) Th us, in one sense, the anachronistic portrayal of
Abraham by modern ultraorthodox writers follows a long tradition of anachronis-
tic portrayals of this character, which (modern biblical critics show) occurs already
in scripture itself. - See Steven Fraade’s chapter 3 in this volume.
- For a summary, see H. L. Strack and Günter Stemberger, Introduction to
Talmud and Midrash, trans. Markus Bockmuehl (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996),
247 – 51. - See M. Kahana, “Th e Halakhic Midrashim,” in Th e Literature of the Sages,
vol. 2, ed. S. Safrai, Z. Safrai, J. Schwartz, and P. Tomson (Assen, Netherlands: Royal
Van Gorcum / Fortress, 2006), 3 – 105. - Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington: