131 Some Words Are Worth a Thousand Words, and Some, Many

book reviews 131

Paul D. Mandel, The Origins of Midrash: From Teaching to Text. JSJSup 180. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Hardback. Pp. xviii + 406. €135/$162. ISBN 9789004336889.

Some words are worth a thousand words, and some, many more. Paul Mandel’s new book is, as he asserts at the outset, about two related words: the verb darash and the cognate noun midrash. The many thousands of words that Mandel devotes to them are well spent, and his book offers a novel and gener- ally persuasive exposition of the meaning of these two much used and much misused words. Mandel’s fundamental claim is that, during the Second Temple and tannaitic periods, these words “did not have a textual-interpretive meaning,” but rather “refer to the public exposition or teaching of instructions, usually laws, regulations, and ethical teachings” (2). Or differently put, the words belong to a “legal-instructional” rather than to a “textual-hermeneutic” mode of discourse (6). The scholarly consensus has largely supposed that in the application of the verb darash to Torah in Second Temple texts, the intended sense is “to seek out”: Rather than inquiring about God’s intentions from the prophet, the Second Temple scribe searches into Scripture. Mandel rejects this view, and argues instead that darash and midrash connote the act of teaching, and that the “Torah” that they teach is not, in the main, the biblical text, but the laws. The chief relationship in Second Temple and tannaitic midrash, for Mandel, is that between the expositor and his audience, not between the interpreter and the text. Mandel is careful to note that while his claim has ramifications for our understanding of the role of the Bible in early Jewish intellectual life in general, the claim is not about the use of the Bible, but about the words darash and midrash. After a brief introduction, chs. 2–4, comprising part 1 of the book, take up the use of darash and midrash in literature of the Second Temple period. Mandel begins in chapter 2 with the sofer because the book of Ezra introduces Ezra as a sofer (7:11) and as one who “set his heart lidrosh God’s Torah” (7:10). The argumentation about the meaning of sofer incorporates some methodologically questionable assumptions—for example, that one can deduce the meaning of sofer as a title in a given book by confining one’s attention to the actions undertaken by the figure called sofer in the specific passages in which he bears the title—but Mandel demonstrates that a link to sefer “book,” so seemingly inevitable, is not intrinsic to the activity of the sofer as a figure of authority (in contrast with the sofer as secretary). Against this background, Mandel turns to the meaning of lidrosh in Ezra 7:10, and plausibly contends that it reflects a semantic shift from oracular searching after God’s laws to public exposition of those laws.

Chapter 3, on the Dead Sea Scrolls, argues that forms of darash and midrash in this corpus do not by themselves indicate textual exegesis, but likewise point first and foremost to instruction in the law. While peripheral aspects of the argumentation might be challenged, such as the view that the “wilderness” to which 1QS sends off its “council” is an inchoate sectarian group, Mandel mounts a persuasive defense of his main claim. At the same time, Mandel’s survey exposes a number of passages that associate darash and midrash with books and with exegesis, and one might detect some of the later history of these words in such passages. Chapter 4 focuses on the Greek word exēgeomai, as applied by Josephus to the Pharisees. Mandel clarifies that this word group, too, does not in itself describe, and in its usage in relation to the Pharisees should not be taken to describe, the clarification of written texts. Like other “exegetes,” the Pharisees teach or instruct on proper observance of the law, without any necessary relationship to Scripture. And if Philo links “exegesis” with the reading of the “holy laws,” then Mandel insists on a distinction between Scripture and the laws, by which he means not that the “holy laws” are something other than Scripture, but that the focus was on explication not of the “Torah text” itself, but of “the laws based on that text” (163). Part 2 (chs. 5–7) addresses rabbinic literature. Chapter 5 concerns the tannaitic sage (ḥakham) and the bet midrash. Mandel establishes that the chief public duty of the ḥakham was to respond to legal questions. Mandel then turns to the bet midrash, and advances a more controversial but ultimately compel- ling claim: that the tannaitic bet midrash was chiefly a site not for higher study among sages and their disciples, but for fielding legal questions from a broad public. The last part of the chapter describes the amoraic bet midrash, which, due at least in part to the increased textualization of rabbinic law, evolved into a place more exclusively designated for advanced textual study by sages and their students. Ch. 6 examines the usage of darash and midrash in tannaitic literature. Mandel demonstrates that for the most part, the usage of these words is con- tinuous with that in earlier texts: They indicate exposition, elaboration of a (legal) position. Such exposition or elaboration can occur in relation to a biblical (or other) text, but need not. Some of Mandel’s subtlest work occurs in this chapter and its footnotes (e.g., 264–65 nn. 107–8), where his basic philo- logical insight about darash/midrash allows him to make illuminating links across periods and corpora. Mandel also traces, in some tannaitic texts and into the amoraic period, the growing association of darash and midrash with interpretation of Scripture (legal and non-legal), a development attributable to

Dead Sea Discoveries 26 (2019) 101–134