This contribution to the volume celebrating the end of the project “Parables and the Partings of the Ways” focusses on a phenomenon in parables which might seem banal, asking why biblical verses are not cited in rabbinic parables (meshalim).
In order to understand why the absence of verses in parables is indeed meaningful, we must first look at the role of verses in rabbinic discourse, mainly in midrash. The presence of verses in midrash was theorized many times by scholars of Jewish studies and adjacent fields from literary, historical, philosophical, and cultural-critique approaches. However, their absence in parables has never been theorized. When explained from a cultural-cognitive perspective, these two phenomena—i.e., the presence in midrash and absence in parables—show themselves to be interconnected. I believe that these phenomena have a very precise cognitive process behind them, a cognitive process which is basic for the creation of any human culture, and by derivation, for the midrash-parable relationship. This process is described in the Decoupling Theory, a culture-cognitive theory formulated by Barend van Heusden, and I will argue that the Decoupling Theory best explains the absence of verses in parables. This theory is hardly common for the study of rabbinic texts or for Jewish studies in general; however, the cognitive aspect of culture is gaining in importance for cultural studies, and thus helps map Jewish studies within the general study of human culture.1
I will first give a short overview of the contexts in which verses are found in midrash, and then discuss Yonah Fraenkel’s and Daniel Boyarin’s theorization of their appearance there. I will content myself with these two, as they form a trajectory to spring into the cognitive approach. Following this, I will briefly explain the Decoupling Theory, and then theorize the absence of verses from the parables in light of this theory. Lastly, I will use one parable (The Cow That Follows Its Calf against Her Will) as an example of the phenomenon and its theorization.
1 Verses in Midrash and in Parables
1.1 Verses in Midrash
Biblical verses are an integral part of rabbinic literature. It is certainly an essential component of midrash, as the midrashic discourse is an intertextual activity occurring between the biblical text and the rabbinic text. The rabbinic collections that are called midrashic corpora follow the biblical narrative, quote a biblical verse, and relate to it either hermeneutically or homiletically. However, also collections that are of halakhic genres—i.e., Mishnah, Tosefta, and Talmudim—employ midrashic discourse; they focus on a biblical verse, which they quote either at the beginning or at the end of a textual unit, and elaborate upon it.2 Let us look at the following example:
“And God called the light day, and the darkness—night” (Gen 1:5). Rabbi Elazar says: “God never attaches His name to bad things, only to good things; it does not say ‘and God called the day ‘light’ and the darkness God called ‘night,’ but ‘and the darkness—night’.”
Gen. Rab. 3:5
Rabbi Elazar explains the absence of the grammatical subject, God, in the second part of the verse as an intentional attempt to avoid having God associated with the negative phenomenon of darkness. We see that the explanation of Rabbi Elazar adds to the verse content which is not originally there: the verse does not talk metaphorically about light and darkness, but about the physical phenomena, and it is Rabbi Elazar who adds this metaphorical understanding to the verse. We therefore see here how rabbinic ideology—i.e., that God is all and only positive—is read into the biblical verse.
This re-understanding is typical of rabbinic literature, as this literature is dedicated to illustrating how rabbinic ideology, including rabbinic halakhah, is based on the authoritative source of divine knowledge, the Bible. The direct quotation of biblical verses is the way to prove this claim. Often, the discourse is formulated as the solution to a linguistic problem in the biblical text, as we saw above.
But the presence of biblical verses in rabbinic literature goes beyond the quotation of a single verse in a single unit for hermeneutic or homiletic purposes. The verses play more roles than just that of a quote. We also find that one quoted verse is explained by another verse, or by a series of other verses, each giving a different interpretation. We find cases where each word in the verse is associated with a different biblical verse, similar to the “extended metaphor” known in literary studies; we also find the midrashic literary form known as the “proem,” where two verses from seemingly unconnected biblical narratives are juxtaposed and integrated into a single narrative or claim.3 Lastly, verses are found in ‘midrashic expansion’: these are elaborations on biblical narratives by the addition of dialogues, plotlines, and even characters in order to create a story that would fit the rabbinic understanding of the biblical narrative.4 We find various characters in this expansion “talk in verses,” so to speak, quoting biblical verses as their speech act. The result of all these ways in which biblical verses are incorporated into midrashic discourse is a body of literature replete with biblical verses serving a variety of different roles.
1.2 Theorising Verses in Midrash
The prevalence of verses in midrash has been identified and theorized by scholars of rabbinic literature, among them Yonah Fraenkel and Daniel Boyarin.
Fraenkel, a prominent midrash scholar, used a literary approach in his comprehensive work on rabbinic literature in its totality, and midrash in particular.5 Fraenkel dedicated numerous chapters of his works to the study of the role of verses in rabbinic literature. He defined the principle of “unity of the Bible,” explaining that the rabbinic perception of the biblical text is that of divine words from beginning to end, such that all the parts of the Bible are holy and can thus be seen as one long divine word. This principle is behind the rabbinic conviction that any one part of the Bible can explain any other part.6 The rabbis, then, felt free to “deconstruct” the biblical text (an expression of which Fraenkel would probably not approve) and to “reconstruct” its parts to assert their ideology, that is, what they thought of as truth.7 Two parallel drives are at work here, says Fraenkel, the drive to interpret the verse, and the drive to innovate, to give the verse a new meaning. As to which of the two came first, Fraenkel argues that this is a matter of our differentiation for the sake of analysis and that the two phenomena are one for the rabbis.8
In spite of the great scope of Fraenkel’s work, there is still room to characterize the phenomenon of verses in the midrash beyond the literary description, and to theorize it from a wider view on human culture. We find this type of high criticism in the work of Daniel Boyarin. In his seminal book Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (1990), which was written in light of the emergence and spread of sophisticated semiotic theories in literary and cultural studies, Boyarin introduced the concept of intertextuality to Jewish studies. In the second chapter, “Reciting the Torah: The Function of Quotation in the Midrash,” Boyarin tackles the role of verses in midrash. Building on Julia Kristeva’s notion of the text as a mosaic of quotations, Boyarin rejects the traditional understanding of verses as prooftexts, and asserts that “the so-called ‘prooftexts’ are to be read as intertexts and contexts of the Torah’s narrative.”9 This intersection, continues Boyarin, in effect undermines the distinction that we habitually make between literary creation and hermeneutic work, by showing that all literary creation is hermeneutic and all hermeneutic is creation:10 “The verses of the Bible function for the rabbis much as do words in ordinary speech. They are a repertoire of semiotic elements that can be recombined into new discourse.”11 Verses are quoted and co-quoted, that is, quoted in nexus with each other, a nexus which conveys an old-new meaning, and thus they are used both as the reference and as part of the narrative itself. This creates a biblico-rabbinic language typical for rabbinic literature. In Boyarin’s analysis, Fraenkel’s claim that the entire biblical text is a single unit has been elevated into “an intuition that the Bible is a self-glossing text.”12
1.3 Absence of Verses in Parables
The prevalence of verses in midrash is matched by their absence in parables. One finds verses as a starting point for a parable, in the nimshal, or just before the nimshal; often the midrash in which the parable is embedded is swarming with verses (to use Gilles Deleuze’s term) of various functions and statuses, but the parable itself never quotes a biblical verse—at least not in the parables that I have seen. How do we theorize this?
The intuitive reaction to this recognition is that this is only to be expected, since the narrative of the parable comes from the reality of the rabbis, or at least from motifs that are familiar in their literary sphere,13 while the biblical text is an unchangeable cultural memory that has to be explained. No study has as yet been dedicated to this phenomenon of the absence of verses in parables, and surely none from a cognitive perspective. Since I claim that the Decoupling Theory can explain this phenomenon, I will first outline the basics of this theory.
2 The Decoupling Theory: The Search for Meaning
In the Decoupling Theory, the concept of “meaning” is understood as a comprehensive cognitive phenomenon, a semiotic one albeit not in an exclusively linguistic sense. It may be briefly formulated as follows: “Something is meaningful for an organism if it triggers a reaction, whether an action, an attitude or even only a recognition.”14
This understanding of “meaning” takes the concept very far back in the evolution of life, where meaningfulness is obtained when an organism reacts to input from the environment in order to maintain homeostasis, the stable conditions of the body necessary for survival. Attraction, movement toward favourable conditions, and aversion, movement away from harmful conditions, indicate that there is meaning. Further down the evolutionary line, these reactions become more complex, such as the recognition of favourable conditions for hunting for a lion, for example, or the detection of emotional clues for improving social interactions for social animals, such as people. This understanding entails that “meaning” is not part of the artefact that is sensed, but is in the mind of the one sensing it.
The evolutionary advantage of “meaning,” when understood in this way, is evident: this semiotic system enables any organism, from the single cell’s embedded behaviour all the way to the complex social animals with learned cultural behaviour, to adapt to their environment, while still benefiting from past experience, as they use their familiar behaviour to tackle or react to new events.
The process of “meaning” happens automatically in all animals, without awareness: when a new input is similar to the memory, the organism reacts, when the new input is not exactly the same as the memory, the brain automatically “updates” the memory to include the new version of the phenomenon. The term “memory” in this context must be explained briefly. Since birth, the brain creates mental concepts of reality which are based on experience: any reaction of an infant to the environment which has proven helpful will be stored as a useful reaction, constituting the infant’s (and later the adult person’s) memory, and this reaction will be triggered whenever a similar situation is recognized by the sensory system. The sum of memories is the reality in which we live, and is termed “reality” in the Decoupling Theory. The sensory input coming from the immediate surrounding is called “actuality.”
There is a special quality in the human brain that, as far as we know, does not exist in other organisms: humans can be aware of the absence of meaning—that is, they can recognize that the sensory input, the actuality, does not match the memory, the reality. Humans can keep both options in their awareness, and they do this without updating the memory automatically in unawareness, as other animals do. This recognition of the gap between actuality and reality is the “decoupling.”
The awareness of the gap between reality and actuality creates a semiotic dissonance. In order to update the memory properly, to gain a new way to handle the new situation, this dissonance demands a reaction. Much of human effort, both on the level of everyday personal experience and on the social-cultural scale, is dedicated to filling the gap between reality and actuality, between existing memories, or more specifically, to accommodating actuality into reality based on past experience. Thus, the process of creating culture in humans is an effort to accommodate actuality into the reality.
3 Integrating Cognition into the Study of Parables and Verses15
3.1 The Rabbinic Midrashic Activity in Cognitive Terms
Regardless of the meaning any part of the biblical text may have had at its degree zero (if one believes such a moment ever existed), from the moment any part of it became authoritative, whether formally, as a sealed, unchangeable text (for example, as performed in the synagogue), or as a culturally accepted, authoritative oral tradition, it paradoxically separated from the people who originally and intuitively held it as authoritative, since historical circumstances change constantly and unchangeable elements in the culture cannot keep pace with those changes. From this hypothetical moment of separation onward, the memory had to be updated whenever meeting the biblical text. In the case of a cultural, that is, collective, artefact, the process of updating is done on a societal level using social institutions. Precisely this updating is the rabbinic activity.
On the one hand, the rabbinic culture is one of the continuations of Second Temple Judaic circles, and thus had the Bible as part of its cultural canon and a holy text. On the other hand, its enterprise was to establish a particular, rabbinic direction for Judaic culture, to divert it from the priestly hegemonic culture as well as others,16 and the rabbis endeavoured to show how their culture was based on the accepted Scripture. Thus, they not only had to make the connection between the declared holy text and their culture (which included rabbinic halakhah), but also to connect the text to their developing culture again and again, in every generation. This is the very thing the midrashic activity is doing: connecting the unchangeable, authoritative cultural artefact to the current culture, the current narratives and social values. From a cultural-cognitive approach, it updates the memory, or in Decoupling Theory terms, accommodates “actuality” into “reality.”
3.2 How Does This Work in the Case of Rabbinic Parables?
In a very short and rough way, we can describe a parable as a narrative that sheds light on another narrative or a narrative situation.17 Parables are ubiquitous in many cultures; in the rabbinic context, meshalim shed light on biblical stories, and in many cases, what they in fact shed light on is the understanding of these stories by previous rabbinic generations.18
The absence of verses in parables, even though such verses are freely and flexibly added to most other parts of rabbinic discourse like midrash and even the nimshal, is a stable quality in rabbinic parables. We can thus say that parables are one element in rabbinic discourse which is not part of the biblico-rabbinic language described by Boyarin. This biblico-rabbinic language of the rabbinic literature represents a holy reality, as does the behaviour of the sages, and the beit-midrash environment as a whole. This reality is not the intuitive everyday reality of the lay person, it is a “second level culture,” a culture which is an extra step above the intuitive culture, a step that had to be taken intentionally and was not easy to achieve. Even the rabbis needed to make an effort to make and maintain themselves as part of this reality.19 In contrast, the parables, in this scheme, are the everyday intuitive reality.
To describe the above in terms of the Decoupling Theory, we would say that the parable is the reality and the biblical story is the actuality, that is, the parable is the internal reality of the rabbis and the biblical story is the external input that has to be accommodated into the internal reality.
Thus, what the rabbis do when expounding the Bible through the use of parables follows the usual process of culture: new input (the biblical text) is recognized as similar but not identical to the memory (the parable) and must be accommodated to the memory, by upgrading the memory, understanding the biblical story in light of the parable.
3.2.1 The Counterintuivity of Relating to the Bible as External or New Input
To call the biblical corpus external is tricky in the context of Jewish studies, as the Hebrew Bible is the most stable element in rabbinic Judaism and often declared as its core and origin of authority. However, from a cognitive perspective, the biblical narrative and text is an artefact, and it only has meaning if endowed with meaning by the minds that give it that meaning. Since the Bible is an ancient text describing a reality which no longer existed in rabbinic times, its meaning had to be reinvented in every generation to fit the inner world of the members of the society of that time. Therefore, as counterintuitive as it may sound, the biblical text and narrative is the external, actual reality, while the parable is an inner reality for those who use it.
While counterintuitive, most scholars studying rabbinic parables recognize this quality about them, even though they do not openly declare that parables are more the inner reality of the rabbis than the biblical text; such recognition can be deduced by pointing to the parables’ culturally inherent nature, for example in Eric Ottenheijm’s use of Bourdieu’s term habitus, which points to both the cultural inner reality and the power play associated with it.20 The difficulty of relating to the Bible as external is that such an understanding stands diametrically opposed to the culture’s self-proclamation as apparent in the biblico-rabbinic language. But recognising the nature of the holy text as a cultural artefact, which as such only acquires meaning if endowed with meaning by the users of the artefact, makes it possible to see the Hebrew Bible as “external.”
4 Example of the Absence of Biblical Verses in Meshalim
It is by definition hard to show the absence of verses in parables, and so I will resort to a single example where a similar parable appears in nexus with various verses, in various functions, and in various periods, but verses are never made part of the narrative of the parable itself.
I will present various realizations of the parables side by side to show the fluidity of verses coming into the narrative or being left out, but this activity only takes place in the text around the parable, never in the parable itself, even though other changes, such as the use of different vocabulary or small changes in the plot, do take place. My analysis of the parables will also be very basic, in keeping with the “distant reading” style of the analysis.
The parable tells about a cow which people wanted to slaughter, or, in one case, to use for ploughing, and it refused to take on the yoke. They therefore dragged its calf to the field (or slaughterhouse), so that the cow followed, unwillingly, and was thus forced into the position it had tried to avoid. The parable is then related to Jacob’s descent to Egypt in Gen 46, where the rabbis understand Joseph’s descent to Egypt (Gen 37) to have taken place to prepare the way for the rest of his family to go there (Gen 46); it is thus God’s scheme to eventually convince Jacob to go to Egypt as well. Jacob’s descent to Egypt, in turn, was necessary in order to fulfil God’s prophecy to Abraham that his offspring would be slaves in Egypt for many years (Gen 15:13). In the following, I present three versions of this parable from Genesis Rabbah, Tanhuma Buber, and the Printed Tanhuma.21 The text of biblical verses has been marked in bold.
4.1 The Parable
The midrash which frames the parable builds on the slightly uncommon22 use of the impersonal passive construction about Joseph being brought down to Egypt, asserting that this refers to Joseph causing Jacob to come to Egypt. At this point comes the parable which likens Jacob’s descent to Egypt to a cow following its calf. The nimshal explains why Jacob went to Egypt willingly and in pomp and circumstance: Jacob should have been pulled to Egypt with chains, but as Israel (which is Jacob’s other name), being the firstborn of God (according to Exod 4:22), he was brought down to Egypt as a free agent, even if against his will, as the cow after her calf.
The supremacy of the land of Israel (and of living there) is a common ideology in rabbinic culture, regardless of where the rabbinic community was living and how authoritative they considered themselves. In the nimshal above, we find this notion expressed in a manner similar to the words of the Palestinian Amora Rabbi Yohanan, as quoted by his student Rabbi Hiyya in the Bavli (b. Shab. 89b): “Our father Jacob should have been dragged to Egypt with chains of iron, but his virtue merited him [to be brought down in pomp]” (
The Parable of Joseph Who Was Brought to Egypt (Gen 39) in three different sources/manuscripts
The text in Tanhuma Buber is in general lines similar to the text in Genesis Rabbah, and it too is based on the same verse (Gen 39:1). Again, the parable tells of the cow who followed her son to the slaughterhouse. The nimshal explains that the descent to Egypt was necessary as it was a part of the pact between God and Abraham. But Jacob is presented as resentful of the move to Egypt, so that God’s seemingly cruel act of bringing Joseph to Egypt first is not a result of the pact He made, but a result of Jacob’s fear. Jacob therefore becomes a much less heroic figure, and, insofar as he represents the inhabitants of the land of Israel, he also presents them in a less heroic light. This ideological shift is quite common in Tanhuma-Yelammedenu literature.
The printed Tanhuma uses the parable in a proem connecting the reading portion (Gen 39:1) to a verse from Psalms (66:5), building on an elaborate rabbinic understanding of the biblical story which presents God’s act in bringing Jacob and his sons down to Egypt as manipulation (albeit not necessarily negative). The narrative is then built around God’s manipulation for the execution of his plan to bring the Israelites to Egypt. The talk of slaughtering is then changed to ploughing the land, eliciting a much softer image in the mind of the audience. We also see an ideological shift there: while a life in the land of Israel is still understood as the ultimate existence, a diasporic life (i.e., the place to which the cow is led) is no longer the dreaded slaughterhouse but just a field that needs to be ploughed. Here God is presented as a “scheming one” (with the term “manipulate,”
4.1.1 Incorporating Verses into These Narratives
Regarding the number and use of verses in this passage: In Genesis Rabbah we only find the verse of the reading portion expounded by the parable. Tanhuma Buber adds more verses to the nimshal—it includes a verse comparing Israel to a cow (Hos 4:16), quotes the verse about God’s pact with Abraham (Gen 15:13), and at the end repeats the verse under examination. The printed Tanhuma involves even more verses, as it uses the parable in the framework of a proem: it quotes the verse of the proem, then the verse about the pact (Gen 15:13) and the verses from the reading portion (in the nimshal), and then repeats the proemic verse. In none of these three cases do we find any verses included as part of the parable. There is thus a very clear gap between the flexibility and potential abundance of incorporating verses into midrashic narrative and the persistent absence of verses in the parable itself.
4.2 Analysing the Parable in Light of the Decoupling Theory
Let us now describe the absence of verses in Decoupling Theory terms. The midrash, in all three occurrences, shows a certain unease with the absence of a negative perspective on Jacob’s descent to Egypt. While the supremacy of living in the land of Israel was, in one way or another, common to both biblical and rabbinic cultures, for the biblical narrative the fulfilment of the pact between God and Abraham was enough to render the descent to Egypt non-problematic, but this was not enough for the rabbis. This, then, is the decoupling process in our example, whereby the gap between the inner reality and the external actuality is bridged:
Firstly, the inner conviction, which is taken for granted in all three cases, is the supremacy of living in the land of Israel, which ought to render any demand to leave it problematic. Secondly, the biblical story, or rather the rabbinic understanding of the biblical story, which in all three cases does not problematize this descent; and thirdly, the parable which bridges the gap between the two.
In Genesis Rabbah, the gap is bridged by making Joseph responsible for Jacob’s descent; by being in Egypt, “He [i.e., Joseph] caused our father Jacob to descend to Egypt.” Had Joseph not been in Egypt, Jacob would have tried to avoid going there. Jacob is thus like a cow which follows the calf to a horrible place (slaughterhouse, referring to Egypt), moved by her motherly drives. The listener thus sympathizes with Jacob’s parental emotion.25 In Palestinian Amoraic rabbinic culture, Joseph represents diasporic life, thus not one with which the Palestinian rabbis identify,26 so that “blaming” Joseph for the descent to Egypt seems the appropriate solution in this milieu.
The narrative and the parable in Tanhuma Buber make a similar move, but the nimshal adds the layer of attitude by declaring that Jacob was “afraid” to go to Egypt, thus giving expression to the proper attitude to leaving the land of Israel. Joseph’s move to Egypt is presented here as God’s doing, and thus Joseph is placed in a more positive light than he is in Genesis Rabbah. This fits the milieu of the Tanhuma-Yelammedenu corpus, coming not directly from the beit midrash environment but from less elitist synagogue circles, with diasporic connections, and from a slightly later period, when Jewish culture in the diaspora was a force to reckon with.27
The printed Tanhuma goes even further by building the narrative around the image of God as a manipulator. It seems to have a diasporic inner reality in which diaspora could not be represented by a slaughterhouse, and so the cow is taken for ploughing instead of slaughter. Joseph appears in a more positive light here as well, since God is emphatically the one responsible for the descent to Egypt. The inner reality presented in the parable in the printed Tanhuma is not just adherence to the ideology of living in the land of Israel, but also a painful recognition of the impossibility of actualising this ideology.
5 Conclusions
The act of making parables is a human activity which intentionally—not in terms of purpose, but in terms of a drive—mimics what happens spontaneously in human cognition: updating the memory to fit the information arriving from the sensory system.
Cultures are upgraded spontaneously as a result of changing conditions, new ideologies or Zeitgeist, or interaction with other cultures. However, an unchangeable holy text poses a challenge by not changing together with the rest of the culture, and thus it needs to be constantly integrated anew into that culture. The Bible is the external input, as counterintuitive as this may sound, and rabbis intentionally update their memory to fit with this external input, as counterintuitive as this may sound. Midrash is the way the cultural elites accommodate the Bible to their culture, and parables are a way to do the same, only without resorting to the elitist particular language form of biblico-rabbinic Hebrew.
The interaction between memory and actuality is essential for human existence, and it is the way to make sense of one’s surroundings. The aim of this study was to theorize parables in midrash in light of this cognitive-cultural perspective. I hope I have succeeded in showing how a cognitive approach in general, and the Decoupling Theory in particular, is relevant for explaining why the midrashic discourse is permeated with verses, which are nevertheless absent in parables.
Recognising the cognitive move behind the role of parables does not render other explanations of this role unnecessary, but it does render them secondary to the cognitive move. While other accounts are successful in describing the way the artefact “parable” performs its role of accommodating external input to the inner reality, in the Judaic context the accommodation of the Hebrew Bible to rabbinic reality, which is the main phenomenon that requires explanation, whether exegetically or rhetorically, is explained by the Decoupling Theory.
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Nikolsky, Ronit. “Parables in the Service of Emotional Translation.” Pages 37–56 in Parables in Changing Contexts: Essays on the Study of Parables in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism. Edited by Eric Ottenheijm and Marcel Poorthuis. JCP 35. Leiden: Brill, 2020.
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Ottenheijm, Eric. “On the Rhetoric of ‘Inheritance’ in Synoptic and Rabbinic Parables.” Pages 37–56 in Parables in Changing Contexts: Essays on the Study of Parables in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism. Edited by Eric Ottenheijm and Marcel Poorthuis. JCP 35. Leiden: Brill, 2020.
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Weiss, Dov. “Dramatic Dialogue in the Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Midrashim.” Pages 247–269 in Studies in Tanhuma-the Yelammedenu Literature. Edited by Ronit Nikolsky and Arnon Atzmon. BRLA 70. Leiden: Brill, 2021.
Especially relevant is the field of the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR), and the work in this direction by Pascal Boyer, Robert McCauley, Thomas Lawson, Armin Geertz, István Czachesz, Risto Uro, Uffe Schjødt, and many others in the past two and a half decades. For a short introduction to this field of study, see István Czachesz and Gerd Theissen, “Cognitive Science and Biblical Interpretation,” in Language, Cognition, and Biblical Exegesis: Interpreting Minds, ed. Ronit Nikolsky, István Czachesz, Frederick S. Tappenden, and Tamás Biró, SSR (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 13–39. Cf. also the contribution from Gerd Theissen in this volume.
Paul D. Mandel, The Origins of Midrash: From Teaching to Text, JSJSup 180 (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 16–19. Mandel coined the term “Legal Instructional Model” to refer to the role of midrash.
For the “extended metaphor” (in narratology), see, e.g., Joanna Gavins, Text World Theory: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 149–152; for the midrashic “proem” form, see: Yonah Fraenkel, Darkhei ha-aggadah vehamidrash (Tel-Aviv: Modan, 1996), 445–448. For a biblical verse interpreted by many verses, see Yonah Fraenkel, “The Role of Biblical Verses in Rabbinic Speech,” in The Aggadic Narrative: Harmony of Form and Content (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2004), 198–219 (Hebrew), especially the example on page 205.
Ofra Meir is known for pioneering this way of conceptualising the midrashic activity; see, e.g., Ofra Meir, “The Story as a Hermeneutic Device,” AJSR 7/8 (1982–1983): 231–262.
Fraenkel’s major works are: Yonah Fraenkel, Darkhei ha-aggadah vehamidrash (Tel-Aviv: Modan, 1996); Yonah Fraenkel, Midrash and Aggadah, 3 vols. (Tel Aviv: The Open University of Israel, 1996); Yonah Fraenkel, The Aggadic Narrative: Harmony of Form and Content (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2001).
Fraenkel, Midrash and Aggadah, 161.
This ideology does not necessarily contradict the general biblical ideology, but it is also not identical with all the details of it; see Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 26.
Fraenkel, Darkhei ha-aggadah, 320–321.
Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash, 22.
Boyarin, Intertextuality, 25.
Boyarin, Intertextuality, 28.
Boyarin, Intertextuality, 80.
For an elaborate and sophisticated description of this issue, see Eric Ottenheijm and Marcel Poorthuis, “Parables in Changing Contexts: A Preliminary Status Questionis,” in Parables in Changing Contexts: Essays on the Study of Parables in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism, JCP 35 (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 1–11; cf. also Eric Ottenheijm and Marcel Poorthuis, “Parables in Changing Contexts: a Retrospect,” in Parables in Changing Contexts, 301–306, and Eric Ottenheijm, “On the Rhetoric of ‘Inheritance’ in Synoptic and Rabbinic Parables,” in Parables in Changing Contexts, 22–24.
Barend van Heusden, “Dealing with Difference: From Cognition to Semiotic Cognition,” CS 4 (2009): 116–132; Barend van Heusden, “Semiotic Cognition and the Logic of Culture,” P&C 17 (2009): 611–627.
See also: Ilkka Pyysiäinen, “Holy Book—A Treasury of the Incomprehensible. The Invention of Writing and Religious Cognition,” Numen 46 (1999): 269–290.
See, e.g., Raʿanan Boustan, “Afterword: Rabbinization and the Persistence of Diversity in Jewish Culture in Late Antiquity,” in Diversity and Rabbinization: Jewish Texts and Societies between 400 and 1000 CE, eds. Gavin McDowell, Ron Naiweld, and Daniel Stoekl Ben Ezra, CSLC 8 (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2021), 427–449, esp. 432–444; Hayim Lapin, Rabbis as Romans: The Rabbinic Movement in Palestine, 200–400 CE, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 45–63.
For an overview of this literature, I refer the reader to Lieve M. Teugels, The Meshalim in the Mekhiltot: An Annotated Edition and Translation of the Parables in Mekhilta de Rabbi Yishmael and Mekhilta de Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, TSAJ 176 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019), 20–65.
On rabbinic parables shedding light on previous rabbinic understanding, see Ronit Nikolsky, “Are Parables an Interpretation?” in Sources and Interpretation in Ancient Judaism: A Volume for Tal Ilan at Sixty, ed. Meron Piotrkowski, Geoffrey Herman, and Saskia Doenitz, AJEC 104 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 289–315.
See, e.g., Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2003), 102–122; see also Daniel Boyarin’s (unpublished) lecture “If That’s not Love, What is it? An Unknown Emotion in the Talmud” in the framework of the expert workshop “Personal and Social Emotions in Rabbinic Literature: Methods and Approaches,” which took place in Groningen in May 2018 as a keynote lecture in the framework of the workshop: “Personal and Social Emotions in Rabbinic Literature: Methods and Approaches” organized by Ronit Nikolsky, and supported by a conference grant from the European Association of Jewish Studies and by the University of Groningen.
Eric Ottenheijm, “Bourdieu und die Exegese; Eine exemplarische Rezeption Pierre Bourdieus am Beispiel der Gleichnisauslegung,” in Resonanzen Pierre Bourdieus in der Theologie, ed. Ansgar Kreutzer and Hans-Joachim Sander (Freiburg: Herder, 2018), 48–67.
All translations are my own and are based on the version of the rabbinic text used in Maʾagarim.
The Hufʾal form of this verb only occurs twice in the Torah (Gen 39:1, Num 10:17), but is more frequent in the prophets (Ezek 31:18, Isa 14:11, 14:15; Zech 10:11).
See Dov Weiss, “Dramatic Dialogue in the Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Midrashim,” in Studies in the Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature, ed. Ronit Nikolsky and Arnon Atzmon, BRLA 70 (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 247–269; Dov Weiss, Pious Irreverence: Confronting God in Rabbinic Judaism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2017), passim.
On sympathizing with narrative reality, see Suzanne Keen, Narrative Form: Revised and Expanded Second Edition (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), 155. For the image of Joseph, see Ronit Nikolsky, “Joseph, Judah, and the Study of Emotions in Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature” in Studies in the Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature, 290–314.
See Maren Niehoff, The Figure of Joseph in Post-Biblical Jewish Literature, AGJU 16 (Leiden: Brill, 1992); Nikolsky, “Joseph, Judah, and the Study of Emotions,” in Studies in the Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature, 290–314.
Arnon Atzmon and Ronit Nikolsky, “Let Our Rabbi Teach Us: Introduction to Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature,” in Studies in the Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature, 1–17.