More on Midrash - On Pharaoh and Egyptians as God's Creatures Too (8/2/21)

In my Torah Study Book Study group, we are currently reading (finishing this week), Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg's Moses: A Human Life, here.  Zornberg has a particularly interest in midrash, and continues that interest in this book.  I have other postings on midrash on this blog, so those wanting more on midrash can click the link at the bottom of this blog entry.

I recently sent this email to our group:

You may be interested in this offering from TheTorah.com: Prof.Edward L. Greenstein, Where Are God’s Tears in Lamentations?, here:

The opening sets it up nicely:

Tears abound in Lamentations: the poet cries, the people cry, even the city cries, but God does not. In contrast, the gods and goddesses of ancient Near Eastern city laments, cry along with their people. Midrash Eichah Rabbah, seemingly uncomfortable with such a callous depiction of God, rereads Lamentations to include God weeping.

That is just the opening.  A really good read.

This reminds me of the midrash I mentioned that I got from Avivah Zornberg about God rebuking the angels who were celebrating the death of the Egyptians by drowning.  I originally heard this in a Krista Tippett interview of Zornberg back in 2005.  The audio and transcript of that interview, titled The Transformation of Pharaoh, Moses, and God, is here.  Here is the relevant excerpt:

Midrash Similar to Jesus’ Separation of Sheep from Goats in Matthew (5/23/21)

The WPC community will undoubtedly recall the Jesus statement quote in Matthew 25:31-46, here, about how he separates the sheep from the goats—by determining who fed the hungry, clothed the naked, etc.  This episode says, in effect, the separation will be made by what a person did in life.  Significantly, what is not stated in this episode is any role for "belief" whatever exactly that is.

I think this is a very Jewish way of thinking.  That should not be surprising because Jesus was a Jew.

A similar story is told in the Jewish tradition by midrash.  Back in 2007, I found this offering in Reform Judaism’s Ten Minutes of Torah.  Unfortunately, I could not find the link today but I had copied the text of the offering and therefore offer it here:

April 12, 2007  

Week 177, Day 4

24 Nisan 5767 

Life after Death: Open the Gates of Righteousness 

Midrash, Thillim Rabbah 118:19 

Text: 

At the time of judgment in the future world everyone will be asked, What was your occupation? If the person answers, I used to feed the hungry, they will say to him, This is Gods gate; you who fed the hungry many enter. I used to give water to those who were thirsty-they will say to him, This is Gods gate; you who gave water to those who were thirsty may enter. I used to clothe the naked-they will say to him, This is Gods gate; you who clothed the naked may enter and similarly with those who raised orphans, and who performed the mitzvah of tzedakah, and who performed acts of caring, loving-kindness. 

Interpretation:

Kugel on Biblical Interpretation by the Ancient Interpreters and Current Jewish and Christian Interpretation (5/23/21)

In the book forming the basis for the WPC series (Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently), the authors offer (pp. 24-25) Professor James’ Kugel’s “four principles of ancient Jewish exegesis.”  I thought I would offer just a little more on that from the Kugel’s How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now.  Kugel says that these principles are “Four Assumptions” that ancient interpreters brought to interpreting the Hebrew Bible.

Kugel has a special expertise in interpretations of the Hebrew Bible (including Christian interpretations )of the Hebrew Bible and has placed particular focus on interpretations of the Hebrew Bible when the Jewish community canonized the text over many years.  He argues that the key interpretations were not what the original author(s) (or redactors) may have intended but the interpretations when the Jewish community accepted the text as interpreted as canon for their religion.  Thus, Song of Songs (Song of Solomon in the Christian Bible) is a love poem between woman and man.  By a process of interpretation, the Jewish community and then the Christian community made it about the love of God and community.  This interpretive process starts and then does not end.

Here is  how Kugel illustrates his focus on ancient interpreters (pp. 10-17, footnotes and endnotes omitted and bold-face supplied by JAT):

The Ancient Interpreters at Work

                        Who were the interpreters of these ancient writings? n14 For the most part, their names are unknown. From their writings and from their whole approach to interpreting Scripture, it would appear that most of them were teachers or professional sages of sorts; n15 is some were probably independently wealthy men (and, possibly, women) who had the leisure to pursue their subject. n16 Indeed, we know that a few, like the second-century BCE sage Ben Sira, belonged to the ruling class and were close to the political leadership (Sir. 39:4; 50:1-24); such figures no doubt strengthened the connection between reading Scripture and determining how community affairs were to be run in their own day. Their ideas about how Scripture is to be interpreted have survived in a number of texts belonging to the end of the biblical period—texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls and the biblical apocrypha and pseudepigraphas as well as in somewhat later writings such as those of early Christians and the founders of rabbinic Judaism.

[11]

            The manner in which ancient interpreters read and explained Scripture is at first likely to strike modern readers as a bit strange. They did not go about the job of interpreting the way we do nowadays. Take, for example, the famous biblical story of how God ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac on an altar:

And it came to pass, after these things, that God tested Abraham. He said to him, "Abraham!" and he answered, "Here I am." He said, "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah. Then sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I will show you." So Abraham got up early in the morning and saddled his donkey. He took two of his servants with him, along with his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering and then set out for the place that God had told him about. On the third day, Abraham looked up and saw the place from afar. Abraham told his servants, "You stay here with the donkey while the boy and I go up there, so that we can worship and then come back to you."

            Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and put it on his son Isaac; then he took the fire and the knife, and the two of them walked together. But Isaac said to his father Abraham, "Father?" and he said, "Here I am, my son." And he said, "Here is the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?" Abraham said, "God Himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son." And the two of them walked together.

            When they came to the place that God had told him about, Abraham built an altar and arranged the wood on it. He then tied up his son Isaac and put him on the altar on top of the wood. Abraham picked up the knife to kill his son. But an angel of the LORD called to him from heaven, and said, "Abraham, Abraham!" And he said, "Here I am." He said, "Do not harm the boy or do anything to him. For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me." And Abraham looked up and saw a ram caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son.

                                                                                    Gen. 22:1-13

            The story itself is quite disturbing to modern readers — as it was to ancient readers. How could God, even as a test, order someone to kill his own son? And why would God ever need to test Abraham in this way? After all, God is supposed to know everything: presumably, He knew how the test would come out before it took place, and He certainly already knew that Abraham was one who "feared God," as the angel says after the test is over. Equally disturbing is the way Abraham deceives his son Isaac. He does not tell him  [12] what God has told him to do; Isaac is kept in the dark until the last minute. In fact, when Isaac asks the obvious question—I see all the accoutrements for the sacrifice, but where is the animal we're going to sacrifice? — Abraham gives him an evasive answer: "God Himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son." This actually turns out to be true; God does provide a sacrificial animal — but Abraham had no way of knowing it at the time.

Presbyterian Excommunication for Heresy as a Preface to Biblical Criticism (5/22/21)

Those who have read my blog posts here note that I am quite enamored of Professor James Kugel.  I have quoted from his book, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now (Free Press 2007 ed.).  That book was about modern scholarship and traditional interpretations (including Christian interpretations) of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible / Old Testament; in this post I will call it the Hebrew Bible).  The book rocked my boat when I first read it (still does), bringing to the task of reading my past in the Christian tradition.

I was surprised that Professor Kugel opened the book (Chapter 1, titled "Rise of Modern Biblical Scholarship") with a picture of Professor Charles Augustus Briggs. I had never heard of Briggs before but I turned the page anyway and quickly found out.  Briggs’ Wikipedia page starts off by saying that he was “American Presbyterian (and later Episcopalian) scholar and theologian.”  Kugel’s bookends the opening and closing of Chapter 1 with Briggs' story.  As a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, Briggs gave a speech on his specialty, the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament, laying out the best scholarship on the Hebrew Bible at the time (the 1890s).  For that, the Presbyterian Church excommunicated Briggs for heresy (although his scholarship in the speech has stood the test of time).  The excommunication came after a long and well-publicized trial in Washington D.C.  How many knew that the Presbyterians excommunicated?  I have asked a few Presbyterians and few knew about the episode.  I always thought excommunication was a Catholic thing.  (When I first read the book, I was a Baptist and, as such, just suspected that the Presbyterians had hung onto that vestige of Catholicism.)

I offer below the opening and closing related of Chapter 1 excerpts related to Charles Augustus Briggs (I put page numbers in brackets) (and for those wanting to know what is between the opening and closing (it’s great), please email me jack@tjtaxlaw.com.  I omit footnotes (mostly scholarly) and bold-face certain parts that might be of particular interest to WPC members:

[2]

            On a warm May afternoon in 1893, a man stood on trial for heresy in Washington, D.C. This circumstance might in itself appear surprising. The defendant was being tried by the Presbyterian Church, which had always prided itself on its tradition of intellectualism and an educated clergy. While disagreements about church teachings were not rare in the denomination, going as far as putting a man on trial for his beliefs was certainly an extreme step. n1 Such a trial might also appear ill-suited to the end of the nineteenth century, a time of great openness to new ideas. Darwin's Origin of Species had been published a full three decades earlier, and Einstein's first writings on the theory of relativity were only twelve years away. America itself was a country of electric-powered machines and newfangled telephones, a rising economic and political center with its own burgeoning literary and intellectual avant-garde. Across the Atlantic, Sigmund Freud was working out his ideas on sexuality and the unconscious; Pablo Picasso was twelve years old, James Joyce was eleven, and D. H. Lawrence was eight. Heresy?

            Still more surprising was the man in the dock; Charles Augustus Briggs hardly seemed fitted to the role of heretic. In his youth, he had been an altogether traditional Presbyterian, distinguished only by the fervor of his belief. In his sophomore year at the University of Virginia, he presented himself for formal membership at the First Presbyterian Church of Charlottesville, and thereafter he became a committed evangelical Christian. n2 The tone of his faith in those early years is well captured by a letter he wrote to his sister Millie:

I trust you feel that you are a sinner. I trust that you know that Christ is your Savior, and I want to entreat you to go to him in prayer. I know by experience that Christ is precious, and that I would not give him up for the world... . Do you want to be separated from your brother and sister when they shall be with Jesus? Are you willing to be with the Devil in torment? You can decide the question in a moment. n3

            So great was Briggs's sense of calling that he soon abandoned plans to go into his father's highly prosperous business—Alanson Briggs, known as the "barrel king," owned and operated the largest barrel factory in the United States—in order to devote himself entirely to a life of Christian preaching and teaching.

[3]

            Briggs proved to be a gifted student of biblical Hebrew and ancient history, and he was soon ordained a Presbyterian minister. After having served as pastor to a small congregation in New Jersey for a time, he accepted a teaching post at one of the mainline seminaries of his day, the Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he lectured on Hebrew grammar and various biblical themes. He became, by all accounts, a highly respected scholar, acclaimed at a relatively young age as already belonging to "the foremost rank among the scholars of his day."  n4 Today, a century later, one of Briggs's books is still in print (a rare feat among academics!), a dictionary of biblical Hebrew that he coauthored with Francis Brown and S. R. Driver in 1906. Indeed, "BDB," as this dictionary is commonly known (for the initials of its three authors' last names), is still a required purchase for any graduate student undertaking serious work on the Hebrew Bible.

            What, then, was this son of the Establishment, an expert in Hebrew lexicography and biblical theology, doing on trial? It all had to do with a speech he had made two years earlier, on the occasion of his being named to a prestigious new chair at Union Seminary. Briggs's inaugural address, delivered on the evening of January 20, 1891, went on for well more than an hour. It began innocently enough; as required of all such appointees at Presbyterian seminaries, he opened with a public declaration of his faith in the Bible and the church's system of governance:

Further on Midrash - Having Our Bible and Criticizing It Too (5/21/21)

I previously offered a post titled "On Midrash (5/3/21)."  In that post, I offered some discussion by Professor James Kugel.  Professor Kugel has an offering today on "Having Our Bible and Criticizing It Too", here.  In it, he offers some discussion of midrash.  I quote the ending (the punch-line, so to speak):

My talk concerned the well-known midrash about Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, according to which Joseph was indeed tempted to sin, until at the last minute he had a vision of his father’s face and immediately desisted. My talk was about how this midrash had come into existence.

When it came time for questions, her hand shot up. I tried looking the other way, but finally I gave in and called on her. “I’m from Byalishtok [Białystok],” she said—and indeed, she had a rather heavy Yiddish accent—and this medrash you’re talking, the father’s face—everyone in Byalishtok knew about this medrash. You didn’t say anything new.

In fact, there was a boy in Byalishtok, Shmulik his name, and he…” at this point she paused, staring at me with a look that combined equal measures of pity and disdain. “Do you know what is beis boishes?” (A brothel.) “Yes,” I said weakly. “Well, this Shmulik, he goes into the beis boishes, but after a minute he comes rushing out. “What happened?” his friends ask him. “Maybe you see your father’s face, like Yoisef ha-Tzaddik?” “No,” Shmulik said, “just his galoshes.”

Isaiah 7:14 - Virgin or Young Woman? (5/14/21)

Among the verses we will discuss at the second session, on 5/16, is Isaiah 7:14.  The known key “facts” are as follows:  (1) The biblical Hebrew for the verse refers to a “young woman” meaning just that, young woman, without necessarily being a virgin; (2) in translating Isaiah 7:14 into Greek for the Septuagint, the translator(s) used the Greek word Parthenos which did mean virgin; and (3) the Christian tradition took their “Old Testament” from translations influenced by the Septuagint. Hence, Matthew and Luke anchor their narratives in a virgin birth prophesied by Isaiah.

Isaiah 7:14 (NRSV) says (emphasis supplied): 

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman[a] is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.

[a] Isaiah 7:14 Gk the virgin

Isaiah 7:14 (KJV) says (emphasis supplied):

Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

The NRSV has gone back to the best translation of the Biblical Hebrew. 

Kugel (pp. 539-552) addresses this verse as follows after translating the Biblical Hebrew verse as follows (emphasis supplied):

Suppose a certain young woman gets pregnant and gives birth to a son; she should give him the name “God-amidst-us” [Hebrew: ‘Immanu-’el].

* * * * 

Immanuel 

The exact identity and nature of the “certain young woman” who gets pregnant in Isaiah’s above-cited oracle is somewhat controversial: was she a real person, or merely hypothetical? * * * * The next word, ha-‘almah, translated as “a certain young woman,” might also be rendered simply as “the young woman.” Some scholars have in fact suggested that the definite article here implies a known individual—perhaps Ahaz’s own wife, or Isaiah’s. * * * * However, biblical Hebrew sometimes also uses definite articles and even demonstratives in an indefinite sense, in the same way that an English speaker might say, “This guy came up to me and started talking French,” where “this guy” really means “an undefined person, someone I never met before.” Considering this ambiguity, “a certain young woman” seems to preserve better the vagueness of the Hebrew: she might be known or might not be. As for “young woman,” that is how ‘almah is usually translated nowadays; the word does not necessarily tell us whether she is married or not.

Written Torah and Oral Torah in the Jewish Tradition (5/13/21; 5/22/21)

Last week, in the Sunday School class we briefly discussed the Oral Torah and its relationship to the Written Torah (first five books of the Hebrew Bible and of the Old Testament).  Today, I was reading James Kugel's Blog entry for May 17, here, titled Word of Mouth. I won’t get into the details of the blog entry, but the ending was this after discussing a hidden message: “At its heart is the idea that the words of the Written Torah tell only half the story.”

That thought inspired me to offer more on Oral Torah for participants in the class and others who are not familiar with Jewish concepts.  Kugel offers this discussion from How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now, (pp. 679-681, footnotes and endnotes omitted and some text omitted):

The founders of what was to become, after the first century CE, the dominant form of Judaism (“rabbinic Judaism”) had always attributed great importance to the Torah’s traditions of interpretation. In fact—for various reasons that need not detain us here—those traditions were granted a special status in Judaism: they were referred to collectively as the Torah-that-was-transmitted-orally (or “Oral Torah” for short), and they were sometimes asserted to go back all the way to the time of Moses himself, who had received them at the same time that he received the written text of the Pentateuch. If so, according to the exponents of rabbinic Judaism, then there were really two Torahs, the written Pentateuch and the traditions of its proper interpretation and application, which had been transmitted orally along with it. In the terms that we have seen, this was a kind of canonization of the idea that Abraham was a monotheist who underwent ten tests; that Jacob was a learned student, while his brother Esau was a brutish lout; that the Israelites heard only the first two of the Ten Commandments directly from God; that in forbidding “work” on the sabbath, the Torah had in mind precisely thirty-nine different types of work; that the Torah’s law of guardians distinguishes between a paid and an unpaid guardian; that a water-giving rock followed the Israelites in the desert; that the Shema is to be recited every morning and evening; and so on and so forth. All such traditions were held to be of equal authority with the written text, and this idea has remained a central tenet of Judaism to this day.

The “Oral Torah,” it should be noted, consisted of more than biblical interpretation alone—it also contained rules governing a number of matters not covered in the Pentateuch (for example, prayers and blessings to be recited on various occasions; agricultural laws; some torts and other areas of civil law; matters connected with betrothal, marriage, and divorce; parts of criminal law and judicial procedure; a detailed description of temple rites, purity statutes, and so forth). It thus included a vast body of material, and even though it continued to be called the “Oral Torah,” this material was eventually committed to writing—it became the Mishnah and Tosefta and the two Talmuds and various compilations of midrash in different genres. Thus, today, Judaism has essentially two canons, the biblical one and the great corpus of writings included under the Oral Torah.

Kugel on Christian Interpretation of the Binding of Isaac Story in Genesis (5/13/21)

This week’s session (5/16 at 9:30am) will include a discussion of how Christians and Jews interpret the Binding of Isaac story in Genesis 22:1-19 .   Randy Scofield, will be leading that discussion.  I thought it might be helpful to readers to have a different view of the Christian interpretation.  This view is from James Kugel, an Orthodox Jew and a noted Hebrew Bible scholar who has considered both Jewish and Christian interpretations of the Hebrew Bible, as presented in his wonderful book, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now, Amazon here.  In a subsection of his chapter 8 on the Trials of Abraham, Kugel offers the following on Christian interpretation of the Binding of Isaac story (footnotes and endnotes omitted):

The Foreshadowing of the Crucifixion

The typological approach to Scripture (see chapter 1) had some Jewish antecedents, but it was essentially a very Christian way of reading. According to this approach, early things foreshadow later ones; more specifically, Christians came to believe that things contained in the Old Testament are actually there as hints or allusions to events in the life of Jesus or to elements of Christian belief and practice (the Trinity, the Eucharist, baptism, and so forth). To put it another way: the Old Testament may not seem like a Christian book, but its stories and laws and prophecies all correspond to something in the New Testament or even in post–New Testament Christianity.

The roots of this idea are not hard to find: as we shall see, certain verses in the Psalms and the book of Isaiah were, from a very early stage of Christianity, taken as prophecies of the events of the Gospels. But after a while, the typologies began to suggest themselves at every turn: Adam, Abel, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, and other figures were all read as foreshadowings or prefigurations (figurae they were called in Latin, “figures”) of Jesus. So was Isaac. After all, his father offered him up to be killed as a sacrifice—certainly anyone who thought of Jesus as the son of God could see the parallel.

If God is for us, then who is against us? He who did not spare His own son but gave him up for us all, will He not also give us all things along with him?

     Rom. 8:31–32

[Jesus was the fulfillment of] that which was foreshadowed in Isaac, who was offered upon the altar.

     Letter of Barnabas 7:3

On Belief and Action (5/11/21)

In the book we are studying (The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently), Professors Levine and Brettler state the following (Kindle edition p. 33):

In Judaism, orthopraxy, what one does, is more important than orthodoxy, what one believes. There are Jewish atheists; technically, however, “Christian atheist” would be an oxymoron.

Somewhat on this theme, this  morning I was reviewing an offering from Torah.com titled: Torah MiSinai and Biblical Criticism: Rising to the Full Challenge by Dr. Rabbi Jeremy Rosen.  Here are some excerpts from the beginning of a longer offering:

Part 1

Tradition and Biblical Criticism: Describing Elements of Confrontation

Biblical Criticism challenges a traditional dogma that all the text of the Torah that we have in our possession today was written down by Moses on the instruction of God during one brief historical period over three thousand years ago. Does this mean that it is incompatible with the belief of Torah Min Hashamayim (Torah from Heaven)? Certainly, the Torah can be from heaven even if it is not from Moses. But what about Torah MiSinai? Does accepting the findings of academic biblical scholarship mean that it is necessarily incompatible with the idea of Torah MiSinai? This essay explores the possibility that the two worldviews are more complementary than many Jews seem to think

Emunah or Belief?

Different Perspectives; Different Stories; Better Picture (5/9/21)

At WPC, we are starting today a series On Christian and Jewish Readings of Biblical Text.  The difference is the lens through which the faiths view the common bible heritage -- the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.  I was reminded of a genre of story where, through cooperating by sharing our perspectives, we can get a more complete picture.  The web link for the story below is here, but I copy and paste here for easier reading:

THE STORY OF THE SIX BLIND MEN

(An Indian fable, modernized and retold by Phil Shapiro.)

Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there lived six blind men. Each of them was very wise. Each of them had gone to school and read lots of books in Braille. They knew so much of many things that people would often come from miles around to get their advice. They were happy to share whatever they knew with the people who asked them thoughtful questions.

One day these six wise blind men went for a walk in the zoo. That day the zookeeper was worrying about all of her many troubles. The night before she had had an argument with her husband, and her children had been misbehaving all day long. She had so much on her mind that she forgot to lock the gate of the elephant cage as she was leaving it.

Now, elephants are naturally very curious animals. They quickly tried to push the gate to the cage to see if it might open. To their great surprise, the gate swung freely on its hinge. Two of the more daring elephants walked over to the gate. They looked left and right, and then quietly tip-toed out of the cage. Just at that moment the six blind men walked by. One of them heard a twig snap, and went over to see what it was that was walking by.

"Hi there!" said the first blind man to the first elephant. "Could you please tell us the way to the zoo restaurant?" The elephant couldn't think of anything intelligent to say, so he sort of shifted his weight from left to right to left to right.

The first blind man walked over to see if this big silent person needed any help. Then, with a big bump, he walked right into the side of the elephant. He put out his arms to either side, but all he could feel was the big body of the elephant. "Boy," said the first blind man. "I think I must have walked into a wall."

On Midrash (5/3/21)

I was reading today in a book titled The Bible With andWithout Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently, authored by Amy Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler who are prominent Jewish professors at  Vanderbilt University Divinity School and Duke Center for Jewish Studies, respectively, working at the intersection of Christianity and Judaism.  Chapter 3, titled "The Creation of the World" has as its first subheading "In the Beginning."  Readers of this blog will probably recognize those words as the famous King James Version opening of Genesis, the first chapter in the Christian Old Testament.  The Christian Old Testament is basically the same as the Jewish Bible, also called the Tanakh (there are differences, but they are not important for present purposes).  Genesis was written in Hebrew, so whether the reader of an English version gets to Genesis through the Jewish tradition or the Christian tradition it comes to us mediated by the vagaries of translation from Biblical Hebrew.

Chapter 3 in the Levine-Brettler book with the subheading In the Beginning starts with the quote from famous prologue to John 1:1-5 (verse numbers omitted).

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

Professors Levine and Brettler say that the quote “is a midrash, or elaboration, on the opening verses of Genesis.”  (Emphasis supplied.)

As it happens, today I was working on midrash in connection with preparing to lead a book study group connected with Torah Study at Congregation Beth Israel in Houston.  The book is Moses: A Human Life by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg.  The book is based significantly on midrash which, in Jewish biblical interpretation, fills out cryptic biblical text that might puzzle or even disturb the biblical reader.  Christian interpreters also do a form of midrash, as Professors Levine and Brettler note. 

My first introduction to midrash was in a 2005 listening to an interview of Zornberg by Krista Tippett (here).  The midrash was on what happened after the Israelites crossed the Red Sea and the waters closed over and drowned the Egyptian troops pursuing them.  The Israelites on the safe side celebrated with the Song of the Sea and Miriam’s song.  Exodus 15:1-21.  The midrash added that God stopped the angels in heaven from singing to celebrate the Israelite’s deliverance by the killing of the Egyptians; God rebuked the angels "the creatures of My hand, the work of My hands, are dying in the sea. How can you be singing a song of praise?”  I was stunned that Jewish tradition had added the flourish that was not hinted in the biblical text (at least to a literal reader).  The midrash extended and smoothed out what on its face was pretty harsh.  (Of course, it does not explain why God had not just made the Egyptians retreat without killing them, but that’s another story or another midrash.)

Lessons Learned Long Ago and Today (4/29/21)

I re-learned a valuable lesson today.  The first time I learned the lesson was when a former student in a class on Real Estate Taxation at University of Houston Law School taught it to me.  As I was pontificating (close but not the same as blustering or bluffing), a student asked a question.  I said that I can’t answer that question,  but she and I could walk through the steps to get to the right answer.  (I was going to use it as a teaching experience for the student and myself.)  Another student jumped in to say something to the effect that “Mr. Townsend, you don’t have to guess at the answer, it is right here in the book.”  Oops.  After that I repeated that anecdote to every class urging them to jump in at appropriate times to move the class along.  (The student who called me out was one of my best ever, but claimed much later that he did not recall the incident; you can be sure that I did because it caused instant but temporary embarrassment which I got over.)

Earlier this week, a similar phenomenon occurred.  I read another lawyer's blog on the starting date for measuring the statute of limitations for erroneous tax refund suits.  (I know, yawn!)  The blog discussed a case that made no sense to me.  So, I responded with off-the-cuff, unresearched, reasoning that suggested the case was wrong and nonsensical.  I offered no authority to support my claim.  Today, I decided to explore that claim that I so off-handedly made.  I worked through the cases and discovered after spending considerable time in writing my own blog (below) on that issue that my off-the-cuff comment was correct.  And then, after completing my blog on the subject, I decided to check my own book on Federal Tax Procedure and found that I had nailed that issue before years ago in a footnote – footnote 1044 – in the book.  Oops again.  So, I did a mea culpa and comment in that new blog entry: When Does the Statute of Limitations Start on the Erroneous Refund Suit? (Federal Tax Procedure Blog 4/29/21), here.