Techniques and Assumptions in Jewish Exegesis before 70 CE.

• Author: Goldman, Edward A.

This reworked Cambridge Ph.D. thesis represents a project conceived on a vast scale and carried out with enormous diligence. The premise of the author was that one could collect all of the extant rabbinic literature likely to have originated prior to 70 C.E., analyze the exegesis utilized in this material both according to exegetical techniques and the underlying assumptions, and then generalize about these "scribal traditions." The features so isolated could then be compared with exegesis in "non-scribal traditions": their predecessors (the Masoretic Text, the Septuagint, the Targumim); their contemporaries (Alexandrian Jewry, Qumran, Josephus, the Dorshe Reshumot and Dorshe Hamurot); their successors, the Rabbis.

The main body of the volume consists of 93 traditions, containing 195 arguments which are either exegetical in character or else make use of a technique which is related to exegesis. The materials themselves reprewent three main types of traditions. 1) The traditions of named authorities, that is, "individuals to whom exegeses have been attributed, from Simon the Just to Rn. Yohanan b. Zakkai" (p. 12). Brewer acknowledges his debt to Jacob Neusner for having collected most of this material in The Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees before 70 and Development of a Legend. 2) The Pharisee-Sadducee traditions, which contain materials citing the Sadducees or the Boethusians. Brewer follows Ellis Rivkin in excluding those traditions which name only the Pharisees (p. 12). 3) The House disputes, containing "exegesis by one or other of the Houses" (p. 12). The author lays out the Hebrew texts of these traditions from the right margin, and facing, from the left margin, he offers his translations.

Beneath each tradition, the author adds notes on dating and an elaborate analysis. He categorizes each text from among four modes of exegesis: 1) peshat, or plain meaning of the text; 2) nomological, or "reading of Scripture as though it were a legal document" (p. 15); 3) ultra-literal, that is, demanding "the literal understanding of the words used in a text even when it is denim by the context and by the plain meaning of the idioms used" (p. 15); 4) derash, or hidden meaning of the text. He also highlights the various middoth, or rules of exegesis, utilized in each tradition.

By studying the number of times the different groups of exegetes represented in the texts use the various exegetical modes and techniques, the author concludes: 1) "the...