Unit 16 · Interpretation Across the Centuries

Midrash comes from a Hebrew root that means to seek or to search. In Jewish tradition it names a way of reading and the books that record it. The rabbis who shaped this reading lived in the Land of Israel and Babylonia between roughly 70 and 600 CE. They did not treat a verse as a closed statement. They treated it as a door. If a word was repeated, why? If a verse could be read two ways, which way, and what follows from each? Midrash is the record of those questions and the answers offered for them.

Rabbinic tradition sorts midrash into two families. Midrash halakhah reads the legal parts of the Torah to derive rules for life. The word halakhah means "the way one walks," that is, Jewish law. The Mekhilta on Exodus, the Sifra on Leviticus and the Sifre on Numbers and Deuteronomy are the classic collections. Historians date them, in their present form, to about the third century CE, with older material inside. When Exodus 21 speaks of injury, these works ask exactly what each phrase requires.

Midrash aggadah reads the stories, poems and gaps. Aggadah means "telling." This kind of midrash fills silences in the text. What was Abraham like before God called him? The Torah does not say, so Genesis Rabbah tells of a boy who smashed his father’s idols. Aggadah does not claim to report history. Jewish tradition treats it as teaching through story. A famous rule in the Talmud says a verse never loses its plain sense, even when a midrash builds on it (Shabbat 63a).

The two families share one habit. Each starts from a real feature of the text: an odd word, a missing detail, a verse that seems to clash with another. Then it proposes a reading. Later readers can accept it, reject it or put another beside it. That habit of reading closely and answering back is the seed of everything else in this chapter.

Genesis Rabbah is the great collection of midrash aggadah on the book of Genesis. Scholars date its compilation to the Land of Israel around the fifth century CE. It moves verse by verse and sometimes word by word. Its first section takes on the first word of the Torah, bereshit, "in the beginning." The midrash does not ask what happened first. It asks what the word "beginning" is pointing to.

The answer comes by way of another verse. Proverbs 8:22 has Wisdom say that the LORD made her as the beginning of His way. The rabbis read Wisdom as the Torah, so "in the beginning" becomes "by means of the Torah." Genesis Rabbah 1:1 then offers a mashal, a parable. A king who wants to build a palace does not build by guesswork. He uses the plans of an architect. So, the midrash says, God looked into the Torah and created the world.

This reading does several things at once. It links two books of the Tanakh into one conversation. It makes the Torah older than creation, an idea that shaped later Jewish thought and prayer. And it turns a hard, tiny word into a picture anyone can hold. Jewish tradition took the blueprint image seriously. Medieval readers, Rashi among them, quote or answer it.

Notice what the midrash is not doing. It is not denying that the verse describes creation. It reads the plain sense and then adds a layer on top. Later readers gave names to these layers, as you will see. Genesis Rabbah simply does it, and does it first.

The Talmud is the record of rabbinic debate built around the Mishnah, the law code of about 200 CE. Its Babylonian version was completed around 500 to 600 CE. On almost every page a rabbi quotes a verse. The quote is rarely decoration. It is evidence. The rabbis developed rules for how a verse can prove a point. A list of thirteen such rules, credited to Rabbi Ishmael, opens the Sifra and is recited in the daily morning prayers.

Two rules come up constantly. Kal va-chomer means "light and heavy." If a rule holds in a lesser case, it should hold in the greater one. Gezerah shavah means "equal cut." If the same unusual word appears in two verses, the law of one can teach the law of the other. These are not free association. Tradition limits a gezerah shavah to pairs received from a teacher. The rules make the argument checkable by another reader.

Alongside the rules sits a principle about who decides. In a famous story (Bava Metzia 59b), Rabbi Eliezer argues a point of law and calls on miracles, and then a voice from heaven, to back him. Rabbi Joshua stands and quotes Deuteronomy 30:12: the Torah "is not in heaven." The majority of sages, not a voice from above, decides how to read the text. The Talmud adds that God laughed and said, "My children have defeated Me." Jewish tradition reads the story as a charter for human interpretation.

The Talmud’s habit of citing verses shaped every later commentator. Rashi grew up on it. Maimonides organized it. Even readers who wanted only the plain sense had to say why they departed from a talmudic reading. When you see a verse quoted in a rabbinic text, ask three questions. What point is it proving? Which rule connects verse and point? And who else, in the same passage, reads the verse differently?

Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki, known by the acronym Rashi, was born in Troyes, in the Champagne region of France, in 1040. He studied in the Rhineland academies of Mainz and Worms and returned home to teach. Tradition says he made his living from wine, though historians are not certain. He died in 1105. His commentaries cover almost the whole Tanakh and most of the Babylonian Talmud. For nine centuries Jewish students have met the Torah with Rashi at their side.

Rashi’s method is compact. He quotes a word or phrase, then explains it in a few lines. He gives the peshat, the plain sense in context, and he brings in derash, midrashic reading, where he thinks it settles a real difficulty in the words. On Genesis 3:8 he states his aim: he has come only to give the plain sense of Scripture and the aggadah that fits the words in their order. That sentence became a banner for later readers who wanted to know when a comment is grammar and when it is story.

His first comment on the Torah shows both sides. He cites a question from Rabbi Isaac: the Torah is a book of commandments, so why does it not begin with the first commandment, in Exodus 12:2, instead of with creation? The answer is a midrash about the nations and the land. Then, without pause, Rashi turns to grammar. The form of bereshit, he argues, is a construct, so the verse means "in the beginning of God’s creating." It is a heading, not a claim about what came first.

Rashi’s commentary was the first dated Hebrew book to be printed, at Reggio di Calabria in 1475. The semi-cursive typeface later used for commentaries is called Rashi script, though he never wrote in it. His grandsons, among them Rashbam and Rabbenu Tam, carried on his school. Rashbam pushed the plain sense even harder than his grandfather did, and sometimes said so.

Abraham ibn Ezra was born in Tudela, in Muslim Spain, around 1089. He was a poet, a grammarian, an astronomer and a wanderer. After about 1140 he left Spain and traveled through Italy, France and England, writing as he went. He died around 1164. His commentary on the Torah was written for readers far from the great academies, and he says so. He wanted them to have grammar and sense, not only story.

Ibn Ezra’s introduction sorts the ways people read the Torah into several paths and rejects most of them. He will not, he says, pile up midrash where the words are plain. He will not read allegory into laws. He will follow the grammar of the Hebrew and the plain sense of the sentence, and he will bow to rabbinic tradition where law is at stake. This puts him near Rashbam and often at a distance from Rashi. He does not name Rashi much, but readers of both can feel the difference.

He is famous for hints. On Genesis 12:6, the text says the Canaanite was then in the land. Ibn Ezra notes that this could mean the verse was written when the Canaanite was no longer there, and adds that the one who understands will keep silent. On Deuteronomy 1:2 he speaks of a "secret of the twelve," which many readers connect with the last twelve verses of Deuteronomy, the account of Moses’ death. He never spells the secret out.

Later readers took those hints in different directions. Some Jewish commentators explained them within tradition, for example by saying Joshua wrote the closing verses, as one view in the Talmud holds (Bava Batra 15a). In 1670 the philosopher Spinoza quoted Ibn Ezra’s hints as early evidence for a critical study of who wrote the Torah. The next chapter picks up that story. Here, notice that the hint began as an act of close reading.

Rabbi Moses ben Nahman, called Ramban or Nahmanides, was born in Girona, in Catalonia, in 1194. He was a physician, a community leader and a scholar of Talmud. Late in life he wrote a commentary on the Torah that is long, argued and personal. In 1263 the king of Aragon required him to debate a Christian preacher in Barcelona. A few years later, in 1267, he left for the Land of Israel and died there around 1270.

Ramban’s introduction sets out his plan in verse. He will study the words of Rashi with love, and he will treat Ibn Ezra with what he calls open rebuke and hidden love. In practice he quotes both, agrees sometimes and disagrees often. On Genesis 1:1 he rejects Rashi’s construct reading and holds that the verse teaches creation from nothing. Then he adds that the true meaning of the passage is deeper than the plain sense.

One of his signature ideas is that the deeds of the ancestors are a sign for their descendants. On Genesis 12:6 he writes that what happened to Abraham foreshadows what will happen to his children. The stories are read as a pattern, not only a record. Ramban also insists that the Torah’s stories carry real theology. Where Ibn Ezra sees a grammar question, Ramban often sees a teaching about God’s care.

Ramban was one of the first major commentators to bring Kabbalah, Jewish mystical teaching, into a mainstream Torah commentary. He signals these readings with the phrase "by way of truth" and keeps them brief. He says plainly that they cannot be understood without a teacher. His page is thus a place where plain sense, midrash and mystery sit together, each labeled, each answering the others.

Rabbi David Kimhi, known as Radak, was born around 1160 in Narbonne, in Provence, and died there around 1235. His father Joseph and brother Moses were grammarians too. The family’s name became a pun on a line in Pirkei Avot, "if there is no flour there is no Torah," since kemach means flour. Later students said that without Kimhi there is no Torah. The joke shows how central his tools became.

Radak’s most lasting works are grammar books. The Mikhlol sets out the rules of Hebrew, and the Sefer ha-Shorashim, the Book of Roots, lists Hebrew words by their three-letter roots with their meanings and examples. For centuries it was the dictionary Jewish and later Christian scholars used. When Radak comments on a verse, he often begins with the root. That gives his reading a firm base and makes it easy to check.

He wrote commentaries on Genesis, on the Prophets, on Psalms and on Chronicles. He favored plain sense, like Ibn Ezra, but he quoted midrash more freely than Ibn Ezra did. In Psalms and Isaiah he sometimes stops to answer Christian readings of a verse. Radak lived in a Christian land where such readings were preached to Jews. His notes on Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53 explain why he reads them as about David or Israel, not about Jesus.

Radak’s place on the printed page came later. He does not appear in the first Rabbinic Bibles, but many editions add him beside Rashi and Ibn Ezra, especially for the Prophets. Reading Radak after Rashi, students notice a shift. Rashi answers a difficulty with a midrash. Radak answers it with a root. Both are trying to make the verse make sense.

Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, known as Maimonides or Rambam, was born in Córdoba, Spain, in 1138. His family fled persecution, and he settled in Fustat, near Cairo, where he worked as a physician and led the Jewish community. He died in 1204. He wrote a code of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah, in Hebrew. He also wrote, in Judeo-Arabic, a philosophical work, the Guide of the Perplexed, finished around 1190 and translated into Hebrew by Samuel ibn Tibbon in 1204.

The Guide is written for a reader who knows the Torah and knows philosophy and feels torn between them. Its first part is largely a dictionary of biblical words. Chapter by chapter, Maimonides takes a term the Torah uses for God: image, likeness, sitting, standing, seeing, hand, face. He shows that each word has more than one meaning in Hebrew. Then he argues that, when applied to God, only the non-bodily meaning can be intended.

His anchor is a rabbinic principle, "the Torah speaks in the language of human beings." The rabbis used it about repeated words in legal verses. Maimonides gives it wider reach. The Torah, he says, uses pictures so that everyone can grasp something true, but a careful reader must strip the picture away. On Genesis 1:26, the image of God in which humans are made is not a shape but the capacity for thought. That is what makes humans like God, and nothing else.

Not everyone accepted this. In the decades after his death, a dispute broke out over the Guide, and reports say copies were burned in Montpellier in the 1230s. Some rabbis feared it made the Torah a philosophy book. Others, including later Kabbalists, thought Maimonides had emptied God of presence. Yet his reading of divine language became standard in much of Jewish thought. Readers of Rashi and Ramban still meet him whenever a verse gives God a body.

The Zohar, "Radiance," is the central book of Kabbalah. It appeared in Castile, Spain, in the late thirteenth century, circulated by Moses de León, who died in 1305. The book presents itself as the teaching of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, a sage of the second century CE. Most modern scholars, following Gershom Scholem, hold that de León and his circle composed much of it. Traditional Kabbalists hold to the older attribution. Either way, the book is written in a special Aramaic and reads the Torah section by section.

For the Zohar, the Torah’s stories are a garment. In one passage it warns against thinking the Torah is only tales, since even a king’s garment is not the king. The words point to a hidden structure, the ten sefirot, aspects through which Kabbalists say God relates to the world. A verse about Abraham’s journey is also, on this reading, a verse about divine love flowing downward. The plain sense is not denied. It is the outermost layer.

Kabbalists of this period, among them Moses de León and Bahya ben Asher, named four levels of meaning. Peshat is the plain sense. Remez is the hint or allusion. Derash is the searching, midrashic reading. Sod is the secret, the mystical level. The first letters spell PaRDeS, a word for an orchard, and the Talmud tells of four sages who entered a pardes, of whom only Rabbi Akiva came out whole (Chagigah 14b). The name carries a warning as well as a map.

The four levels are a way to hold the whole tradition on one page. Rashi’s grammar is peshat. Ibn Ezra’s secret is remez. Genesis Rabbah is derash. Ramban’s "by way of truth" is sod. Not every reader accepts all four. Ibn Ezra was wary of allegory, and Maimonides did not use Kabbalah at all. But the scheme lets a student say which kind of reading is on the table, and that is often the first step in an honest argument.

Mikraot Gedolot means "great scriptures." It is the name of a printed Bible in which the Hebrew text stands in the center and translations and commentaries surround it. The first such edition came from the press of Daniel Bomberg, a Christian printer from Antwerp working in Venice, in 1517. A second Bomberg edition, published in 1524–1525, was edited by Jacob ben Hayyim ibn Adonijah. Its text became the standard Hebrew Bible for printers for about four hundred years.

The layout is the lesson. The center holds the Masoretic text, the Hebrew with the vowels and notes fixed by the Masoretes, scribes of the early Middle Ages. Beside it runs Targum Onkelos, the ancient Aramaic translation of the Torah, which Jewish tradition reads as an early commentary. Below and around are Rashi, Ibn Ezra and, depending on the edition, Ramban, Radak, Sforno and others. The Masorah, the scribes’ notes on spelling and word counts, may fill the margins.

Reading such a page is a skill. A student reads the verse, then the Targum, then Rashi, then looks to see whether Ibn Ezra objects. Each commentator uses his own script and his own shorthand. Nothing is settled by placement. Rashi is closest to the text because he is the most used, not because he is always right. The page assumes the reader will move between voices and form a view.

The Rabbinic Bible also changed Christian scholarship. Bomberg’s text was the base for later Christian Hebrew Bibles, and Radak’s grammar shaped Christian Hebrew study. The page carried Jewish reading beyond Jewish readers. Today Mikraot Gedolot editions, in print and online, remain the working tool of anyone who studies the Tanakh with its commentators.

Put the readers of this chapter in a line and the line is a thousand years long. Genesis Rabbah, around 400 CE, reads "in the beginning" as "by means of the Torah." Rashi, around 1100, quotes that midrash and then reads the grammar. Ramban, around 1260, takes Rashi’s grammar apart and adds a mystery. The Zohar, a generation later, makes the mystery the point. Maimonides, in between, warns them all not to give God a body. No one in the line erased anyone before him.

Jewish tradition has a word for this. Machloket means a dispute, and the Mishnah distinguishes a dispute for the sake of heaven, which endures, from one that is not (Avot 5:17). The model is the argument between the schools of Hillel and Shammai. The Talmud reports that a heavenly voice declared both to be words of the living God, and yet the law follows Hillel (Eruvin 13b). Jewish readers took from this that a text can carry more than one true reading without becoming meaningless.

The practice that keeps the conversation alive is chavruta, study in pairs. Two students read a verse and its commentators aloud and argue about them. The word comes from a root meaning friend. In a chavruta, questioning a reading is how you honor it. To skip Rashi’s question would be careless; to accept his answer without testing it would be lazy. The printed page is built for two people leaning over it, not one.

For a public-school reader, this history offers a method rather than a belief. You can ask what a verse says, what each named reader made of it and why, and where they differ. You can lay Rashi and Ramban side by side and say what each is doing. That is not deciding who was right about God. It is learning how a text has been read, which is something a historian, a literary critic and a student of religion can all do together.

A canon is the list of books a community counts as scripture. The Jewish canon is the Tanakh, twenty-four books in three parts: Torah, Nevi’im and Ketuvim. Christians call roughly the same collection the Old Testament, a name that pairs it with a New Testament. Jewish readers do not use "Old Testament" for their own scripture, since for them it is not old in relation to anything. In a public school, the neutral name is Hebrew Bible.

The counts differ because of how books are grouped. The Tanakh counts Samuel, Kings, Chronicles and Ezra–Nehemiah as one book each and the twelve minor prophets as one book, the Twelve. Protestant Bibles split them, which gives thirty-nine books with the same content. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles add books such as Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom and Sirach, giving forty-six or more. Jewish tradition and Protestants call these apocrypha; Catholics call them deuterocanonical.

Translation adds another layer. The Septuagint, a Greek translation made by Jews in Egypt from about the third century BCE, became the Bible of the early church. It includes the extra books and sometimes reads a verse differently from the Hebrew. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, finished around 405 CE, went back to the Hebrew for most books. When a rabbi and a pastor read "the same verse," they may be reading different words.

None of this makes one canon right and another wrong. It means that when you compare readings, you first ask which canon, which order and which translation each reader holds. That is a matter of fact, not of faith, and it is where careful comparison begins.

The books are the same, but the order is not. The Tanakh puts the Prophets in the middle and the Writings last. The Ketuvim, the Writings, close with Ezra–Nehemiah and then Chronicles. The last verses of 2 Chronicles record the decree of Cyrus, king of Persia, allowing the exiles to return and rebuild the Temple. The last word is a call to go up. Jewish readers have long noted that their Bible ends on the way home.

The Christian Old Testament follows the Septuagint’s order. It moves history to the front, the poetry to the middle and the Prophets to the end. Its final book is Malachi, whose last verses promise that Elijah the prophet will come before the great day of the LORD. In a Christian Bible the next page is the Gospel of Matthew, where John the Baptist appears in the wilderness. Christian readers have seen the ending as a bridge to that story.

Neither community moved a book to make a point in secret. The orders grew up over centuries and both are ancient. But once fixed, an order teaches. A Jewish student who reads through the Tanakh finishes with return and rebuilding. A Christian student finishes with expectation. The historian notes both orders and asks when each became standard, which is a question about manuscripts and lists, not about truth.

The lesson for comparison is simple. Before you ask what a book means, ask where it sits. The same chapter of Daniel is among the Prophets in a Christian Bible and among the Writings in the Tanakh. That placement already tells you how each reader has been taught to hear it.

In Isaiah 7 the prophet speaks to Ahaz, king of Judah, around 734 BCE, when two neighboring kings threaten Jerusalem. Isaiah offers a sign: a young woman will bear a son and name him Immanuel, "God is with us," and before the child is old enough to know right from wrong, the threat will pass. The Hebrew word for the woman is almah. In the Tanakh it means a young woman of marriageable age. It does not by itself say whether she is married.

The Septuagint translated almah with the Greek word parthenos, which usually means virgin. The Gospel of Matthew (1:23) quotes that Greek line and applies it to the birth of Jesus. From then on, Christian readers, from the church fathers to the King James Version, read Isaiah 7:14 as a prophecy of a virgin birth. That reading is central to Christian tradition and is stated here as its reading.

Jewish commentators read the verse within its chapter. Rashi takes the young woman to be the prophet’s own wife, and the sign to be for Ahaz in his own lifetime. Ibn Ezra and Radak read it similarly and point out that a sign for Ahaz must come in Ahaz’s day. Radak adds that the Hebrew word for virgin is a different word, betulah. The 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation renders the phrase "the young woman." So does the Christian Revised Standard Version of 1952, which caused a public dispute in American churches.

The historian’s question is narrower. What did the sign mean to Ahaz? Most scholars connect the child to the crisis of 734 BCE and to the chapters that follow, where Isaiah’s own son is named as a sign. On that reading, the verse is about Judah’s survival, and its later use in Matthew is a second life the text took on. That is a description of how readings grow, not a ruling on which one a reader should hold.

Isaiah 52:13 through 53:12 describes a servant who is despised, suffers for others and is finally raised up. Scholars call it the fourth of the servant songs in Isaiah 40 through 55. Earlier in those chapters the servant is named: in Isaiah 41:8 and 49:3 the servant is Israel, or Jacob. The identity of the servant in chapter 53 is the most argued question in the whole book.

Rashi, Ibn Ezra and Radak read the servant as the people of Israel, humiliated among the nations in exile and then vindicated. On this reading, the speakers who say "he was despised" are the nations themselves, astonished at Israel’s rise. The church father Origen, writing around 248 CE, reports that Jewish scholars of his day already read the chapter this way. Jewish tradition is not uniform, though. The Talmud (Sanhedrin 98b) applies a verse of the chapter to the Messiah, and some later Jewish readers followed that line.

Christian tradition, from the New Testament on, reads the servant as Jesus. The book of Acts (8:26–35) tells of an Ethiopian official reading Isaiah 53 and asking whether the prophet speaks of himself or another, and the apostle Philip answers with the story of Jesus. Church fathers and later Christian readers built on this. In Christian worship the chapter is read in Holy Week. Jewish readers note that it is not among the haftarot read in the synagogue year, which some take as deliberate and others as chance.

Historians place Isaiah 40 through 55 in Babylon around 540 BCE, near the fall of that empire to Cyrus. They ask what the exiles could have heard: perhaps the community, perhaps the prophet, perhaps a figure the text leaves open on purpose. Literary readers point to the shifting speakers and the poem’s refusal to name the servant. Three readers, three questions. A good comparison names each question before comparing any answer.

Psalm 22 opens with a cry: My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? Its heading in Hebrew reads "for the leader, upon ayelet ha-shachar," the hind of the dawn, and calls it a psalm of David. The poem moves from abandonment to a vivid description of suffering and then, in its second half, to praise and a feast for all nations. Its shape, from cry to thanksgiving, is common in the psalms.

Jewish readers have read it as David’s own prayer in danger. The Midrash Tehillim, the midrash on Psalms, reads the hind of the dawn as Queen Esther and the whole psalm as her prayer before she approached the king. For that reason, some communities recite Psalm 22 on Purim. Rashi follows this line and reads the psalm as speaking for Israel in exile as well. The suffering is real, the speaker is human, and the rescue comes.

In the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, Jesus speaks the psalm’s first line from the cross, in Aramaic. Christian readers from the first century on have read the whole psalm as a description of the crucifixion: the mocking, the thirst, the dividing of garments. It is read on Good Friday in many churches. As with Isaiah 53, this is Christian tradition’s reading of a Jewish text, and it is described here as such.

One verse became a translation dispute. In the Hebrew Masoretic text of verse 17 (verse 16 in Christian numbering), the phrase is usually read ka'ari, "like a lion," at my hands and feet. The Septuagint and the Vulgate read a verb, "they pierced." The King James Version follows the Greek. JPS 1917 follows the Hebrew: "like a lion." Scholars note that the two readings differ by a single letter in Hebrew and that ancient manuscripts vary. Which text you hold decides what you can see in the verse.

Genesis 1:26 has God say, "Let us make man in our image." The verb is plural. Every reader notices, and readers have noticed for two thousand years. The next verse switches back to the singular: God created humankind in His image. The tension between the two verses is a gap in the text, and gaps are where readings gather.

Genesis Rabbah (8:8) records rabbis worried that the plural would let others claim more than one God. It answers that God consulted the ministering angels before creating humans, and that the Torah kept the plural to teach humility: even the greatest should take counsel with the lesser. Rashi adopts this reading and adds that the Torah did not shy from the risk of being misread in order to teach good conduct. On this view, the plural is a lesson in manners, not a statement about God’s nature.

Many early Christian writers read "let us" as a hint of the Trinity, the Christian teaching that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Augustine, around 400 CE, and others before him took the plural as the persons of the Godhead speaking together. This became a common Christian reading, though not all Christian scholars today hold it. It is presented here as a reading Christian tradition has offered.

Historians of the ancient Near East offer two accounts. One is the divine council: several biblical passages, such as 1 Kings 22:19 and Psalm 82, picture God enthroned among heavenly beings, and "let us" may address that court. The other is a plural of majesty, a way of speaking that some languages use for kings. Scholars debate which fits better. What they share is the question: what would this phrase have meant to its first hearers? That is a different question from the rabbis’ or the church fathers’, and it deserves its own answer.

A disputation in the Middle Ages was a public debate ordered by a Christian ruler in which Jews were made to answer charges about their texts. The Jewish side could not refuse and could not win in any ordinary sense. In Paris in 1240, Nicholas Donin, a convert from Judaism, brought charges against the Talmud before the court of King Louis IX. Rabbi Yechiel of Paris and other rabbis were summoned to respond. The Talmud was condemned, and in 1242 cartloads of manuscripts were burned in Paris.

In Barcelona in 1263, the contest was over the reading of the Tanakh and the Talmud. Pablo Christiani, also a convert, argued before King James I of Aragon that rabbinic texts themselves proved that the Messiah had come. Ramban was required to answer. He later wrote his own account of the debate, and a Latin account survives from the other side. The two accounts do not agree on who prevailed. Ramban’s version circulated widely among Jews; he left Aragon a few years later.

Ramban’s most famous move was about categories. Christiani cited aggadah, rabbinic stories, as if they were binding teaching. Ramban replied that Jews are bound by the Talmud’s law and by the Tanakh, but that aggadic stories are teachings a Jew may accept or set aside. Historians debate whether this was Ramban’s settled view or a position for the debate. Either way, it shows a reader arguing not about a verse but about what kind of text a verse belongs to.

These events are described here as history. Jewish memory keeps them as times of pressure, and the burning of 1242 is mourned in a medieval lament still recited by some on the fast of Tisha B’Av. Christian churches today have, for the most part, renounced forced disputations. Knowing this history explains why modern dialogue between the two traditions insists on equal footing and on each side describing its own reading.

In 1893, alongside the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago hosted the World's Parliament of Religions. Speakers from many faiths addressed the same hall, among them Jewish leaders such as Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch of Chicago Sinai Congregation. It was not a debate. Each speaker described his or her own tradition. Historians treat it as an early model of interfaith gathering on equal terms, though it was organized mainly by liberal Protestants and reflected that.

The Catholic Church’s declaration Nostra Aetate, issued by the Second Vatican Council in 1965, rejected the charge that Jews as a people were responsible for the death of Jesus and called for dialogue and mutual respect. It affirmed the Church’s roots in the Jewish scriptures. Many Protestant churches issued similar statements in the following decades. These are described here as what those churches said about their own teaching.

From the Jewish side, in 2000 a group of Jewish scholars published Dabru Emet, "Speak the Truth," a statement on how Jews might regard Christianity. It noted that Jews and Christians worship the same God and seek authority from the same book, while differing on how to read it. Not all Jewish leaders signed, and some criticized it. The point is that the response was voluntary and internal, which no disputation ever was.

In practice, dialogue today often means reading together. Jewish and Christian scholars sit with Isaiah 53 or Genesis 22 and say what each tradition has made of it. A historian may join and explain the text’s setting. The rule of the room is the one Ms. Okafor set: describe, do not rank. That rule is also the rule of this course. Readers can hold different faith commitments and still agree about what Rashi said, what Augustine said and what the Hebrew word is.

Baruch Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632 to a family of Portuguese Jewish origin. In 1656 the leaders of the community placed him under herem, a ban, for opinions the surviving document does not spell out. He worked as a lens grinder and wrote philosophy. In 1670 he published, without his name, the Theological-Political Treatise. It was banned in the Netherlands a few years later. He died in 1677.

The treatise’s central claim about reading is a method. Spinoza argued that the way to understand scripture is the way one understands nature: gather the data, in this case the language, the history of each book and the circumstances of its writing, and draw conclusions only from that. Meaning must come from the text itself, not from philosophy or from a church’s or synagogue’s authority. He called this interpreting scripture from scripture.

Applying the method, Spinoza reviewed passages that seemed to be written after Moses. He quoted Ibn Ezra’s hints on Genesis 12:6 and Deuteronomy 1:2 and said openly what Ibn Ezra had only hinted. He proposed that Ezra the scribe, centuries after Moses, had compiled the Torah and the historical books from older writings. He read prophecy as the work of vivid imagination and miracles as events not understood, positions that both Jewish and Christian readers of his day rejected.

Historians of biblical study treat the treatise as a beginning of critical study: the reading of the Bible with the tools of history and language and without a prior commitment to its authority. Later scholars did not all share Spinoza’s philosophy. Many religious scholars, Jewish and Christian, have used historical tools while keeping their faith. But the question he made public, who wrote these books and when, has been on the table ever since.

Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) was a German Protestant scholar. In 1878 he published the book known in English as the Prolegomena to the History of Israel. It gave the classic form of the documentary hypothesis. Building on earlier scholars, he argued that the Torah combines four written sources. J uses the divine name and tells vivid stories; E prefers the word Elohim; D is Deuteronomy; and P, the Priestly source, cares for genealogies, ritual and the tabernacle.

Wellhausen’s most contested claim was about order. He placed P last, after the Babylonian exile, which made the Torah’s priestly law a late product rather than the foundation. He connected D with the reform of King Josiah in 622 BCE, an idea proposed by W. M. L. de Wette in 1805. The whole was an argument about history: the religion of Israel, on his account, developed from prophets to priests, and the Torah’s final shape reflected the end of that process.

Jewish responses varied. Some Orthodox scholars, such as David Zvi Hoffmann in Berlin, wrote detailed rebuttals. Umberto Cassuto, at the Hebrew University, argued in 1941 that the changes in divine names follow meaning, not sources. Others in the Reform and Conservative movements accepted much of the method. Some also noted that Wellhausen’s picture of a late, legalistic priesthood echoed Christian views of Judaism, and that critique has been taken seriously by later scholars of all backgrounds.

Today the four-source model is taught as a starting point, not a settled result. Many scholars now speak of layers and supplements rather than four complete documents, and dates for P are argued in both directions. What survives is the practice: reading the Torah for seams, repetitions and differences of style, and asking what they show about how the book came to be. That is the historian’s question, and it sits beside, not above, the rabbis’ and the church’s.

William F. Albright (1891–1971), of Johns Hopkins University, shaped what came to be called biblical archaeology in the mid-twentieth century. He dug in the Land of Israel, dated pottery, and argued that the finds supported the broad outline of the biblical account of the ancestors and the conquest. His students dominated American study of the field for a generation. Albright was a Christian scholar and did not hide it, but his method was archaeological.

From the 1970s on, new excavations and surveys changed the picture. Many scholars concluded that there was no archaeological trace of a swift conquest of Canaan and that early Israel emerged within the land’s highlands. Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University proposed a low chronology, which moves some structures once credited to Solomon down to a later century. With Neil Asher Silberman he wrote The Bible Unearthed (2001), arguing that much of the Torah and Joshua through Kings took shape in the seventh century BCE, in Josiah’s Judah.

Other archaeologists disagree, and the argument continues in journals and at dig sites. The debate is often described with the labels minimalist and maximalist, but most working scholars sit between them. What all sides use is the same evidence: pottery, walls, inscriptions, and the dating methods that fix them in time. The disputes are about how much the evidence can bear.

The Tel Dan stele, found in 1993 in northern Israel, shows the limits. It is an Aramaic inscription from the ninth century BCE in which a king boasts of defeating kings of Israel and of the "House of David." Most scholars read the phrase as naming David’s dynasty, the first mention of David outside the Bible. It does not tell us anything about David’s life or the size of his kingdom. An inscription confirms a name, a date, an enemy. The stories remain the Bible’s own.

In 1981 Robert Alter, of the University of California, published The Art of Biblical Narrative. He argued that the Bible’s stories are carefully made, with repeated scenes, key words and telling silences, and that a reader should attend to that craft before cutting the text into sources. He named the type-scene, a scene the text repeats with variations, such as the meeting at a well in Genesis 24, Genesis 29 and Exodus 2. Meir Sternberg’s The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (1985) went further into how the text controls what the reader knows.

Some of these tools have Jewish roots. The leitwort, a leading word repeated through a passage, was named by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig in their German translation of the 1920s and 1930s. Rashi and the midrash had long noticed repeated words. What the new critics added was a way to talk about the whole story’s design in the language of literature, alongside the historian’s questions about its sources. Alter later translated the whole Hebrew Bible (2018) to show the craft in English.

Feminist reading asks what the text says about women and what its readers have done with that. Phyllis Trible’s God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (1978) and Texts of Terror (1984) read stories such as Hagar’s, Tamar’s and Jephthah’s daughter’s closely and named their violence. Tikva Frymer-Kensky, who taught at the University of Chicago Divinity School, read the women of the Bible against the ancient Near East. Judith Plaskow’s Standing Again at Sinai (1990) asked what a Jewish theology looks like when women are at the center. Avivah Zornberg reads the stories with midrash and psychology.

Each of these readers asks a question the earlier readers did not. Alter asks how the story is built. Trible asks whom the story hurts and who is listening. A historian asks where it came from. Rashi asks what the words mean and what the tradition heard. None of these questions replaces another. A student who can name the question each reader is asking has learned the main skill of this unit.