Midrash
Before the Talmud and hadith, there were the Torah and Quran, and those who affirmed that the latter were indeed sacred Scripture were committed to an understanding of what was meant and what was intended by the words of God in them.1 There is no getting at the beginning of that process; we possess only sophisticated finished works of commentary on Scripture. But the existence of a class of professional scribes or bookmen (soferim) in the Jewish community after the Exile suggests that already the task of expounding the Jewish Scriptures for learned and laity alike was well under way. The work itself and some of the works that embody it are called midrash, and midrash is the single most characteristic act of post-Exilic Judaism.2 The root from which the word derives means simply to “study” or “expound,” but when it was connected with Scripture, it took on for many Jews the quality of a liturgical act.
From the available evidence we can conclude that in the decades following the return from exile two processes were occurring. In their own study centers, the soferim were extracting, comparing, and combining legal precepts (halakot) derived from Scripture, a work that came to term in the Mishna;3 and in more general religious contexts, perhaps the forerunners of the later synagogues, these same and other scriptural texts were adduced and expanded, in the manner of a homily (haggada), for purposes of moral formation, edification, and piety.
We have already spoken of halakic midrash, the rabbinic process of extracting implicit statutes—as opposed to the explicit mitzvot—from the text, or even, just as frequently, from the sense of Scripture. Here we will examine the narrower sense in which midrash is, generally understood—that is, haggadic or homiletic midrash. Even though the two genres are distinguished here and elsewhere as a matter of course, there is no essential conflict between halakic and haggadic midrash. They differ widely in style, but their fundamental agreement rests on what has been called Jewish “monobiblism,” the presence of a single, authoritative Scripture accepted by all interested parties. Whether explicitly referred to or not, the Bible underlies all Jewish midrash. There are, moreover, halakot in the homiletic midrashim and the haggadic method was often applied, as we shall see, to halakic material.
A further distinction must be drawn. Haggadic midrash, hereafter simply midrash, is a method that appears in many different contexts. Translations of the Bible are a prime locus for the exercise of the midrashic method, for example. The language of post-Exilic Judaism was changing from Hebrew to Aramaic in the immediate pre-Christian centuries.4 Since large numbers of the laity could no longer understand Scripture in its original form, it was translated into the common Aramaic tongue of Palestine, just as it was turned into Greek at Alexandria for the Greek-speaking Jews living there and elsewhere in the Diaspora. The Alexandrian Greek translation, the Septuagint, whose origins are surrounded by stories calculated to guarantee its authenticity, was, for all its sometimes easy manner with the Hebrew text, still recognizably a translation.5 The Aramaic treatments, called targums, were paraphrases rather than translations and often approached commentaries in their haggadic manner.6 Their principal use was for oral liturgical recitation in the synagogue service.
From Midrash to Midrashim
The targums are obviously midrashic but not yet midrashim in the formal, literary sense. The earliest preserved examples of the latter are the sectarian commentaries called pesharim from Qumran and the works of the rabbis, both tannaim and amoraim, of the talmudic era.7 The latter fall into two general categories. The first or expositional midrash is a commentary proper that puts the midrashic method at the service of halakic concerns. It treats the Scripture in the order of its verses, each verse expounded by an appropriate tale or parable. The purely homiletic midrashim differ in two ways. First, they treat Scripture according to its liturgical divisions, that is, the Torah pericopes read daily in the synagogue over a cycle of three years or the “section” (pesiqta) reserved for Sabbaths and special festivals. Second, the homiletic exegete began each of the divisions of his work by citing a verse drawn from the Writings to which was added one or more explanations from different sources. The last of these was designed to lead into the homily proper, which generally confined its attention to one significant verse of the original pericope.
The earliest rabbinic midrashim, as has been remarked, had as their object the extraction of halakic material from Scripture by an application of the midrash method. They are, moreover, treasurehouses of Jewish biblical legend, and their composition stretches well into the Islamic era.8 There are in fact stories similar to the rabbinic midrashim in both content and homiletic style in the Quran and many more in the “Tales of the Prophets” that began to circulate in Islam with the conversion of increasing numbers of Jews and Christians. It is not always clear who borrowed from whom in any given instance.9
The How and the Why of Explaining Scripture
The development of midrash is not unlike the history of logic. There is a kind of logic in almost all forms of human thought, but it was only after arriving at a certain degree of self-consciousness about the process that the “rules” governing such thought were first formulated. Aristotle did not invent logic; he simple abstracted and formalized an operation many could perform but few could describe. The early soferim too may have been practicing midrash without knowing it, or at least formalizing the process, though their growing self-consciousness is clearly reflected in the encomium of the sofer and his work in the second-century B.C.E. Wisdom of Jesus ben Sira (39:1–8). Tradition, however, grants Jesus’ contemporary Hillel the glory of being the Aristotle of Jewish midrash. Some of Hillel’s rules for elucidating the meaning of a text were by then commonplace in the Greek and Roman rhetorical and philosophical schools—so commonplace, perhaps, that there was no need to “borrow” them in any formal sense of that word.10
If we turn from the methods of Jewish exegesis to trying to understand its motives and intent, we are confronted with a far more complex problem. A distinction is occasionally drawn between “pure” exegesis, which attempts to understand the meaning of a text, and “applied” exegesis, which has as its intent the eliciting of a scriptural answer to what was essentially a nonscriptural question.11 The first type of midrash arises out of the obscurities, lacunae, and self-contradictions of Scripture itself, or the impossibility of accepting what the plain sense (peshat) says. There are words in the Bible whose meaning was obscure at best. Stories sometimes lacked important details, and biblical mitzvot do not always spell out the terms or conditions of their applicability.12 Further, the Bible is a composite book, and its various enactments were not always harmonized by the original editors; the task fell to the exegetes. Finally, some of the accounts in the Bible—instances of polygamy and incest, for example—had to be explained and mitigated for a generation that found them somewhat less than edifying.13
It was a Pharisee, it should be noted, who codified the rules of exegesis, perhaps, as has been argued, because the Pharisees could not claim the priestly authority of the Sadducees and their scribes in the interpretation of Scripture, and so if they wished to depart from the literal sense, as the Sadducees refused to do, they had to justify their midrash carefully on technical grounds. But the Pharisees were not the only ones to “apply” Scripture to their own point of view. The community at Qumran did the same, and so did the followers of Jesus.14 Pharisaic midrash, and the rabbinic midrash that grew out of it, had as its chief aim the extraction of a deeper understanding (and a wider application) of the legal and ethical principles inherent in Scripture. The Essenes and Christians had other interests: to read in the Scriptures the foreshadowing of future events, the future that was now present or still to come in the messianic age or the End Time.
Allegorical Exegesis
The exegetical technique of both the Essenes and the Christians involves a kind of allegorizing in that it takes as its premise the principle that although Scripture is talking about one thing (the present), it is really referring to something else (the future). But the method of allegory found its broadest extension in Philo of Alexandria (ca. 20 B.C.E.–45 C.E.), whose understanding of “the other” was the whole body of contemporary Greek philosophy.15 Philo understood well enough the value of the peshat, and could also compose moral midrash in the best Palestinian style. But his chief contribution to scriptural exegesis was his application of the peculiar Greek sense of allegoria (other-referent) and hyponoia (under-thought) to the Bible.16 The Greeks, particularly the Stoics and Neoplatonists, allegorized Homer and the poets for much the same reason that Jewish exegetes “interpreted” patriarchal polygamy and incest: the stories were morally offensive and yet occurred in a context of divine inspiration. Philo did not allegorize on quite the same moral grounds, but rather because of his conviction that Scripture and philosophy were speaking of the same truths, though in different forms of discourse.17 The Scriptures themselves invited allegorization, somewhat the way the poets did, by presenting things in a manner that made the literal interpretation offensive or unintelligible.
It was Paul who made allegoria a staple of the Christians’ reading of Scripture.18 In his Letter to the Galatians (4:21–27) he boldly pronounced the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar an “allegory” and proceeded to unpack its true spiritual meaning. And it was he too who pioneered the notion that the Scriptures—for Paul and the other early Christians that meant only the Jewish Bible—foreshadowed the events of the coming Christian dispensation. Adam was the analogical “type” or model of the future (and now present) Messiah in that the sin of the first prefigured the redemptive death of the second Adam (Rom. 5:14), whereas the Israelites’ experiences in Sinai occurred “typically” to warn the Christians of the results of resisting God—the same use to which the Quran puts the Bible. Succeeding generations of Christians were extremely fond of this foreshadowing or typological exegesis and so quite unintentionally ensured that the “Old Testament” of the Jews would always be linked to the “New” of the Christians, the prefiguring to the prefigured.
When we turn from Paul to the Gospels, we find ourselves in a not terribly different world. Here too the Bible (and the Apocrypha) are scrutinized for their foreshadowing of Jesus as the Messiah. None of this is particularly novel in the context of Jewish midrash—in Luke 4:16–30 Jesus is shown doing much the same thing in a Galilean synagogue service—and it was obviously a persuasive way of arguing Jesus’ claims on a Jewish audience. The early Jewish Christians went a step further; one of their number, Symmachus, prepared a new Greek translation of the Bible. It no longer survives, but from Eusebius’s remarks, it was almost certainly a targum that argued as well as translated. A very early example of Christian exegesis that comes directly out of a context of Jewish midrash, and perhaps written by a converted Jew, is the Letter of Barnabas, which allegorizes the Bible, particularly its dietary laws, in a quite remarkable fashion.19
From the Gentiles to the Fathers
Over time the Christians lost their audience of Jews or Jewish converts to whom Barnabas addressed his letter, as a result they turned away from the methods of rabbinic midrash to the allegoria of Philo, which would be more congenial to the Hellenized, once Gentile, Christian. The Christian Fathers knew Philo’s allegorical method very well. Whether or not they read Philo himself, they received ample instruction on allegorical interpretation from two who had: the early-third-century Alexandrian Christians Clement and Origen. All of these scholars—Philo, Clement, Origen, and their Greek and Latin successors—tried their hand at formalizing allegoria by subdividing it.20 There was general agreement that both a literal and a “spiritual” sense of Scripture existed. A common division of the latter was into a moral sense not very different from rabbinic haggadic midrash and a Philonian allegoria that penetrated into the deeper, that is, philosophical truths embodied in the sacred book.
Though the Christian Fathers paid lip service to the literal sense of Scripture, they did not expend a great deal of exegetical energy on explaining it. This was not unnatural, perhaps, in the case of the Jewish Bible, whose mitzvot they had quite explicitly rejected. One who did take it seriously and who, as a Christian, was led to conclude that the Jewish Bible was not Scripture at all was the second-century Christian Marcion. Where Barnabas managed to embrace the Jewish Bible by allegorizing it almost beyond recognition, Marcion simply rejected it as unusable, unfitting, and unlikely the Word of God—not the God worshiped by the Christians, at any rate. Marcion was rejected by the Church in turn: he was excommunicated at Rome in 144 C.E. The Church kept the Jewish Scripture, though most of the Christian Fathers followed the example of Paul and the Gospels, offering a typological rather than a literal interpretation of what they called “The Old Testament,”21 or else they followed where Philo had led, converting a “Mosaic philosophy” into a Platonic one.
In the end, the most influential early Christian interpreters of Scripture—Clement (ca. 156–215) and Origen (ca. 185–254) in the Greek East, Augustine (354–436) and Gregory the Great (540–604) in the Latin West—all recognized that various figurative or allegorical readings might complement, or even override, the literal sense of Scripture, and each had attempted to reduce them to some kind of order.22 Origen thought there might be three levels of understanding Scripture: the literal, the moral, and the spiritual sense. Augustine argued for four: “what things are related as having been done,” that is, the literal or historical sense of the text; “what things are foretold,” the now familiar prophetic or typological sense; “what eternal things are intended there,” a spiritual reading of the text; and “what we are intended to do,” Scripture as moral guidance.
Augustine’s fourfold scriptural understanding became popular throughout the Latin West, though without unanimous agreement on precisely what the divisions were. In subsequent discussions there was little disagreement about the literal sense of Scripture: the historical truth of the Bible and, to an even greater extent, the New Testament Gospels had to be taken seriously, while the moral sense remained the staple of both preaching and contemplation. Typology became less important in time since there was no longer any need to argue the case of Jesus as Messiah to Christians who now accepted the New Testament alone as irrefutable evidence for Christ as Savior. The spiritual sense also became the reading of choice for both the mystics and the theologians of the Church, as it did for their Jewish counterparts, all of whom found there divine truths hidden from the ordinary believer.
Scripture and Tradition
Scriptural exegesis was no mere school exercise. The New Testament text became the battleground for the fierce debates over the nature of Jesus, God and man, that were waged in the fifth century and exegesis was the weapon that all the combatants wielded with both skill and conviction.23 The scriptural witness, often couched in familiar, popular, and even homely language, had to be converted into the abstract and learned currency of theology, the language of choice of the Church’s intelligentsia. Scripture, as it turned out, was merely the starting point. The steering mechanism was exegesis, and behind the exegesis, the helmsman at the rudder, stood another elemental principle: tradition.24
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam each possessed a Scripture that was, by universal consent, a closed Book. But God’s silence was a relative thing, and his providential direction of the community could be detected and “read” in other ways. Early within the development of Christianity, for example, one is aware of a subtle balance operating between appeals to Scripture and tradition. It was not a novel enterprise. By Jesus’ time the notion of an oral tradition separate from but obviously connected to the written Scriptures was already familiar, if not universally accepted, in Jewish circles. Jesus and the Pharisees debated the authority of the oral tradition more than once, and though he does not appear to have denied the premise, Jesus, his contemporaries remarked, “taught on his own authority,” not on that of some other sage. He substituted his authority for the tradition of the Fathers. Thus Jesus was proposing himself as the source of a new tradition handed on to his followers and confirmed by the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost.
The Christian view that there was a tradition distinct from the Scriptures may have begun with the early understanding of Scripture as synonymous with the Bible—serious exegetical attention did not begin to be paid to the Gospels until the end of the second century—whereas the “tradition” was constituted of the teachings and redemptive death of Jesus, both of which Jesus himself had placed in their true “scriptural” context.25 Thus, even when parts of Jesus’ teachings and actions had been committed to writing in the Gospels, and so began to constitute a new, specifically Christian Scripture, the distinction between Scripture in the biblical sense and tradition in the Christian sense continued to be felt in the Christian community.26
Bishops and the Rule of Faith
If the Christian “handing down” (paradosis) came from Jesus, its witnesses and transmitters were the Apostles. The written Gospels go back to them and so does that other, unwritten part of the tradition that in the second century came to be called “the rule of faith” or “the rule of truth,” and that, in the words of Irenaeus, was “received from the Apostles and guarded in the Church by the succession of presbyters.” Here the Apostolic tradition, which included the correct interpretation of Scripture as well as certain prescribed forms of behavior, is explicitly tied to the bishops’ being the direct spiritual descendants of the Apostles. This notion was formalized about 175 C.E. and was held by the entire Church.27
The bishops spoke, then, with the authority of the Apostolic tradition behind them. At times their voices were single but authoritative, that of an Ignatius, an Irenaeus, a Basil, or a Chrysostom, but there was also a broad stream of consensual tradition that manifested itself by the bishops sitting in synods or, from the fourth century, in the ecumenical councils of the Great Church. They might refer to Scripture, but Scripture was not their justification any more than it was for the rabbis in the Mishna.28 But unlike their rabbinical counterparts, the bishops’ synodal pronouncements were cast in the form of dogma—“It has been decided”—the voice was that of the Apostolic tradition and so of Jesus himself. Once expressed, it suffered no appeal.
The “teachings of the Fathers” was an important ingredient in the formulation of Christian doctrine and of canon law, but its influence is no less visible in the interpretation of Scripture.29 In all three religious communities, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim, tradition controlled the interpretation of Scripture in the first instance by its definition of the canon of sacred writings, by its choice of proof texts, and by its authoritative understanding of the meaning of those texts. Attacks on tradition and its guardians were made by appealing back to a literalist reading of Scripture and an assertion of its absolute priority, as was done by the Sadducees and Karaites in Judaism and, somewhat differently, by the Hanbalis and Zahiris in Islam and the Protestant reformers of Christianity. Attacks might also be made by recourse to an alternate Gnostic form of tradition, one more akin to a private revelation, which permitted a more allegorical and spiritual reading of the sacred book and so freed the adept from the law of the traditionalists. This was the approach of the Jewish Kabbalists, Christian Gnostics, and the Islamic Shiite and “Esotericist” groups.
Quranic Exegesis
Since the Quran was not a historically conditioned revelation but rather reflects an eternal heavenly archetype, the “Mother of the Book” (Quran 13:39; etc.), composed of the same Arabic words, the Muslim approach to its exegesis was initially quite different from that pursued by the Jews and Christians, though the Quran did not easily suffer either translation or paraphrase.30 On the Christian premise, Jesus was his own revelation. He could teach its significance with authority and pass on that teaching to his disciples in a formal and imperative fashion. Muhammad, in contrast, was the conduit of God’s revelation, much as Moses was, and during his own lifetime there was no question that he and only he was the authoritative interpreter of that revelation for the Muslim community. His verbal explanations of the Quran formed part of the later collected body of hadith already noted.
We may posit, then, a body of oral tradition in early Islam, some of it historical narrative, later incorporated into the Lives of the Prophet; some of it halakic, the discrete pieces eventually shaped into Islamic law; and some, finally, exegetical in character.31 These overneat categories were by no means observed by Muslim authors themselves. Since they, like us, were using quranic texts to illuminate the life of Muhammad and vice versa, long exegetical passages occur in early biographies of the Prophet, whereas professed works of exegesis (tafsir) devoted considerable attention to describing the historical circumstances surrounding the revelation of individual suras or even verses of the Quran.
According to one tradition, there was an early prohibition against interpreting the Quran.32 It does not seem to have been much observed, however.33 The earliest identifiable types of quranic exegesis were very similar to the familiar forms of Jewish haggadic midrash, and showed some of the same motives: to fill in gaps in quranic narratives, and to construct a genuine Islamic piety.34 Most of the narratives in question were biblical and, according to the Muslim tradition itself, details for their haggadic elaboration were supplied by new converts with a particular knowledge of the Jewish tradition, both biblical and midrashic.
Fashioning an Islamic piety through homiletic means is not the same as deriving a body of legal enactments—hukm/pl. ahkam, in this context the semantic equivalent of the Hebrew halakot—out of Muslim Scripture. It is not certain precisely when the Muslim exegetes turned to the common Jewish practice of what was called halakic exegesis,35 but in order to achieve this they had first to establish the so-called occasions of revelation, the contextual setting of each revelation.36
The Quranic Commentary
A common form of Muslim commentary on the Quran is the explication of the text itself, a procedure that presumes the existence of an authoritative canonical text. The language of the Quran was, of course, Arabic, a “clear Arabic speech,” in the Scripture’s own words (Quran 16:103, 26:195). If quranic Arabic was “clear” to Muhammad’s audience at Mecca and Medina, as it surely must have been to some degree, it is not so to modern scholars, and there has been considerable controversy over whether the diction of the Quran was a local dialect, perhaps that of the Quraysh of Mecca, which is the traditional view, or a kind of ecumenical art-speech common to Bedouin oral bards.37 Nor was it entirely “clear” to a later generation of Muslims, many of whom did not have Arabic as their native tongue, and who turned in a somewhat unexpected direction for help in the explication of the text—to the works of the otherwise reprehensible pre-Islamic poets. This turning promoted a parallel activity in the collection and editing of that poetry.
Many of these developments in Islamic exegesis are traditionally attributed to Muhammad’s much younger cousin Ibn Abbas (d. 687), but like many other such attributions in early Islamic history, its object may have been to confer antiquity on something that occurred a century or more later.38 What we know for certain is that most of the earliest Islamic exegesis was assimilated into the Collection of Explanations for the Exegesis of the Quran, called simply The Exegesis (al-Tafsir), of al-Tabari (d. 923), which from that day to this has held pride of place in the Muslim interpretation of the Quran.39 The Exegesis proceeds majestically through the Quran sura by sura, combining legal, historical, and philological comment of great density, and it supports each judgment by a chain of authorities going back to Muhammad’s own contemporaries, the famous Companions of the Prophet.
Since he occasionally addressed himself to the question, it appears from al-Tabari’s commentary that in his day there was already understood to be another distinction in exegetical approach that cut across the categories just discussed: that between tafsir or “plain” exegesis, and tawil, which is often broadly understood as allegorical exegesis. The distinction may go back to the Quran itself (3:7), which seems to suggest that there are two kinds of verses in Scripture, those whose meaning is clear and those that require some kind of explanation, which the Quran itself calls tawil.40 The explanation may originally have been no more than the application of personal reasoning (ijtihad) or research (nazar) to the text, as opposed to the acceptance on authority of the plain meaning—a distinction current, and debated, in legal circles. On that understanding, the difference between tafsir and tawil was not between exoteric and esoteric passages but rather between clear and ambiguous ones. Where tawil took on its allegorical association was its use in “applied exegesis,” that is, the use of exegetical principles to elicit from Scripture dogmatic and mystical understandings of which both Muhammad and the Quran were perhaps totally innocent.
Challenging the Tradition
Most of the commentators and commentaries discussed to this point operated within a tradition that regarded the body of hadith as the primary exegetical instrument for understanding the Quran, particularly on legal matters, much in the way the Talmud served that end vis-à-vis the Torah in Judaism. But the tradition did not go unchallenged. In both religious contexts there were challenges from “spiritualists” who claimed a deeper understanding of the Book, and hence a freedom from the body of positive prescriptions that the sages had exegetically extracted from it by resort to “tradition.” The Essenes and the Christians confronted the Pharisees with just such a special understanding in their day, as later the Kabbalists did the rabbis. In Islam, Sufi and Shiite alike could counterpose the spiritual tradition passed on by their spiritual fathers and infallible Imams to the tradition-derived halakot of the jurisprudents.
But the challenge could be mounted in another way. Josephus’s brief remarks about the Sadducees characterize them as a group that rejected any law not explicitly contained in the Torah. This was a direct denial of the Pharisees’ tradition of the Fathers: the Torah alone was revelation, and it should be interpreted in a direct, literal fashion; all else is at best speculation and at worst innovation. We hear this charge once again in Judaism, there urged by a group called the Karaites against Babylonian rabbis of the eighth century. As we have already seen, it was also a fundamental charge of the Reformers against the Roman Church’s interpretation of Scripture.
The Karaites were literally “readers” who confined their reading to Scripture and attempted to live according to its explicit precepts and those alone.41 We do not know how the Karaites managed this in a society already remote from the mores and manner of life of the patriarchal age. Literalism brought freedom from the rabbinic halakot, it is true, yet many of these latter were not the “burden” sometimes suggested by Christian sources but effectively brought the biblical mitzvot into line with local custom and evolving circumstances, much as the hadith did in Islam. The Karaites’ attraction was the threat they posed to the power of the rabbinate.42 But it is doubtful whether the millennium-old Torah could indeed serve in its literal sense as a normative code for an eighth-century Jewish community, and the version of a Torah society put forward by the Karaite leader Anan ben David may have foundered on its own literalism.
A later generation of Karaites under Benjamin al-Nihawandi and Daniel al-Qumisi took a different path; they granted Jews the privilege of being their own rabbis, of constructing their own Talmud out of a commonly held Torah. It was, once again, an attractive possibility, and Karaism spread far from its Babylonian place of origin to Jewish communities all over the Abode of Islam and beyond. The intellectual leadership turned away from the mitzvot in what at first seems like an unexpected direction, to philosophical speculation and the allegorical interpretation of Scripture. They may have been following an Islamic lead. As the early Muslim theologians known as Mutazilites had shown, Scripture could be controlled as effectively by rational inquiry as by an appeal to tradition.
In Islam we find distinct parallels to the Karaite position in the Kharijites, whose sense of Islamic community has already been discussed. The Kharijites attempted to establish a Muslim community and a Muslim way of life based on the Quran without benefit of “interpreting” the plain meaning of the text, and again like the early Karaites, took a severe stance toward associating with those who did not share their outlook. The Kharijites were putting forward their views late in the seventh century, well before the imposing body of hadith and its derived prescriptions were in place, and so they were likely reacting to what they construed as worldly and non-Islamic behavior rather than to an oppressive tradition.
Tradition in Islam
Tradition was and is a powerful force in Islam. Though the evidence is not plentiful, it can hardly be doubted that the tribal life of the pre-Islamic Arabs, and that of their seventh-century brethren in the somewhat more urban milieus of Mecca and Medina, were governed by sunna, custom either decreed or instituted by an individual that later became the common practice of the tribe. There are instances of the Prophet himself regarding his own acts as setting a precedent for the umma, but the firmest evidence for the existence of the idea that the custom of the Prophet was somehow normative in Islam is its inclusion in the oath sworn by the third caliph, Uthman, at his accession in 644.43
Shafii neither invented nor popularized hadith as a form of popular piety; he was discussing the priority of certain legal principles. The broader reach of hadith may be observed in the “traditionists” (ahl al-hadith), a large and amorphous category of Muslims who, like the Kharijites, longed for a Quran-oriented society, now supplemented by that idealized version of the earlier generation of Muslims that found its definitive portrait in the hadith. They venerated the Quran next to God himself, and inclined toward a reverentially strict interpretation of its text.
Opposition to the traditionists came from Islam’s nascent theologians, the ahl al-kalam or “partisans of dialectic,” particularly from the group known as the Mutazilites. Whether the Mutazilites rejected hadith or, as seems more likely, took a more hypercritical view of it than was common in most Muslim circles is not known. They preferred to rely on the Quran, which they did not hesitate to interpret metaphorically in order to avoid the gross anthropomorphisms of the simple-minded pietists. But their dispute with the traditionists went deeper than this. The latter’s veneration for the ipsissima verba of the Quran and the Mutazilite insistence on using dialectical methods of analysis came to term in the profound debate on whether the Quran was created, as the Mutazilites and tradition asserted, or whether it was eternal, coeval and coequal with God.44
Tradition and Reason in Islamic Exegesis
For the Mutazilites, an uncreated and eternal Quran was a theological affront to a unique God as well as a manacle that chained human reason and conscience to a text, however revered the latter might be. In traditionist eyes the uncreated Quran was a mysterious embodiment of the sacred, an almost sacramental link between a transcendent God and his earthly creation. In a verbal struggle in which all the weapons belonged to the dialecticians, it is difficult to piece together the nuances of the traditionist position, but out of the ahl al-hadith came two Islamic “schools,” those of Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 855) and Dawud ibn Kalaf (d. 884), from which a coherent position can be derived. Both insisted on the evident (zahir; Dawud’s followers were called Zahiris) sense of both the Quran and the hadith—on pious, conservative grounds, to be sure, but almost as surely as a reaction to Mutazilite exegesis based on analogy and what they called “investigation” (nazar).
As we shall see in our discussion of theology, exegesis lay at the heart of the debate over the conflicting claims of faith and reason in the domain of revealed religion. The rationalizing theologians wrested some of the rights of exegesis away from the lawyers because they were more skillful in allegorical exegesis. Traditionists were tied by their own legal premises to the literal interpretation of Scripture, a connection that committed them in nonhalakic passages to certain gross anthropomorphisms that the dialecticians could devour with arguments. More, the theologians permitted themselves a far wider exegetical range, and could apply both learning and imagination to the text of Scripture, whereas the traditionists were largely limited to arguments derived from rhetoric and philology. The attractiveness of theological tafsir is demonstrated by the position won by the Mutazilite Zamakhshari’s quranic commentary among all segments of the Islamic community, and by the fact that Philo’s discredited allegorical exegesis found a new audience once Jewish theologians under Islam rediscovered philosophy.
Jewish Exegesis, Arab Style
As we have already seen, rabbis cultivated both the legal and the homiletic types of exegesis of the Bible, but then, in the tenth century, under the unmistakable influence of their Muslim environment in the Middle East, Jews began to pursue a new approach to reading Scripture. Its first proponent was Saadya ibn Yusuf (882–942), the Egyptian-born scholar who became gaon of the Iraqi rabbinic circles, which by then had moved from provincial Sura to metropolitan Baghdad, the seat of the caliphate. Saadya produced a first Arabic translation of the Bible for the now Arabicspeaking Jews of Mesopotamia. But equally importantly, his translation was accompanied by an extensive commentary on the text, and the latter set biblical exegesis on a new path.45
The rabbis who engaged in midrash had never to that point much concerned themselves with context. Their attention was fixed almost exclusively on the text itself or, more accurately, its words: what they were thought to have said (or not said) and, perhaps more importantly, what they intended. Muslim commentators on the Quran looked at their Book differently, however. They read it as a literary product, not of Muhammad, of course, but of God himself, yet as literature nonetheless. Thus the Quran was open to, and indeed required, the same kind of literary and rhetorical analysis as the Arabs’ rich (and profane) poetic tradition.46 And again, and quite counterintuitively, the Muslim commentators read the Quran, with its almost defiant lack of historical context, as a historical document. They searched out the very concrete occasions of revelation in the life of Muhammad and attempted to fit them to verses of the Quran.
With Saadya, rabbis began to do the same with the Bible, employing the method that became known as peshat, sometimes called the “plain” or “literal” reading of Scripture but actually a profoundly contextual address of the text. The rabbis may have had the advantage over their Muslim models. The latter generally had only Arabic at their exegetical disposal, whereas Jewish scholars had not only Hebrew, biblical and rabbinic, but Aramaic and, of course, their now native Arabic, a language that had by then developed into a supple and elegant literary tool capable of expressing everything from the commonplace to the most demanding technical matters. The Jews absorbed the Arabic literary tradition and put it to good use, not only in the interpretation of Scripture, where the peshat or contextual method became widespread among the Sefardim, the Jews in Muslim lands, but, most startling of all, in the resurrection of Hebrew as a literary medium for the production, in Spain, of an extraordinary body of quite secular poetry.47
The Frenchman Rashi perhaps illustrates the full flowering of the rabbinic midrash method.48 But the Spaniard Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1164) carried the contextual method with its concomitant language skills from the Muslim world, where it was practiced by Sefardic exegetes, to the Jewish commentators of Christian Europe who knew little or nothing of the Arabic literary tradition. Born in Spain, Ibn Ezra traveled widely across the Abode of Islam, but the conversion of his son to Islam in 1140 pushed, or forced, him into Christian exile, where he traveled in Italy, France, and even, on occasion, England. Like Saadya, Ibn Ezra was a polymath and a cultural historian. His Hebrew writings, in particular a Hebrew grammar and a history of Hebrew linguistic studies, offered Jewish scholars of western Europe a convincing and attractive introduction, in Hebrew raiment, to the poetics and philology of Muslim Arab Spain. Ibn Ezra’s multiple commentaries on Scripture are often boldly innovative and often on the same text from differing perspectives, and they were all highly influential on the scriptural perspectives of Christian Europe’s rabbinic elite.49
Notes
1. The process is known generally as exegesis (see Peters, Monotheists, vol. 2, chap. 2; and the texts assembled in Peters, JCI Texts, 2:72–156). Its application in medieval Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is the subject of the papers collected in Jane Dammen McAuliffe et al., eds., With Reverence for the Word: Medieval Scriptural Exegesis in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), particularly the contribution of Stephen D. Benin, “The Search for Truth in Sacred Scripture: Jews, Christians, and the Authority to Interpret,” 13–32.
2. The entire range of midrash is on display in Martin Jan Mulder, ed., Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading, and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), as well as in Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). There are individual studies in part 2 (pp. 181–240) of John Barton, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Rabbinic midrash is the particular focus in Herman L. Strack and Günter Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 254–394; and Gary Porton, Understanding Rabbinic Midrash: Texts and Commentary (New York: Ktav, 1984).
3. See chap. 4.
4. On the languages of rabbinic literature, see Strack and Stemberger, Talmud and Midrash, 111–118.
5. See André Pelletier, “Josephus, the Letter of Aristeas, and the Septuagint,” in Louis H. Feldman and Gohei Hata, eds., Josephus, the Bible, and History (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 97–115. The pertinent texts, Jewish and Christian, are in Peters, JCI Texts, 2:14–18.
6. John Bowker, The Targums and Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); and the papers collected in Derek Robert, George Beattie, and Martin McNamara, eds., The Aramaic Bible: Targums in Their Historical Context (Sheffield: Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Press, 1994).
7. On the Qumran pesharim, see Maurya P. Horgan, Pesharim: Qumran Interpretations of Biblical Books (Washington, D.C.: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1979).
8. These have been collected and topically arranged by Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 7 vols., 10th ed. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1954).
9. As illustrated, for example, in The Tales of the Prophets of al-Kisa’i, trans. from the Arabic by Wheeler Thackston (Boston: Twayne, 1978). For two studies of the genre, see Khalil Athamina, “Al-Qasas: Its Emergence, Religious Origin, and Sociopolitical Impact on Early Muslim Society,” Studia Islamica 76 (1992): 53–74; and M. J. Kister, “Legends in Tafsir and Hadith Literature: The Creation of Adam and Related Stories,” in Andrew Rippin, ed., Approaches to the History of the Interpretation of the Qur’an (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 82–116.
10. On Hillel’s middot, see Strack and Stemberger, Talmud and Midrash, 19–23.
11. Geza Vermes, “Bible and Midrash: Early Old Testament Exegesis,” in P. R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans, eds., The Cambridge History of the Bible vol. 1, From the Beginnings to Jerome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 199–231. See also his Scripture and Tradition in Judaism: Haggadic Studies, 2d ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1973).
12. Vermes, “Bible and Midrash,” 205–207, cites the classic instance of the biblical pronouncement on divorce (Deut. 24:1), where the grounds are described simply as a man’s finding “some indecency” in his wife, hereby leaving the door open for a great deal of midrashic debate—and Jesus’ own pronouncement (Matt. 5:31–32)—on what precisely constituted “indecency.”
13. A reverse example is the use of images, whose biblical prohibition is, on the face of it, absolute (Exod. 20:4–5; Deut. 5:8–9), and was still understood as such at the time of Josephus. By the beginning of the second century C.E., however, attitudes were changing, and soon both secular and religious buildings of the Jews in Palestine and the Diaspora were being adorned with images of humans and animals. The exegesis of the biblical passage was adapted accordingly; see Vermes, “Bible and Midrash,” 217–218. For this and the related issue of images in Islam, Peters, Monotheists, vol. 2, chap. 6.
14. Horgan, Pesharim.
15. See Louis Ginzberg, On Jewish Law and Love (New York: Atheneum, 1977), 127–152.
16. See Rudolph Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship, from the Beginning to the End of the Hellenistic Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 210–251; Jan Whitman, Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); David Dawson, Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
17. On Homer in the hands of later Hellenism, see Robert Lamberton, Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Interpretation and the Growth of the Epic Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
18. Early Christian treatment of Scripture is surveyed in James L. Kugel and Rowan A. Greer, Early Biblical Interpretation (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986); and R. P. C. Hanson, “Biblical Exegesis in the Early Church,” in Ackroyd and Evans, eds., The Cambridge History of the Bible, 1:412–453. There is more on the longer range of Christian exegesis in part 2 (pp. 241–322) of Barton, The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation.
19. Trans. in M. Staniforth, Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 193–220.
20. For a comparative study, see Marc Hirshman, A Rivalry of Genius: Jewish and Christian Biblical Interpretation in Late Antiquity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996).
21. The technique is studied in Donald Juel, Messianic Exegesis: Christological Interpretation of the Old Testament in Early Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988); and for a somewhat later period, Jean Daniélou, From Shadows of Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers (London: Burns and Oates, 1960).
22. These important figures in Christian exegesis are dealt with in Ackroyd and Evans, eds., The Cambridge History of the Bible, 1:454–562.
23. See, for example, Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition (London: Sheed and Ward, 1965), 338–362.
24. See Peters, JCI Texts, 2:157–200.
25. The relative weight of Scripture and tradition and the role of the latter in shaping the understanding of the former in the comparative context of Judaism and Catholic and Protestant Christianity have been broached by the studies collected in Frederick E. Greenspahn, ed., Scripture in the Jewish and Christian Traditions: Authority, Interpretation, Relevance (Nashville: Abingdon, 1982).
26. This distinction developed into a profound tension in the sixteenth century, when it became one of the central issues of the Protestant Reformation. For a brief introduction to a complex question, see Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 4, Reformation of Church and Dogma, 1300–1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 210–212, 304–313. For the Roman counterstatement, Herbert Yedin, A History of the Council of Trent, vol. 2, The First Sessions at Trent, 1545–1547, trans. from the German by Dom Ernest Graf (St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co., 1961), 52–98.
27. This crucial development has been traced by J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (London: Black, 1968), chap. 1; G. L. Prestige in his classic Fathers and Heretics (London: SPCK, 1963), chap. 1; and Hans von Campenhausen, Ecclesiastical Authority and Spiritual Power in the Church of the First Three Centuries (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1997). The sources illustrating the growth of the concept are collected in Henry Bettenson, Documents of the Christian Church (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 95–103. For a comparison of the Apostolic succession with the parallel phenomenon in Judaism—the connection of the oral Torah and the tradition of the Fathers back to Moses on Sinai—see Amram Tropper, “Tractate Avot and Early Christian Succession Lists,” in Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, eds., The Ways That Never Parted (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 159–188.
28. So Yves Congar, Tradition and the Traditions (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 50–64.
29. Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, 100–600 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), chap. 7, “The Orthodox Consensus,” 332–357. For its influence on Scripture, Congar, Tradition and the Traditions, 64–85.
30. On Arabic as a sacred language, see John Wansbrough, Qur’anic Studies (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), 99–106.
31. On quranic exegesis generally, besides the already cited Rippin, History of Interpretation, and the quranic contributions to McAuliffe et al., With Reverence for the Word, see Andrew Rippin, ed., The Quran: Formative Interpretation (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 1999); Helmut Gaetje, The Qur’an and the Exegesis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), and Mahmood M. Ayoub, The Qur’an and Its Interpreters (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), both with many illustrative texts; John Burton, “Qur’anic Exegesis,” in M. J. L. Young et al., eds., The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Religion, Learning, and Science in the Abbasid Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 40–55; and the studies in Gerald Hawting and Abdul-Kader Shareef, eds., Approaches to the Qur’an (New York: Routledge, 1993).
32. See Harris Birkeland, Old Muslim Opposition against Interpretation of the Qur’an (Oslo: Hos. J. Dybwad, 1955); and Nabia Abbott, Studies in Arabic Literary Papyri, vol. 1, Qur’anic Commentary and Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).
33. The early evolution of the genre is traced by Fred Leemhuis, “Origins and Early Development of the Tafsir Tradition,” in Rippin, History of Interpretation, 13–30.
34. Wansbrough, Qur’anic Studies, 122–149, esp. 145–148, where Wansbrough underlines the role of the public and popular Friday sermon in the evolution of this basic form of Muslim exegesis.
35. The radical view expressed ibid., 174–176, is in keeping with Wansbrough’s even more radical thesis for a late date (eighth–ninth century) for the establishment of the text of the Quran.
36. Ibid., 177–201; and two studies by Andrew Rippin, “The Exegetical Genre Asbab al-Nuzul: A Bibliographical and Terminological Survey,” and “The Function of the Asbab al-Nuzul in Qur’anic Exegesis,” Bulletin of the School of African and Oriental Studies 48 (1985): 1–15; and 51 (1988): 1–20 respectively.
37. See Chaim Rabin, Ancient West Arabian (London: Taylor’s Foreign Press, 1951); and Wansbrough, Qur’anic Studies, 85–93, for a review of the question.
38. I. Goldfeld, “The Tafsir of Abdullah ibn Abbas,” Der Islam 58 (1981); 125–135.
39. Jane Dammen McAuliffe, “Quranic Hermeneutics: The Views of al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir,” in Rippin, History of Interpretation, 46–62. Al-Tabari’s commentary on sura’s 1 and 2 is available in abridged English translation by John Cooper, The Commentary on the Qur’an by al-Tabari (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
40. The entire text and some Muslim commentary appears in Peters, JCI Texts, 2:144–147. On the various understandings of this difficult quranic passage, see Wansbrough, Qur’anic Studies, 148–151.
41. See Leon Nemoy, Karaite Anthology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952) for an introduction to Karaiteir thought and selections from their writings.
42. See Daniel J. Lasker, “Rabbanism and Karaism: The Contest for Supremacy,” in Raphael Jospe and Stanley M. Wagner eds., Great Schisms in Jewish History (New York: Ktav, 1981), 47–72.
43. See chap. 4, n.29.
44. The debate is laid out in J. F. Peters, God’s Created Speech (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976).
45. On Saadya as an exegete, see Haggai ben Shammai, “The Tension between Literal Interpretation and Exegetical Freedom: Comparative Observations on Saadia’s Method,” in McAuliffe et al., With Reverence for the Word, 33–50.
46. This approach let into dogmatic issues, namely, the essential inimitability of the Quran; see Issa Boullata, “The Rhetorical Interpretation of the Qur’an: I‘jaz and Related Topics,” in Rippin, History of Interpretation, 139–157. There are modern attempts at such analysis, and studies of medieval ones, collected in Issa Boullata, ed., Literary Structures of Religious Meaning in the Qur’an (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2000).
47. This milieu is brilliantly displayed in María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (New York: Little, Brown, 2002). For the Jewish literary setting in particular, see Ross Brann, The Compunctious Poet: Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), and his Power in the Portrayal: Representations of Jews and Muslims in Eleventh and Twelfth Century Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
48. Studied by Benjamin Gelles, Peshat and Derash in the Exegesis of Rashi (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981). For an example of Rashi at work, Chaim Pearl, Rashi: Commentary on the Pentateuch (New York: Norton, 1970).
49. On medieval Jewish exegesis generally, see Edward L. Greenstein, “Medieval Bible Commentaries,” in Barry W. Holtz, ed., Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts (New York: Summit Books, 1984), 213–260; and Barry D. Walfish, “An Introduction to Medieval Jewish Biblical Interpretation,” in McAuliffe et al., With Reverence for the Word, 3–12.
Written by Francis E. Peters "The Children of Abraham - Judaism, Christianity, Islam", Princeton University Press,USA, 2004, chapter five. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa
