On the Origins of Peshat Commentary

The shift in biblical exegesis from homiletic readings to literary, contextual commentaries has its roots in Charlemagne’s 9th century Carolingian Revolution. It comes to the fore only in the 11th century with Rashi’s quasi-peshat commentary, soon followed by the peshat approach of R. Joseph Kara and Rashbam.

Prof. Rabbi

Robert Harris

Prof. Rabbi

Robert Harris

Categories:

Korach

Medieval Interpretation

From Derash to Peshat – The Invention of Literature

Christian scholarship in 12^th century northern France experienced what is often described as an intellectual Renaissance, one that incorporated the study of ancient Roman rhetorical texts, both in their own right (for techniques and theory) as well as in applying them to the study of the Bible. During this period, northern French biblical exegetes, both Jewish and Christian, moved away from treating Scripture as only the authoritative basis of religious behavior and ideology (auctoritas) and began to read it also as a literary text (littera).^[1] Thus both rabbis and churchmen developed a different set of tools to unlock the Bible’s meaning.

Christian Interpretation

By the 12^th century, Christian commentators had regularly begun to include, alongside the traditional allegorical and figurative levels of interpretation, the so-called “literal” reading (ad litteram), what we would call “contextual meaning.” As the twelfth century Christian churchmen wrote treatises and lengthy introductions to their exegetical works, we can readily understand their intellectual and academic appreciation of the Bible and how they understood their project of contextual reading.

Scholars of Christian exegesis generally trace the beginnings of approaching scripture with multiple levels of interpretation to an arc that builds from the third century church father Origen to the fifth century monk, John Cassian.^[2] This included a level of reading “according to the letter.”^[3] In the 12^th century, efforts to clearly define and practice “the plain sense of Scripture” (sensus litteralis) found a home at the Parisian School of St. Victor. There, Hugh of St. Victor wrote a number of important treatises on biblical study. In one of these, he explains the so-called literal sense as follows:

God’s entire word is explained by threefold exposition. The first exposition is the historical sense, which considers the first meaning of words when they refer to things and facts. God’s word has this characteristic, which is different from other writings, that the words that are recited in it first refer to certain things, and that these things themselves then refer to other things… This is history in the proper and strict sense; but history is also understood more broadly as the sense that words have in their first meaning when they refer to things.^[4]

We might consider Hugh’s definition, “the first meaning of words when they refer to things and facts,” to be an early Christian effort to define “the plain sense method.”

Rabbinic Interpretation

At roughly the same time and in the same place, rabbinic Jewish commentators in northern France shifted from only derash, or homiletical reading^[5] to peshat, or reading according to linguistic and grammatical norms, and in literary (and sometimes historical) context.^[6] Nevertheless, in contrast to the Christian exegetes, the rabbinic peshat commentators never precisely defined their key exegetical term peshuto shel mikra.^[7] Sarah Kamin (1938–1989), the late Hebrew University Professor of Bible, described the peshat approach as follows:

An explanation (of a biblical passage) according to its language, its syntactic structure, its (immediate) literary context, its literary type, while considering the dynamic interaction among all of these components. Put differently, an interpretation according to peshat is an interpretation that considers all of the linguistic foundations in its literary composition, and assigns to each of them a meaning within a complete reading.^[8]

The beginning of peshat reading required a certain amount of pushback against traditional, midrashic reading of scripture, which had been dominant for well over a millennium.^[9] The Talmudic Sages described their midrashic approach as תורה שבעל פה, or “oral Torah,” which had been passed from God to Moses to them in an unending chain (m. Abot 1:1).

The northern French peshat commentators did not deny this claim outright, but they believed that in addition to traditional readings, the words of Scripture mean something on their own, i.e., without recourse to ancient authorities and their interpretation of the passages.^[10] Stated differently, the French peshat exegetes argued that biblical text was not merely cryptic coded language. Rather, the text has a clear meaning, subject to grammar and philology, in addition to syntax and rhetorical or literary devices.

The Shift from Oral to Written Transmission

The means through which both Jewish and Christian twelfth century exegetes expressed this shift “from derash to peshat” or “from allegoria to ad litteram” was the commentary, or ad locum gloss.

Writing a commentary on a biblical book was foreign to the ancient rabbis. Admittedly, rabbinic works offered interpretation of biblical books, and some of them, such as the Tannaitic midrashei halakhah on Exodus through Deuteronomy, even use a lemmatic, commentary-like style, i.e., a quote of a phrase from the Torah followed by a gloss with a homiletic interpretation. Nevertheless, they do not present a consistent and systematic interpretation of the biblical text. Not only do these works skip large swaths of text, but the commentary form is really secondary. The various interpretations included in the corpus began as independent oral homilies, which were then organized, presumably later in their compositional history, some of them according to a verse-by-verse system.^[11]

We don’t have access to the way in which these homilies were transmitted before they were organized in this fashion, since ancient rabbinic sages expressed themselves almost exclusively in oral form.^[12] Thus, for rabbinic Jewish writers,^[13] the adoption of the commentary mode for exposition is a distinctly medieval genre of discourse, beginning with Rashi in the 11^th century.^[14]

Commentary among Christian Exegetes

The situation among Christian exegetes was different, however. They were heir to ancient Greco-Roman literary modalities, and employed the commentary form, both in antiquity and in the earlier medieval periods. Even so, the commentary genre grew exponentially among Christian scholars during the 12^th century Renaissance, around the same time that rabbinic Jewish commentary developed.^[15]

This surge in commentary among Christian and Jewish exegetes of this period suggests that we should be looking for intellectual and cultural developments in 11^th century Christian Europe to understand how this change in approach to Bible came about. But to get the full picture, we need to look even earlier, to the 8^th century period under Charlemagne, and to the subsequent cultural revival that took place in the Carolingian period (beginning in the 8^th–9^th centuries).^[16]

Charlemagne – Striving Toward a “Truthful” Understanding of the Bible

Charlemagne began as king of the Frankish state, but extended his rule to much of Western Europe, becoming, in 800 C.E., the first European “emperor” in centuries. In an effort to establish and legitimize their new dynasty, Charlemagne, himself a faithful Christian, endeavored to co-opt the Roman Church and its institutions.

Part of his strategy was creating a learned and literary caste that could serve as the clerks, administrators, diplomats and magistrates, who held his far-flung empire together.^[17] To accomplish this, he instituted schools that would teach far greater numbers of people how to read.^[18]

For scribal training, Charlemagne used ancient Greco-Roman learning in the service of the Church. Principally, this involved the copying of ancient manuscripts, from both pre-Christian Rome as well as the patristic legacy of the early Church. He and his advisors, such as Alcuin of York (ca. 735–804),sponsored scholars at various centers of learning throughout the Carolingian empire, opening up to them the ancient cultural heritage of Greco-Roman antiquity.

Charlemagne’s interests gave rise particularly to the increased study of the trivium, the first three of the so-called liberal arts: rhetoric, logic and, first and foremost, grammar. As Martin Irvine states, Charlemagne’s influential Admonitio Generalis and other legislative acts “effectively made grammatical culture the law of the land.”^[19]

Charlemagne’s efforts to cultivate study and learning in his kingdom encompassed a serious and long-term policy. Specifically, his legislative act known as Epistola (or Encyclica) de Litteris Colendis, “The Epistle on the Cultivating of Letters,” had a profound impact on the development of literary culture in northwestern Europe. In this directive, Charlemagne (or Alcuin, who likely composed it) ordered the study of “literature” (or letters) as the foundation of the learned Christian society to which he aspired.^[20]

In Charlemagne’s mind, a great kingdom could not be secured and thrive without great learning. Also, the Epistle notes, scholars must strive towards truth. The engagement in this type of learning led to the development of new strategies for reading,^[21] in general, and in interpreting the Bible, in particular.

Charlemagne’s directive to incorporate ancient Roman, pre-Christian tracts in the effort to understand holy scripture initiated a long process of establishing monastic schools and searching for suitable materials for the teaching of Latin and Scriptural Exegesis. The latter in particular led to a systematic search for, and patient recopying of, manuscripts long hidden in the long neglected libraries of Europe. Moreover, the early biblical commentaries that were produced in what is sometimes characterized as the Carolingian Renaissance provided few methodological advances; they mostly took the form of florilegia, that is, condensations and excerpts from ancient patristic allegorical exegesis.

Thus, despite Charlemagne’s “Admonition,” the full blossoming of increased literacy and application of rhetorical considerations to biblical interpretation reached its climax only in the 11th–12^th centuries. This period of scholarship unleashed a “truthful” understanding of biblical literature that would be seen (both in Christianity and in Judaism) as at variance with established and authoritative traditions of interpretation.

Rabbis Borrowing from Christian Exegetes?

While the Carolingian revolution may explain how Christian interpretation developed in this direction, how did intellectual developments in the Christian world influence rabbinic exegetes? While some rabbis could converse about Latin scriptures when in the presence of learned Christians (see, e.g., Rashbam on Exodus 20:12), no rabbi could likely have sat down and read a Latin book any more than a 12^th century churchman could have read a Hebrew book without help from a Jewish scholar.^[22]

It is possible that certain rabbis learned directly from a Christian mentor, nevertheless, given the degree of animus and constructions of power exercised by a dominant Christian majority over northern Europe’s tiny Jewish community, no rabbi in this period would have admitted to such a thing in writing.^[23] Whatever the case, more than Zeitgeist alone played a role in the development of peshat. Jews and Christians conducted a lively discourse about biblical interpretation during this period, in a wide variety of social circumstances, certainly in the 12^th century, but probably in the 11^th as well, and the Christian turn to contextual reading was likely influential in the thinking of their Jewish colleagues.^[24]

Peshat/Contextual Commentaries: A Two Step Process

The idea of a peshat commentary did not emerge in one step. The first true rabbinic commentary on the Torah for which we have evidence is that of Rashi.^[25] Nevertheless, this commentary is overwhelmingly midrashic in nature.^[26]

The Christian analogue to Rashi’s commentary is the Latin biblical commentary known as Glossa Ordinaria, meaning “comments in a standard form.”^[27] Although the Glossa contains some literal exegesis, it is mostly allegorical (roughly corresponding in Christian ideology to midrash in rabbinic exegesis). Both the Glossa commentary and that of Rashi are composed at approximately the same time, and place, and share a cultural, linguistic, intellectual, and religious milieu.^[28]

Thus, in the 11^th-12^th centuries in northern France, both Jewish and Christian scholars began the creation of a major work of biblical exegesis; both drew on their respective ancient exegetical traditions for approximately 70% of their content (the great Patristic literature for the Christian churchmen and the Talmud and various midrashic collections for Rashi) whereas approximately 30% represented newer, individually-intuited “plain sense” or “literal” interpretations, along with the occasional polemic (either overt or covert). This was the first step.

Once the concept of a lemmatic, i.e., phrase by phrase, commentary was established, within a generation, both Christian and Jewish exegetes made tremendous advances towards developing a truly contextual approach. Among the Christians, the leaders were Hugh and Andrew of St. Victor and Herbert of Bosham, while among the Jews it was R. Joseph Kara, Rashbam, and R. Eliezer of Beaugency.

This newer approach was increasingly characterized by attention paid to features of composition that would in a later age be termed “literary.” These readers were interested in using grammar and rhetoric to unlock the meaning of a biblical text, as opposed to traditional religious instruction. Moreover, these exegetes developed terms to express their awareness of a wide variety of structures and devices in biblical narrative and poetry.^[29]

In reimagining what it meant to access/read the biblical text, the 12^th century exegetes fundamentally created the terms through which, centuries later, 19^th century critics would define “literature.” In so doing, the medieval exegetes at one and the same time transformed the ancient Jewish or Christian “religious truth-seeker” (rabbinic darshan or patristic homilist) into what we moderns call “the reader.”^[30]

Put differently, it is only due to the development of 12^th century considerations of biblical composition, with its attendant focus on meaning determined by context and by its articulation of devices at play in biblical texts (e.g., parallelistic structure; wordplay; prolepsis and analepsis, and the like) that the very idea of literature could be developed in the first place.^[31]

Paradoxically, when these rabbinic scholars composed their ad locum gloss commentaries, they essentially adopted a hermeneutic devised by Christians, which took root and flourished in the Jewish milieu. In distinguishing exegesis from hermeneutics, that is, between the interpretation itself and the reading process through which one approaches scripture , we can see the commonality among 12^th century northern French scholars, both Jewish and Christian.

Two Fingered Reading: Rashi Didn’t Study “Chumash with Rashi”!

When we look at the development of peshat commentary in its historical context, we first need to see the arc in the Christian community. The early forerunner of commentary was the revival of Greco-Roman scholarship in the Carolingian period. This was followed by the establishment of the commentary genre in the 11^th century, but utilizing traditional allegorical readings. Soon afterwards, independent contextual reading developed. The rabbinic exegetes followed an analogous path, with Rashi representing the first step and R. Joseph Kara and especially Rashbam, the second.

This shift in focus from traditional reading to contextual reading could only have happened once traditions that were long the province of oral discourse were committed to writing, and the study of these newly inscribed texts among a body of readers^[32] replaced the relationship between masters and disciples. But this development brought about a new phenomenon, which I call the two-fingered reading approach.

To explain, before commentary became a genre, the biblical text was taught by masters, and the student’s understanding was filtered through the “oral Torah,” namely the homilies and glosses passed on orally from generation to generation. The Bible itself, the “written Torah,” was read on its own, what I call “reading with one finger.”

Once commentary became written, however, it soon took the place of the masters. But it also constituted another written and at least quasi-authoritative text. As new generations continued to grapple with the Bible, and write their own commentaries, they needed to consult with the commentaries from previous generations to borrow from or push back against. These “classic” commentaries, Rashi being the most famous and important among the Jews, thus had to be studied just as the Bible was studied, which I call a “two-fingered reading,” with one finger on biblical text and the second on the commentary.

The process of peshat commenting in northern France began in incipient and somewhat hesitant fashion with Rashi; it developed into full-fledged peshat commentary soon after, and continued unabated and more fully dedicated until persecutions and expulsions of the 13^th century and beyond signaled the decline of northwestern European Jewry.

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Published

June 11, 2021

Last Updated

October 26, 2024

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Footnotes

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Published

June 11, 2021

Last Updated

October 26, 2024

[1] This essay is rooted in my current research: a book titled The Reinvention of Reading During the 12th Century Renaissance and an already published article, “From ‘Religious Truth-Seeking’ to Reading: The Twelfth Century Renaissance and the Emergence of Peshat and Ad Litteram as Methods of Accessing the Bible,” in The Oral and the Textual in Jewish Tradition and Jewish Education, ed. J. Cohen, M. Goldish and B. Holtz (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2019), 54–89. See also, Robert A. Harris, “Concepts of Scripture in the School of Rashi,” in Jewish Concepts of Scripture: A Comparative Introduction (Benjamin D. Sommer, ed.; New York and London: New York University Press, 2012), 102–122. For my earliest attempt to call attention to this factor, see my dissertation, The Literary Hermeneutic of Rabbi Eliezer of Beaugency, Ph.D. diss. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1997), especially 280–300.

[2] The latter provides one of the earliest definitions of “the four-fold method of exegesis (quadruplex sensus) in his work, Conlationes Patrum (14:8), a pithy presentation of which appears in a poem attributed to Augustine of Dacia (13th century):

1. Plain Sense

littera gesta docet;

The letter, events, (does) teach;

2. Allegorical

quid credas allegoria;

That which you should believe, allegory;

3. Moral

moralis quid agas;

Morals (or tropology), what you should do;

4. Mystical

quid speras anagogia,

that which you should hope for, anagogy.

This poem is cited widely; I first read it in Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), xiii.

[3] A popular account of Christian biblical exegesis may be found in Henning Graf Reventlow, History of Biblical Interpretation, trans. James O. Duke (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009); for John Cassian, see Volume 2, 73: “Following Origen’s model, Cassian knows here two sorts of interpretation, ‘historical interpretation and spiritual understanding.’ He distinguishes three types of spiritual understanding: Tropology (moral meaning), allegory (figurative) meaning, and analogy (relating to ‘the more spiritual mysteries…”

[4] Excerpt from Hugh’s “On Sacred Scripture and Its Authors,” chapter 3; see Franklin T. Harkins and Frans van Liere, Victorine Texts in Translation: Exegesis, Theology and Spirituality From the Abbey of St. Victor: Interpretations of Scripture: Theory (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 214–215.

[5] Elsewhere I have dubbed this “religious truth-seeking.” See Harris, “Concepts of Scripture,” 104. Among relevant usages of the root ד-ר-שׁ in Biblical Hebrew we note occurrences of “to seek after sheep” (e.g., Deuteronomy 22:2) or “to seek a Divine oracle” (e.g., Genesis 25:22). Late Biblical Hebrew provides the even more pertinent usage “to expound” (i.e., “seek/demand out of”) the Torah book (Ezra 7:10). The root also yields the noun “midrash” (2 Chronicles 13:22; 24:27), though the precise meaning of this term there is uncertain; see Sara Japhet, I & II Chronicles: A Commentary (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), 700. This latter meaning, of both noun and verb, denotes the standard exegesis of the Bible throughout rabbinic literature; this leads to an additional definition of midrash in rabbinic Hebrew is “that which is sought (and found) in the Bible.”

[6] The question of why and how the root פ-שׁ-ט developed out of its various ancient uses into the catchword of a far-ranging medieval exegetical enterprise has never fully been fleshed out. It is found in the Bible, most often in the context of “stripping off clothing” (e.g., Genesis 37:23; Leviticus 6:4; 16:23; Isaiah 32:11; see also Leviticus 1:6, in the context of removing the hide before butchering a slaughtered animal). The root also occurs in military contexts (e.g., Judges 9:33; 20:37); unless one wishes to consider the possibility of “attacking” or “assaying” a text, however, it seems the first types of usages are more relevant. For the use of the root in ancient rabbinic literature (פשטיה דקרא and the like), see Sarah Kamin, רש"י: פשוטו של מקרא ומדרשו של מקרא [Rashi’s Exegetical Categorization in Respect to the Distinction Between Peshat and Derash] (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1986), 25–57. I agree with Kamin that the root means something entirely different in medieval rabbinic Hebrew than it did in the Talmuds and ancient rabbinic midrashic sources, and in this essay, I primarily address the former.

[7] Both of the premier 12^th century peshat exegetes, Rashbam and Ibn Ezra, provided a core statement that described their overall methodology. Rashbam’s briefest statement on the subject is found in his introduction to the Covenant Collection at Exodus 21:1 and Ibn Ezra’s is found in part five of his introduction to the Torah. For a brief discussion of each of these passages, see Robert A. Harris, “Jewish Biblical Exegesis in the Middle Ages: From Its Beginnings Through the Twelfth Century,” in The New Cambridge History of the Bible (Richard Marsden and Ann Matter, ed. Cambridge University Press, 2012), 596–615 [608–613].

[8] Kamin, Rashi, 14. The Hebrew original reads:

ביאור הכתוב על־פי לשונו, מבנהו התחבירי, הקשרו הענייני, סוגו הספרותי ומבנהו הספרותי, תוך יחסי גומלין בין מרכיבים אלה. לשון אחר: פירוש על דרך פשט הוא פירוש המתחשב בכל היסודות הלשוניים בהתרכבותם ומקנה לכל אחד מהם מובן על־פי השלימות.

The translation is my own.

[9] See R. Joseph Kara’s diatribe (at 1 Samuel 1:20) against בעלי אגדה, i.e., masters of expounding Scripture only according to midrash and who (to whatever extent they were aware of it) eschew the developing rabbinic sense of peshat:

ויודע אני שיליזו על פתרון זה כל בעלי אגדה ותלמוד, שלא יניחו מה שפתרו רבותינו... וילכו אחרי פתרונם. אך המשכילים ישכילו לנתיבות הקרייה, להעמיד דבר על האמת.

I know well that all of those ‘masters of Aggadah and Talmud’ will laugh at (my) explanation, since they never abandon what our Sages have interpreted… and always run after their interpretations. But illuminati will become enlightened through the pathways of reading, and will stand matters upon the truth.

In general, the ancient Jewish world, including the rabbis, approached Scriptures with a completely different set of assumptions from ours. James L. Kugel insightfully calls these “the four assumptions” shared by all ancient interpreters of the Bible. See James L. Kugel, The Bible as it Was (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997), 17–23.

[10] Northern French pashtanim held a multivalent approach to “meaning,” and therefore could sustain support for both derash and peshat at one and the same time, whereas Sephardic exegetes held a fundamentally univocal understand — and therefore expressed a great deal of tension particularly when dealing with the conflict between peshat and halacha. Various exegetes from the Judeo-Islamic world (from Saadia to Abraham Ibn Ezra and beyond) developed a concept of peshat that, although it shares certain basic assumptions about grammar and context with the northern French rabbinic exegetes, was remarkably different in certain elements of theory and practice. Describing the circumstances in which it originated (in interplay with both Islam and Karaism) and developed, requires its own treatment, and I do not address it in this essay.

[11] On the origins of midrash as oral discourse, see, e.g., Jonah Fraenkel, דרכי המדרש והאגדה [The Ways of Aggadah and Midrash] (Jerusalem: Massada, 1991), 1.16–43.

[12] On the corresponding transition from oral to literary culture in Latin literature, see Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 3–87.

[13] Karaite commentary, in the Arabic milieu, began earlier. Daniel Frank, Search Scripture Well: Karaite Exegetes and the Origins of the Jewish Bible Commentary in the Islamic East (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2004); Meira Polliack, Karaite Judaism: A Guide to Its History and Literary Sources (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2003). But as the vast preponderance of this literature was composed in Arabic, and that language was not known in 11th–12th century Europe, its influence in the origins of northern French peshat may be discounted. Karaite influence only truly began to influence European exegetes with the arrival of Abraham Ibn Ezra, and even then, only through his citations of it (and polemic with it) in Hebrew translation.

[14] See David A. Salomon, An Introduction to the Glossa Ordinaria as Medieval Hypertext (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012). While the present paper is concerned with northern French cultural and intellectual developments, analogous observations may be made concerning developments in the Mediterranean and Byzantine worlds, as well with respect to Karaite commentaries and their Rabbinite respondents.

[15] See Nikolaus M. Haring, “Commentary and Hermeneutics,” In Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed., Robert L. Benson, Giles Constable, and Carol D. Lanham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, in association with the Medieval Academy of America, 1991), 173–200.

[16] For a fine collection of essays on the subject, see Celia Martin Chazelle and Burton Van Name Edwards, The Study of the Bible in the Carolingian Era (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2003).

[17] We see evidence of this interest as early as 786, in Charlemagne’s “Letter to the Lectors,” issued some years before his more famous Admonitio Generalis:

…Since it is our concern that the condition of our churches should always advance towards better things, we strive with vigilant zeal to repair the manufactory of learning, almost destroyed by the sloth of our forefathers, and summon whom we can, even by our own example, to master the studies of the liberal arts.

Translation from P. D.King, Charlemagne: Translated Sources (Lambrigg, Kendal, Cumbria: P.D. King, 1987), 208.

[18]Thus, the Admonitio Generalis (paragraph 72) states:

And let schools for teaching boys the psalms, musical notation, singing, computation and grammar be created in every monastery and episcopal residence. And correct catholic books properly, for often, while people want to pray to God in the proper fashion, they yet pray improperly because of uncorrected books. And do not allow your boys to corrupt them, either in reading or in copying….

King, Charlemagne, 217.

[19] Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture, 305. On the increased production of manuscripts, Mary J. Carruthers observes, “There is no questioning the fact that written material came increasingly into use from the eleventh century on; the reason that more manuscripts survive from the later Middle Ages is because more were made.” Carruthers, Mary J. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 195. Irvine further notes:

…The Carolingian codification of grammatica established the foundations for subsequent textual culture: most of the corpus of classical grammatical treatises and classical literary works is preserved in manuscripts copied in the Carolingian era. Grammatica supplied special technologies of authority — literacy, normative latinity, knowledge of a literary canon, the scribal arts, book production — which became part of a larger ideology. Without grammatica laws and charters could not be written, the Scriptures could not be read, copied, or interpreted…

Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture, 305–306; see also 521, n. 112.

[20] To get a feel for the approach, here are some excerpts (translated from the Latin):

…we, along with our faithful advisors, have deemed it useful that the bishoprics and monasteries… should… devote their efforts to the study of literature and to the teaching of it, each according to his ability, to those on whom God has bestowed the capacity to learn; that, just as the observance of a rule gives soundness to their conduct, so also an attention to teaching and learning may give order and adornment to their words, and that those who seek to please God by living aright may not fail to please him also by rightness in their speaking… For although it is better to do what is right than to know it, yet knowledge comes before action… They should give special service to truth. Letters have often been sent to us… we found that in most of these writings their sentiments were sound but their speech uncouth… because of their neglect of learning their unskilled tongues could not express it without fault. And so it came about that we began to fear that their lack of knowledge of writing might be matched by a more serious lack of wisdom in the understanding of holy scripture… Wherefore we urge you, not merely to avoid the neglect of the study of literature, but with a devotion that is humble and pleasing to God to strive to learn it, so that you may be able more easily and more rightly to penetrate the mysteries of the holy scriptures. For since there are figures of speech, metaphors and the like to be found on the sacred pages, there can be no doubt. that each man who reads them will understand their spiritual meaning more quickly if he is first of all given full instruction in the study of literature.

Cited from H. R. Loyn and John Percival, The Reign of Charlemagne: Documents on Carolingian Government and Administration (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975), 63–64. For a different translation, see King, Charlemagne, 232–233.

[21] As Richard Matthew Pollard has written,

Whether or not we can really call this period a ‘renaissance’ is still much debated by scholars, but there can be no question that these centuries saw a great upswing in cultural and intellectual productivity. This can be illustrated most simply in terms of book production, that is, by the number of manuscript books that were copied in the Carolingian period. The total number of surviving Latin manuscript books that were produced in Europe before the year 800 is less than two thousand, whereas for the period c. 800-900 we have more than four times as many, perhaps nine thousand.

Richard Matthew Pollard, “Carolingian Literature at Reichenau and St. Gall.”

[22] As Beryl Smalley already noted in an early publication, Andrew of St. Victor habitually referred to “Hebraeus meus” to describe his Jewish interlocutor. See Beryl Smalley, “Andrew of St. Victor, Abbot of Wigmore: A Twelfth Century Hebraist.” Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 10 (1938), 358–73 (362–363).

[23] Indeed, if one looks for a “smoking gun” of the type in which some rabbi would write “on such and such a day, I sat down with my good friend at the Cathedral School of St. Victor and, in studying Scripture together, I learned…” one surely looks in vain. While the occasional (and exceptional) Christian scholars could write such a thing, no Jewish exegete, given the degree of animus and constructions of power exercised by a dominant Christian majority over northern Europe’s tiny Jewish community, could possibly have been expected to express positive acknowledgment of Christian influence on Jewish exegesis. For discussions of Jewish-Christian relations in the 12^th Century, see, e.g., Anna Sapir, Abulafia, Christians and Jews in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (London and New York: Routledge, 1995); Robert Chazan, Reassessing Jewish Life in Medieval Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Israel Jacob. Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb : Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

[24] For the 11th Century, see Mordechai Z. Cohen, “A New Perspective of Rashi of Troyes in Light of Bruno the Carthusian: Exploring Jewish and Christian Bible Interpretation in Eleventh Century Northern France,” Viator 48:1 (2017), 39–86. For the 12th Century the evidence is much greater. See, e.g., John Van Engen, “Ralph of Flaix: The Book of Leviticus Interpreted as Christian Community,” in Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe (Michael A Signer and John Van Engen ed. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 150–70 (indeed most any article in this fine volume might be consulted); and my own article, written in respectful response, Robert A. Harris, “The Book of Leviticus Interpreted as Jewish Community,” Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 6 (2011): 1–15.

[25] For the moment, I do not address the question of whether the pitronot of R. Menahem bar Helbo represent true commentaries, or whether there were other (anonymous or otherwise) precedents to Rashi’s oeuvre. Analogously, Rashi’s commentary on the Babylonian Talmud (quite probably begun earlier) represents the first primary line-by-line guide for reading that work.

[26] For an extended study of Rashi’s commentary in its essence as a midrashic anthology, see Yedida C. Eisenstat, “Rashi’s Midrashic Anthology: The Torah Commentary Re-Examined,” diss., Jewish Theological Seminary, 2014.

[27] For a discussion of the development of the Gloss, see Lesley Smith, The Glossa Ordinaria : The Making of a Medieval Bible Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 2009). See also Margaret T. Gibson, “The Place of the Glossa Ordinaria in Medieval Exegesis,” in Ad Litteram: Authoritative Texts and Their Medieval Readers (ed. Mark D. Jordan and Kent Emery. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 5–27.

[28] Devorah Schoenfeld authored a comparative study of Rashi and the Glossa, in which she clearly concludes that they share a similar approach to the exegesis of Scripture. See Devorah Schoenfeld, Isaac on Jewish and Christian Altars: Polemic and Exegesis in Rashi and the Glossa Ordinaria (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 9. Schoenfeld does not particularly develop the hermeneutic insight, and instead concentrates on presenting the interpretations of both on the narrative of Genesis 22, especially with the intention of highlighting the polemical overtones of the two exegetical texts. Editor’s note: For an accessible look at the Glossa Ordinaria interpreting a text, see Wendy Love Anderson, “Parents Eating their Children – The Torah's Curse and Its Undertones in Medieval Interpretation,” TheTorah (2018); Devorah Schoenfeld, “Akedah: How Jews and Christians Explained Abraham’s Faith,” TheTorah (2017).

[29] See Robert A. Harris, “Twelfth-Century Biblical Exegetes and the Invention of Literature,” in The Multiple Meaning of Scripture: The Role of Exegesis in Early-Christian and Medieval Culture (Ienje van ‘t Spijker, ed. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2009), 311–329, in which I present and explain northern French rabbinic awareness of a wide variety of literary devices, and detail the terminology they developed to call attention to them in biblical literature. For extended examples with one rabbinic exegete, see Robert A. Harris, Rabbi Eliezer of Beaugency: Commentaries on Amos and Jonah (With Selections from Isaiah and Ezekiel) (Kalamazoo: TEAMS: Medieval Institute Publications and Western Michigan University, 2018). For extended examples with Christian exegetes, see Frans van Liere and Franklin T. Harkins, Interpretation of Scripture: Practice: A Selection of Works of Hugh, Andrew, Richard of St Victor, Peter Comestor, Robert of Melun, Maurice of Sully and Leonius of Paris (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2015).

[30] Robert A. Harris, “The Reception of Ezekiel Among Twelfth-Century Northern French Rabbinic Exegetes,” in After Ezekiel: Essays on the Reception of a Difficult Prophet (Andrew Mein and Paul M. Joyce, ed. New York, London: T&T Clark International, 2011), 71–88 (87–88).

[31] Hermeneutics and exegesis have both been thoroughly bound up in biblical studies from the Middle Ages into modernity. For a basic overview, see Anthony C. Thiselton, Hermeneutics: An Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2009). Medieval and pre-modern Bible study fed directly into theoretical discussions of literature in the emergent modern university. The contemporary idea of “literature” as a distinct academic pursuit is primarily the result of changes taking place in the 19^th century university. See James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014), 254–273.

^[32] See Brian Stock, Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 102–103.