Early Medieval Biblical Interpretation
New Approaches to the Biblical Text
In the early medieval period, Jews began to approach the Hebrew Bible in new ways. The study of Hebrew grammar, various polemical challenges, and new intellectual movements in the surrounding cultures all prompted significant developments in Jewish biblical interpretation (exegesis). Medieval Jewish biblical interpretation flourished, from its ninth-century origins in the Muslim East through the twelfth century, involving Jews from conflicting schools of thought (such as Karaites, who rejected rabbinic tradition, and Rabbanites, who accepted it) and illustrating the interconnectedness of Jewish groups throughout the medieval world. Despite theological and cultural differences, medieval Jews shared an abiding desire to understand the Hebrew scriptures and, in many cases, employed the same intellectual toolbox to do so.
As the field of Hebrew grammar and linguistics developed, Jews first sought to stabilize the transmission of the biblical text and its reading tradition and then moved to formulate philological rules and to interpret the Bible’s language. Importantly, many of these efforts came to draw on the robust field of Arabic linguistics. A second step in understanding the biblical text was the production of translations of the Bible and commentaries on it. The Hebrew biblical text was rendered into Arabic, Aramaic, Greek, and Judeo-Persian translations, which were sometimes literal but often paraphrastic and highly interpretive. During this period, commentaries written by both Karaites and Rabbanites explicated the text generally in line-by-line fashion, a new feature of medieval writing. Expanding their understanding of the biblical text, Jews also wrote homiletical works, such as sermons and sermon-like texts—including medieval collections of midrash—that draw on biblical materials. Taking a scriptural verse as a starting point, these works typically provide missing context for scriptural stories, fill gaps in the biblical account, draw moral lessons, or offer literary insights. Unlike medieval commentaries, most of these works have no named author and do not necessarily present a unified perspective.