ABSTRACT
On October 1, 2013, the Pew Center's Religion and Public Life Project released A Portrait of Jewish Americans, sending shockwaves throughout much of the American Jewish community. Alongside some expected causes of concern, such as rising intermarriage rates, the Pew study highlighted an interesting trend: the increasing number of Jews who identify as Jews with no religion. The tendency to intertwine exegesis and theological discourse was widespread among both Jewish and Christian interpreters in late antiquity, although numerous scholars have noted important differences between the specific literary and interpretive structures employed by rabbis and by their contemporaries in the early church. David Stern has analyzed the structure of the mashal form at length, arguing that it is uniquely able to draw its audience into the interpretive process through its construction of gaps and ambiguities. Scholars of midrash have persuasively demonstrated that the practice of midrashic interpretation is not freewheeling or haphazard but rather is governed by identifiable hermeneutical rules.
