ABSTRACT
The Most of the books in the Hebrew Bible were written while the Jews were participants in the culture of the Ancient Near East. In earlier ages the Jews envisioned Moses, anachronistically, as a prototype of the rabbi. In the contemporary Western world, rabbis preside over prayer services in synagogues, much as priests and ministers do in churches. The public knew what words of Scripture were coming, as the lectionary of Judaism was standardized. The preacher tantalized the folk by reciting a verse from elsewhere in Scripture and tying it to the weekly reading with word association and clever interpretation. This method of verse-by-verse interpretation of Scripture to reveal new messages is called "midrash". The process of enlarging the Scriptures through mishnah and midrash overlapped with the process of completing and closing the written Scriptures, the Bible.
