ABSTRACT
Every community which regards as normative certain texts given by the worthies of old must develop a “hermeneutic,” a means whereby these fixed standards can be kept in an effective relationship with the ever-changing frontier of day-to-day experience. In the two centuries surounding the turn of the era, six factors impelled Rabbinic Judaism toward the elaboration of a hermeneutic far more self-conscious than anything previously known: the canon of the Scripture was fixed; a body of authoritative Torah not part of that canon had to be kept in fruitful relationship to it; the institutions of Bet-Kenesset and Bet-Midrash emerged as settings suitable for carrying on the hermeneutical task; sectarian competition increased the urgency for an explicit hermeneutic; Hellenistic culture offered models from its own interpretive tradition; and the normative role of the Temple in religion ceased.
Out of this period emerged a sophisticated system of “hermeneutics,” or praxis of interpretation. The essay reviews the traditional lists of seven and thirteen middot, together with other methodological devices not part of the lists, and —with the help of illustrations drawn from Mekilta de R. Ishmael — offers a logical and literary analysis of each one. A comparison of the results of these analyses with hermeneutical devices found in both Old and New Testaments and in the larger Hellenistic milieu leads to the conclusion that the system of Rabbinic hermeneutics was sui generis, and was the indigenous response of the Tannaim and their immediate successors to their own urgently felt need for an effective hermeneutic.
