What is Midrash?
Judaism in Five Minutes - Sarah Imhoff
Sarah Imhoff [+]
Indiana University
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Sarah Imhoff is Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Chair in Jewish Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University. She is author of Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism (Indiana University Press, 2017) and The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist (Duke University Press, 2022). She is the founding co-editor of the journal American Religion.
Description
Midrash is creative textual interpretation that draws on biblical texts. The word midrash can refer to two things: at its broadest, it denotes the genre of inquiries, speculations, imaginative exegesis, allegorical readings, line-by-line commentaries, and even new stories related to the Bible; its more specific meaning denotes the set of texts of this genre that gather and record rabbinic interpretations of the Bible from about 200 to 1000 CE.