Reception of Scripture in Rashi’s Torah Commentary

Abstract

Abstract The most influential biblical commentary in Jewish history is that of the late eleventh century scholar, Rabbi Shlomo Yitzḥaki (“Rashi”) of northern France. This essay examines Rashi’s Torah Commentary as a midrashic anthology and examines Rashi’s reception of the Bible through the lens of his use of midrash. After highlighting shared traits of first-millennium midrashic corpora and Rashi’s Torah Commentary, I offer a new reading of Rashi’s “methodological statement.” I then turn to Rashi’s historical context to suggest that the Commentary’s lemmatized form demonstrates that Scripture cannot be properly understood without its rabbinic accompaniment, the midrash of the rabbis’ Oral Torah. Finally, I offer examples of the range of ways Rashi employed midrash in his Commentary, the primary lens through which traditional Jews have received Scripture for a millennium.