Scripture and Midrash in Judaism

The rabbis of late antiquity produced a score of exegesis of the Hebrew Scriptures of Ancient Israel (the Old Testament), in which they took various approaches to the study and interpretation of what they called the written Torah. These exegesis, called collectively Midrash form an important part of the oral Torah, that is, the tradition of Sinai formulated and transmitted for memorization and ultimately written down by the ancient sages in the first six centuries A.D. These three volumes present large selections of the Midrash-documents of ancient Judaism, in the translation of Jacob Neusner, who has now translated into English nearly all of the Rabbinic literature of late antiquity. The selections are organized by type, so that readers see the various ways in which, in form and in intellectual program, the documents of Midrash-compilation were formulated and set forth. In this way, the vast body of biblical exegesis put forth by Judaism in its formative age is made available to the contemporary reader.