But the rabbis, it turns out, had a different and much greater kind of freedom. To them, every letter and word of the Bible was put there by God, which meant that every letter and word had a meaning. If the same word appeared in a verse in Exodus and again in a verse in Chronicles, then there must be some essential relationship between the two verses that the reader was meant to discover. And the rabbinic reader of the Bible was not even bound by the plain sense of the words: He was free to invent episodes, multiply motives, and add characters, if the result seemed to him a fuller explication of the text’s divine meaning.The catchword principle is one of the keys to understanding both rabbinic and Second Temple Jewish exegesis of scripture.
This week’s Daf Yomi reading, which brought us to the end of Chapter 1 of Tractate Megilla, offered a master class in this kind of midrashic reading. Over seven pages of Gemara, the rabbis engaged in a chapter-by-chapter, sometimes line-by-line analysis of the Book of Esther, after which the tractate is named. The result is practically a rewriting of the Esther story, full of new details that seem to spring from nowhere but the minds of the rabbis themselves yet are treated as deep truths that the text must have contained from the beginning. At times euphemistic and puritanical, at times surprisingly frank, the rabbis show how they take the ambiguous story of Esther and assimilate it to their own worldview.
Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links. More posts having to do with exegesis of the Book of Esther up to the present (including Haman as barber) are here and here and links.
