What are Jewish ways of reading the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible?) Many of us were told that there are four ways – Peshat, Derash, Remez, and Sod. Together they’re known by the acronym, פַּרְדֵּס PaRDeS. What you may not have been told is that this was only practiced by a tiny fraction of Jews until relatively recently. And even today most Jews don’t read our Bible this way. So, in the bigger picture, what are the ways that Jewish people have studied Tanakh?
Peshat – Discerning the message of the original author
In this mindset we recognize that our Bible wasn’t written recently, here, or in modern Hebrew. It was written thousands of years ago, in ancient Hebrew, in the ANE (ancient near east.) We have to keep that historical context in mind if we want to understand the message that the author intended to get across to the original audience. Only with this mindset can we understand the puns and wordplay, the figures of speech, and the difference between statements meant as literal, versus statements that were meant as hyperbole, a technique commonly used across the ANE.
Examples of sages who often focused on discerning the peshat: Rashbam, Abraham Ibn Ezra, Samson Raphael Hirsch, and from today, The JPS Torah commentary series, the Torah commentaries of Conservative (Masorti) and Reform Judaism, and some Torah commentaries from Modern Orthodox and Dati Leumi rabbis.
Derash – delving deeper into the text
Here we put ourselves into the mindset of Chazal – the sages of classical rabbinical Judaism who are found in the Mishnah, Midrash, and the Talmuds. Derash asks why the text is phrased the way that it is. They plumbed the text to find new meaning and to bring out lessons that may not have been intended by the original authors.
We see derash in the classic works of rabbinical Judaism – Mishnah, Talmud – and also in many later generations of rabbis and commentators.
Philosophical rationalism
Jewish rationalists believe that the Torah’s teachings are divine and true, and also comprehensible and discoverable by human reason. Rationalists tend to believe that “there are truths – especially in logic and mathematics but also in ethics and metaphysics – that the intellect can grasp directly.” – “Rationalism” – Encyclopedia Britannica
Rationalist Jewish Bible commentators show how verses of the Bible make sense in light of rational thought e.g. Saadya Gaon, Gersonides, Maimonides, Abraham ibn Ezra.
Kabbalistic (esoteric mystical secrets)
Kabbalists hold that we should read our Bible through the lens of Jewish mysticism. In this view, Kabbalah is a once-secret body of divinely revelation just as important and momentous as that received by Moses from God on Mount Sinai.
Kabbalah pulls back the curtains covering the surface reading of the Torah. Although classical Judaism is based on reading the Torah through both peshat and derash, Kabbalah holds that those are just the surface of deeper truths. Beyond these lie Remez – allegories that reveal mystical truths, and Sod, the innermost mystical secrets.
Together, using peshat, derash, remez, and sod is known by the acronym, פַּרְדֵּס PaRDeS – which is the Hebrew word for orchard/paradise: Kabbalah is said to reveal the secrets of the Heavenly orchard/Gan Edan/Garden of Eden.
Judaism’s kabbalistic works are found in the Merkabah and Hekhalot literature, the Zohar, and later works by mystics such as Moses ben Jacob Cordovero, Isaac Luria, Hayyim ben Joseph Vital , and Joseph Ben Emanuel Ergas.
Chassidus (Hasidic Jewish thought)
Hasidic Jews read the Bible using both classical Jewish and kabbalistic methods. What distinguishes Kabbalah is that it transmogrifies Kabbalah’s esoteric, cosmic teachings into the realm of the psychological. Instead of cosmological explorations of supernal realms, Chassidus relates mystical, cosmic ideas to the realm of the human mind.
Examples include the Baal Shem Tov, Maggid of Mezeritch, Elimelech Weisblum of Lizhensk, Menachem Nachum Twersky of Chernobyl, Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev, Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Menachem Mendel of Rimanov, Nachman of Breslov.
Literary ways of reading the Bible
In 1975 Robert Alter wrote a groundbreaking essay noting –
“It is a little astonishing that at this late date there exists virtually no serious literary analysis of the Hebrew Bible. By serious literary analysis I mean the manifold varieties of minutely discriminating attention to the artful use of language, to the shifting play of ideas, conventions, tone, sound, imagery, narrative viewpoint, compositional units, and much else; the kind of disciplined attention, in other words, which through a whole spectrum of critical approaches has illuminated, for example, the poetry of Dante, the plays of Shakespeare, the novels of Tolstoy.”
Alter, A Literary Approach to the Bible, Commentary, 1975
Since that time, first led by him, then by other non-Orthodox scholars, the literary method of studying our Bible has become mainstream across the Jewish world. Yes, this can be done in a secular or non-religious fashion, yet it also has become seen as important by some in the Orthodox Jewish community.
Indeed, if we look more closely, we see that some traditional commentators such as Rashbam (1085-1158 CE) had used literary analysis. Elements of it appear in some classical and Chassidic Bible commentators.
Today we have two generations of religious Jewish literary Tanakh analysis, including by countless non-Orthodox rabbis and scholars, and by some Modern Orthodox Jews, and many in the Dati Leumi community in Israel. Much has been published from Koren Publications.
In Israel this literary approach is also known by the for the approach in which it writes about our ancestors, prophets, and kings as human and fallible – which is how the Torah and Tanakh present them. This engendered a controversy because Haredi communities eschewed Tanakh study, and generally only knew Tanakh stories from hagiographic and laudatory episodes in the Talmud and from later Orthodox rabbis. As such, many Haredim were disturbed by a literary reading of the Bible – instead of seeing Moses, Jacob, and King David as flawless, perfect people who could do no wrong, they were exposed to a reading in which all of these people were human and imperfect. Haredi critics of the literary approach derided this method as reading תנך בגובה עיניים – the Tanakh at eye level. This was contrasted to their preferred way of reading Tanakh from “a heavenly level.”
This term – reading the Bible at eye level – has since become a common modern Israeli Hebrew way of referring to literary analysis. Some Israelis refer to it as עיון הספרותי literary study.
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