Sections of The Midrash
The index to the rabbinical Bible (Venice, 1525) gives 27 sedarim in Deuteronomy; on 19 of these there are homilies in the present Midrash, as well as a fragment, which, according to the editions, belongs to another seder (Deut. xxix. 9). It may be due to differences of time and place in the division of the cycle of sedarim that in the Debarim Rabbah there are no homilies on seven or eight of the sedarim mentioned in that index—namely, Deut. xi. 10, xiv. 1, xv. 7, xxiii. 10, xxiii. 22, xxiv. 19, xxvi. 1, and occasionally and conditionally xxix. 9—and that, besides a homily on a section mentioned in other sources as a seder (Deut. iv. 25), there are five additional homilies on the sections Deut. i. 10, iv. 7, xi. 26, xxiv. 9, and xxix. 1, which were not otherwise known as sedarim.
In some of these homilies, moreover, the halakic exordiums (see below) close with the words מנין ממה שקרינו בענין ..., which clearly show that the Scriptural sections on which the homilies were pronounced were used for public lessons. The editor of this Midrash, however, has probably included only the homilies on the Sabbatical lessons of the cycle of sedarim: for Debarim Rabbah contains no homilies on the lessons of the Pesiḳta cycle belonging to Deuteronomy, Deut. xiv. 22 and xxv. 17 (Deut. xxxiii. 1 is a seder as well as a Pesiḳta section).
The economy of this Midrash containing sedarim homilies on Deuteronomy, as well as the character of the individual homilies, could easily have been misconstrued and forgotten after the division of the Torah into pericopes according to the one-year cycle had come into general use. In present editions Debarim Rabbah is divided only according to these latter pericopes; it was not noticed that the homilies on כי תצא and כי תבא did not correspond with the beginnings of the pericopes Deut. xxi. 10 and xxvi. 1. The sidrot Niẓẓabim and Wayelek formed one pericope in the oldest Midrash editions (Constantinople, 1512, and Venice, 1545); hence in these editions Debarim Rabbah contains only ten sections, corresponding with the pericopes. The further designation of these sections as "parashiyyot" and their enumeration from 1 to 11, dividing Niẓẓabim and Wayelek, are addenda of the later editions.
Read more about this topic: Deuteronomy Rabbah
Famous quotes containing the words sections of the, sections of and/or sections:
“For generations, a wide range of shooting in Northern Ireland has provided all sections of the population with a pastime which ... has occupied a great deal of leisure time. Unlike many other countries, the outstanding characteristic of the sport has been that it was not confined to any one class.”
—Northern Irish Tourist Board. quoted in New Statesman (London, Aug. 29, 1969)
“... many of the things which we deplore, the prevalence of tuberculosis, the mounting record of crime in certain sections of the country, are not due just to lack of education and to physical differences, but are due in great part to the basic fact of segregation which we have set up in this country and which warps and twists the lives not only of our Negro population, but sometimes of foreign born or even of religious groups.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks ... or lay down on a couch, and think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries.... Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don’t bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each.”
—Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926)