Genesis Rabbah - Material

Material

Far more difficult than any question concerning the outward form of Genesis Rabba is that of deciding how much of its present contents is original material included in it, and how much of later addition. The sections formed the framework that was to contain the exposition of a number of Biblical verses in continuous succession. But with the notoriously loose construction of the haggadic exegesis it became easy to string together, on every verse or part of a verse, a number of rambling comments; or to add longer or shorter haggadic passages, stories, etc., connected in some way with the exposition of the text. This process of accretion took place quite spontaneously in Genesis Rabba, as in the other works of the Talmudic and midrashic literature. Between the beginning and the completion of these works — if ever they were completed — a long period elapsed during which there was much addition and collection. The tradition that Rabbi Hosha'iah is the author of Genesis Rabba may be taken to mean that he began the work, in the form of the running commentary customary in tannaitic times, arranging the exposition on Genesis according to the sequence of the verses, and furnishing the necessary complement to the tannaitic midrashim on the other books of the Torah. The ascription of the Mekilta to Rabbi Ishmael and of the Jerusalem Talmud to Rabbi Johanan rests on a similar procedure. Perhaps the comments on Genesis were originally divided into sections that corresponded with the above-mentioned sections of the text, and that contained the beginnings of the simplest introductions, as indeed the first traces of such introductions are found also in the tannaitic midrash. But the embellishment of the sections with numerous artistic introductions — which points to a combination of the form of the running commentary with the form of the finished homilies following the type of the Pesikta and Tanhuma Midrashim — was the result of the editing of Genesis Rabba that is now extant, when the material found in collections and traditions of the haggadic exegesis of the period of the Amoraim was taken up in the midrash, and Genesis Rabba was given its present form, if not its present bulk. Perhaps the editor made use also of different collections on the several parts of Genesis. The present Genesis Rabba shows a singular disproportion between the length of the first Torah portion and that of the eleven others. The Torah portion Bereishit alone comprises 29 sections, being more than one-fourth of the whole work. It is possible that the present Genesis Rabba is a combination of two midrashim of unequal proportions, and that the 29 sections of the first Torah portion — several of which expound only one or a few verses — constitute the extant or incomplete material of a Genesis Rabba that was laid out on a much larger and more comprehensive scale than the midrash to the other Torah portions.