Midrash

Midrash and rabbinic readings "discern value in texts, words, and letters, as potential revelatory spaces", writes the Hebrew scholar Wilda Gafney.

[7][8] Such works contain early interpretations and commentaries on the Written Torah and Oral Torah (spoken law and sermons), as well as non-legalistic rabbinic literature (aggadah) and occasionally Jewish religious laws (halakha), which usually form a running commentary on specific passages in the Hebrew Scripture (Tanakh).

[14] A definition of "midrash" repeatedly quoted by other scholars[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] is that given by Gary G. Porton in 1981: "a type of literature, oral or written, which stands in direct relationship to a fixed, canonical text, considered to be the authoritative and revealed word of God by the midrashist and his audience, and in which this canonical text is explicitly cited or clearly alluded to".

This is not limited to the traditional thirteen textual tools attributed to the Tanna Rabbi Ishmael, which are used in the interpretation of halakha (Jewish law).

The presence of words or letters which are seen to be apparently superfluous, and the chronology of events, parallel narratives or what are seen as other textual "anomalies" are often used as a springboard for interpretation of segments of Biblical text.

Bernard H. Mehlman and Seth M. Limmer deprecate this usage, claiming that the term "minor" seems judgmental and "small" is inappropriate for midrashim, some of which are lengthy.

[40] Generally speaking, rabbinic midrashim either focuses on religious law and practice (halakha) or interprets the biblical narrative in relation to non-legal ethics or theology, creating homilies and parables based on the text.

This work is based on pre-set assumptions about the sacred and divine nature of the text and the belief in the legitimacy that accords with rabbinic interpretation.

These aggadic explanations could be philosophical or mystical disquisitions concerning angels, demons, paradise, Hell, the messiah, Satan, feasts and fasts, parables, legends, satirical assaults on those who practice idolatry, etc.

[47] Frank Kermode has written that midrash is an imaginative way of "updating, enhancing, augmenting, explaining, and justifying the sacred text".

Because the Tanakh came to be seen as unintelligible or even offensive, midrash could be used as a means of rewriting it in a way that both makes it more acceptable to later ethical standards and conforms more to later notions of plausibility.

Kugel traces how and why biblical interpreters produced new meanings by the use of exegesis on ambiguities, syntactical details, unusual or awkward vocabulary, repetitions, etc.

Targum Neophyti (Deuteronomy 30:12) and b. Baba Metzia 59b claim that this text means that Torah is no longer hidden away, but has been given to humans who are then responsible for following it.