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Azzan Yadin-Israel . Scripture and Tradition: Rabbi Akiva and the Triumph of Midrash . Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press , 2014. 320 pp.
Book Reviews: Judaism in Late Antiquity and Rabbinics
A decade after the publication of his book Scripture as Logos, which presented an analysis of the tannaitic midrashim identified with the school of Rabbi Ishmael, Azzan Yadin-Israel's new book Scripture and Tradition takes on the tannaitic midrash quintessentially identified with the competing school of Rabbi Akiva: Sifra on the book of Leviticus. Through a close analysis of the Sifra's hermeneutic idiosyncrasies, Yadin-Israel brings forth creative and insightful conclusions not only about the nature of this midrashic work, but about Akivan midrash more broadly and the early rabbinic project as a whole.
In the first part of the book, Yadin-Israel leads the reader through an investigation of some puzzling elements of the Sifra's midrashic technique. Yadin-Israel points out that although the Sifra appears to rely on certain hermeneutic markers in the biblical text, it is inconsistent in both its attention to these markers and its interpretation of what they signify. Furthermore, the Sifra sometimes offers midrashic readings whose content is tautological, or whose interpretation appears to bear no relevance whatsoever to the verse being glossed. Finally, although the Sifra shares some terminology with Ishmaelian midrash, it does not seem to follow the same, or indeed any, rules about how those terms should be employed.
Yadin-Israel takes the reader carefully through his texts, providing both English translations and sources in the original Hebrew in the appendix. His careful critical analysis of the Sifra's rhetoric is motivated by a desire to take the Sifra seriously and on its own terms. Having thoroughly and engagingly convinced the reader of the Sifra's hermeneutic inconsistencies, Yadin-Israel then introduces the argument that lies at the core of his book: the Sifra is in fact employing a "hermeneutic of camouflage," in which "oral-traditional legal rulings...