The modern midrashic hermeneutical reformation

As yet unbeknownst to most Bible students and believers outside the academy, since roughly the 1980s we are presently living on the cusp of arguably the second greatest hermeneutical reformation since the first century AD! Ancient rabbinic and patristic literary tools (e.g. intertextuality, symbolism, chiasms, paronomasia, gematria) are being independently rediscovered among diverse interpretive communities including Orthodox Jewish, Cathlo-Orthodox, conservative Evangelical, and liberal scholarship, allowing the “midrashic layer” of Scripture to once again be seen with new eyes. Properly employed(!), this does not lead to novel or strange doctrines, but rather adds color, texture, nuance, richness, flavor, insight, and deeper heart-impacting dimensionality to the same truth readily available on the “surface (peshat) layer” of the text.

Quotes and Examples

• Midrashic Hermeneutical Resources provides examples of the diversity of streams which are converging in this already-existing-yet-largely-unknown Reformation
• Rabbi David Fohrman: "Now, I do think that we used to have it, but I think it was lost. My theory is that the Rabbis, Chazal had it. The Sages of the Talmud. They had an actual coherent approach to Biblical study, but they weren't overt about it. They kept it among themselves. It was almost like a secret society. Like this is how Bible is learned. They had ways of doing it. ... I'm happy that I was able to spend the last 20 years on, I think, is actually working on an approach that isn't really so new, but I think it's old. It's a way of uncovering techniques that I think are the oldest techniques that we have in Biblical study. That were the fundamentals of what the Rabbis of those days were using when they made that kind of exegesis."
• "Rabbi Koretzky: How has that approach been received by secular academics? Do they see it as kind of like a bit of a cop out or a sellout and like you're just trying to inject meaning ‑‑ impose meaning where ‑‑ an order where really it's just chaos? Or do people respect it and say, okay, this is a reasonable alternative?
  Rabbi Fohrman: Look, it depends what you mean by academics. I would say there is a branch of this in academia. It's a small branch in academia. The closest that you have in an academia is guys like Robert Alter.
  ... I didn't read Robert Alter and he didn't see my thing, but we kind of independently came to similar approaches. So it's there a little bit with Robert Alter. It's there within the Orthodox world, in Israel, in Michlelet Herzog. The whole Herzog College is devoted really to a similar kind of approach. Guys like Yoni Grossman, who's a professor at Bar Ilan, this is his thing."
• In academia, Julia Kristeva is credited with coining the term "intertextuality" in 1968
• Regarding the book of Revelation in particular Beale observes, "Until the early 1980s the use of the OT in the Apocalypse of John received less attention than the use of the OT elsewhere in the NT—merely two books and six significant articles. Important discussion of the subject could be found in commentaries and other books... . Since the early 1980s, however, six significant books have been written on the topic... . Since the same period, a number of articles on the same subject have appeared," and Allen traces some of that history from 1900--2014.
• David Curwin traces the "the Orthodox modern literary approach revolution", using Robert Alter's 1981 "The Art of Biblical Narrative" as watershed turning point for establishing, or at least beginning the popularization of, the movement.
• Works on Biblical "echoes" (e.g. those of Richard Hays and others) have increasingly blossomed in the Christian world in the present generation.

Joining In

See Midrashic hermeneutical discussion communities.