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Bernard H. Mehlman and Seth Limmer . Medieval Midrash: The House for Inspired Innovation . The Brill Reference Library of Judaism 52. Leiden : Brill , 2016. viii + 189 pp.
Book Reviews: Medieval and Early Modern Eras
Rabbis Bernard Mehlman and Seth Limmer have undertaken a labor of love of midrash that comes when two rabbis who began as teacher and student become a hevruta to study Torah for its own sake. The work's major contribution is an annotated translation of six medieval midrashim about King Solomon. Each of these midrashim was written after the close of the Talmud and each touches on a different legendary aspect of the biblical king's mythically imagined "life."
All six of these minor midrashim were published in Adolph Jellinek's Bet ha-Midrasch (six volumes, 1853-78; republished by Wahrmann, 1967). Jellinek's German subtitle, Sammlung kleiner Midraschim und vermischter Abhandlungen, captures their extracanonical, widely varied, and brief status. These small works were later alphabetically anthologized (mostly s.v. Shlomo ha-melekh) in J. D. Eisenstein's 'Ozar midrashim / Bibliotheca Midraschica (published 1915; republished in Israel, 1969). Indeed, the common denominator of Solomon suggests that the current volume would have better been called something like: Legends of King Solomon: Six Medieval Midrashim.
The first of the midrashim in this volume is "Midrash al-Yithallel - Do Not Boast" (a republication of Mehlman's article by the same name in the CCAR Journal, Spring 2004: 88-101). This midrash begins by drawing on Leviticus Rabbah 19:2 wherein the Hebrew letter yod complains about Solomon's transgressions of the laws of Deuteronomy 17. It turns from there...