Aggadic Exegetical Approach to Tanach: Louis Ginzberg’s The Legends of the Jews as an Example

Abstract

The “legendary Midrash”, one of the two major branches of the Midrash, not only uses imagination to bridge the gap between biblical texts and human understanding, but also expresses and deepens the rabbinic idea of erudite norms in a popular form, and the high degree of coherence and consistency in its development is not only a crystallization of the collective wisdom of the Jewish people, but also a testament to their progressive spirit. National Romanticism at the end of the 19^th century gave rise to the study of folklore as an academic discipline, and folklore is closely related to the construction of national identity. As a representative of the third generation of Eastern European Jews (born in the 1870s and 1880s), Louis Ginzberg worked at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to preserve and perpetuate Jewish history by editing and canonizing it. His seven-volume masterpiece, The Legend of the Jews, translated the traditional Jewish literary form of“legendary Midrash” into an anthology connecting Jewish and universal culture to build and strengthen a common Jewish national faith and identity. This paper mainly includes four parts: are view of the Jewish legends, an overview of Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, and exegetical perspective of The Legends of the Jews.