Book Review: Masters of the Word, Vol. I

Masters of the Word: Traditional Jewish Bible Commentary from the First through Tenth Centuries, Vol. I, Yonatan Kolatch; Jersey City, NJ: KTAV, 2006. Reviewed by Dan Vogel.

Vogel welcomes the first installment of Kolatch’s series as a work that gives the early commentators biography and historical setting rather than hagiography. Much of the volume is a substantial primer on parshanut that distinguishes pshat, drash, midrash aggada, and midrash halakhah, and that shows how ambiguity and deliberate irregularity in the text invite interpretation. Chapters then treat Hazal, the Targumim, the Zohar, the Geonim, the Spanish grammarians, and the Ba’alei Masorah. Vogel concedes that some stretches drag, but singles out the treatment of Saadia Gaon and his Karaite disputes as the volume’s most instructive demonstration of how surrounding intellectual currents shape even a literalist reader.