The (Im)Possibility of Separating Rabbinic Texts into Literary Genres: The Multiplicity of Genres in Pesiqta Rabbati

Pesiqta Rabbati contains multiple genres (text-types) in its homilies, e.g., comparisons, stories, and halakhic questions. These genres are structurally integrated into homilies and cannot separated from the text. The question of the mode of the existence, character, and validity of genres is one of the oldest in literary theory. My topic requires determining the relationship between problems of genre theory in literary studies and those of rabbinical literary descriptions. Both require a classification and grouping of literary texts according to their main characteristics, assuming that Pesiqta Rabbati is primarily a literary text. The collection and definition of constants is the main concern of a genre-specific analysis of rabbinical literature. There is almost no research, which presents aggadic texts from a purely theoretical point of view.

Historically, there has been an awareness of genres oin rabbinic literature and textual dissection was frequently applied to classical rabbinic literature, e.g., by En Yaakov. Recently, there has been a renewed interest in distinct genres, e.g., extracting narratives and other categories of genres, such as “parables.” This raises the following problems: There are two ways of approaching aggadic midrash, namely, viewing the text as an intricately interconnected unity or as a patchwork of frequently disparate documents. Which way should we utilize?I will argue that a single midrashic text-unit is to be analyzed in its larger co-text in conjunction with additional subunits of genres. A Genizah fragment (Cambridge T-S NS 329.609v) has been defined as Pesiqta Rabbati, however, this fragment is self-contained and too cohesive to be part of a larger text. Based on genre theory this part of the Genizah fragment could have been circulated as a story of its own.

I would like to draw the following conclusion with regard to rabbinic texts which serve as examples of genre based theories: The dispute about the relationship between the general and the particular is perhaps based on a pseudo-problem, even in its modern variant, but it is useful in dividing the texts into compositional units.