Yedida Eisenstat: ¿At Odds With the Law: Halakhic Precedent & Multiple Interpretation in Rashi's Torah Commentary

For the last two hundred years, scholars of medieval Jewish biblical interpretation have tried to cast Rashi as a practitioner of
peshat
exegesis: a more rationalist and
context-sensitive hermeneutic, as opposed to the more fanciful primarily midrashic modes of interpretation of the first millennium rabbis.
My exploration of Rashi's commentary reveals the work to be better understood as a late midrashic anthology in the form of a lemmatized commentary and a product of the increasingly
textual culture of the twelfth century renaissance in northern Europe, not long after the shift towards the inscribed transmission of the Oral Torah in Ashkenaz.
In this paper, focusing on Rashi's
commentary on biblical verses that contain legal material, I correct a second equally mistaken assumption:
that Rashi intended
his comments to represent halakha pesuqa,
the settled rabbinic legal ruling-an
assumption that actually conflicts with the claim that he strove for the
peshat. I examine instances in which Rashi presented more than one interpretation of a "legal verse," and
show that he employed an anthological method of collection and presentation essentially similar to that which he employed to explicate aggadic sections. This
conclusion has larger implications for the changing role of halakhic "texts" in northern France in the late eleventh century. This analysis shows that Rashi never conceived of
his Torah commentary as a halakhic text.