Q&A: Rules of Interpretation
Rules of Interpretation
Question
Hello Dr. Michi,
Which rules of interpretation were given to us at Sinai?
Were they Rabbi Ishmael’s 13, or Hillel’s 7, perhaps Rabbi Eliezer son of Rabbi Yose the Galilean’s 32? (At least the halakhic ones among them.) And what about the dozens of others that appear in the Talmud?
Why is there disagreement about the rules themselves among the tannaim, such as specific-and-general versus inclusion-and-exclusion?
I once saw that you wrote that the rules were given as a language and later underwent conceptualization, but I didn’t understand what that means. How did Moses learn these rules at Sinai (and which ones)? How is it that something so basic and essential, at the very core of Orthodox halakhic belief, is actually so detached, vague, and unclear?
Thank you
Answer
Indeed, I explained in detail in the second book on Talmudic Logic that the rules were given as a natural language (the language of midrashic interpretation), with the Holy One, blessed be He, teaching Moses at Sinai how to read the verses on both the plain-sense level and the interpretive level. But He did not give him a list of rules; rather, He simply read the verses with him through the “glasses” of midrashic interpretation, like someone who speaks a language without knowing its formal rules (a native speaker). After some time, people began to forget that language, and they developed systems of rules that reconstruct its usage, like a system of grammatical rules. That is why, over the generations, there are more and more rules, because they are a progressively more detailed development and conceptualization of the language of interpretation.
For more detail, see my book there. I showed this at great length regarding the rules of general and specific.