Editing Midrash (section)

==Contemporary views==
According to Carol Bakhos, recent studies that use literary-critical tools to concentrate on the cultural and literary aspects of midrash have led to a rediscovery of the importance of these texts for finding insights into the rabbinic culture that created them. Midrash is increasingly seen as a literary and cultural construction, responsive to literary means of analysis.<ref>''Narratology, Hermeneutics, and Midrash: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Narratives from the Late Antique Period Through to Modern Times'', ed  Constanza Cordoni, Gerhard Langer, V&R unipress GmbH, 2014, pg 71</ref>

[[Frank Kermode]] has written that midrash is an imaginative way of "updating, enhancing, augmenting, explaining, and justifying the sacred text". Because the Tanakh came to be seen as unintelligible or even offensive, midrash could be used as a means of rewriting it in a way that both makes it more acceptable to later ethical standards and conforms more to later notions of plausibility.<ref>{{cite magazine|url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1998/04/23/the-midrash-mishmash/|title=The Midrash Mishmash|first=Frank|last=Kermode|website=The New York Review of Books|access-date=23 July 2017|archive-date=20 March 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170320062832/http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1998/04/23/the-midrash-mishmash/|url-status=live}}</ref>

[[James L. Kugel]], in ''The Bible as It Was'' (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997), examines a number of early Jewish and Christian texts that comment on, expand, or re-interpret passages from the first five books of the Tanakh between the third century BCE and the second century CE.

Kugel traces how and why biblical interpreters produced new meanings by the use of exegesis on ambiguities, syntactical details, unusual or awkward vocabulary, repetitions, etc. in the text. As an example, Kugel examines the different ways in which the biblical story that God's instructions are not to be found in heaven (Deuteronomy 30:12) has been interpreted. Baruch 3:29-4:1 states that this means that divine wisdom is not available anywhere other than in the Torah. Targum Neophyti (Deuteronomy 30:12) and b. Baba Metzia 59b claim that this text means that Torah is no longer hidden away, but has been given to humans who are then responsible for following it.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.jhsonline.org/reviews/review014.htm|title=Review of J. L. Kugel, The Bible as It Was|website=www.jhsonline.org|access-date=23 July 2017|archive-date=26 December 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171226144528/http://www.jhsonline.org/reviews/review014.htm|url-status=dead}}</ref>