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Editorial
The Editors

The word « midrash » is progressively becoming familiar to Christian ears, especially since New Testament scholars have begun to realize the importance of Jewish exegetical methods for the understanding of the New Testament. (The knowledge of these methods is, of course, no less important for the understanding of the Hebrew Bible.) Christians are discovering more and more that the New Testament authors in general used the same approach to the Hebrew Bible as their contemporaries did, which is obviously to be expected. Therefore, the New Testament contains a number of midrashim and shows many parallels with other Jewish exegetical material of the time - with the understandable difference that the Christian authors use this method in function of the Jesus event.
Mentioning the word Midrash (from the root drsh, « to search, to examine ») we touch a whole world of biblical interpretation. To grasp its vital significance for Jewish and Christian life it is necessary to remember that divine revelation, according to rabbinical tradition, is transmitted in two streams: the Written Torah (Torah she bikhtav) and the Oral Torah (Torah she be-al peh). Both are equally of divine origin. One of the many forms in which the Oral Torah was expressed and later written down is the Midrash. Another form is the Targum, an oral Aramaic translation of the Hebrew text for liturgical usage, which very often becomes an elaboration of and interpretation of the text. The student of these sources is struck by the enormous riches of biblical interpretation they contain. The Church was born not in or from a Book, the Hebrew Bible, but in the Jewish tradition, and it is in studying the midrashic and targumic material that we see the full meaning and concrete expression of this fact. But the consequences for exegesis, theology and spiritual life are only beginning to be seriously explored.
Basically, the Church has accepted the same or at least a similar intimate relationship between the written and oral forms of revelation, between Scripture and Tradition, although this question has been and in a way still is a bone of sharp contention between the Catholic Church and the Churches of the Reformation. The Vatican Council II Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation states: « There exist a close connection and communication between sacred tradition and sacred Scripture. For both of them, flowing from the same divine wellspring, in a certain way merge into a unity . . . Sacred tradition and sacred Scripture form one sacred deposit of the word of God . . . » (Nos. 9-10). The study of the Oral Torah in its living link with the Written Torah can throw much new light on the way the Word of God is received and lived by God's people. It might also, as L. Bouyer has suggested, help divided Christians to overcome some of their theological differences.
This issue of SIDIC offers only a few brief but penetrating reflections on Midrash and Targum, but we hope that they give a real taste of the beauty, the depth and the importance of these expressions of rabbinic tradition.