Book launch on Zoom - 2/9/21 - Recording

This book gathers all the derashot for the Book of Jonah from the Talmud and midrashic literature (150 sermons). The derashot are arranged according to the biblical sequence of verses in each chapter. Each chapter of Jonah corresponds to a chapter in this book.

Every derasha is interpreted both on its own and in relation to the biblical text, in order to clarify which difficulties the darshan found in the verse and what solutions he suggested in the derasha. The difficulties and solutions were sorted into different types and each derasha is described as to the difficulty and solution it deals with. Each chapter ends with a short summary according to the plain meaning of the biblical text and in contrast, a summary of the derashot for that chapter and the main trends in them, in order to show the difference between the plain and midrashic versions of the verses. We also added references to authors from antiquity and the Middle Ages who did not write in the Hebrew language, but whose words reflect sages' derashot on the Book of Jonah: Hieronymus (fourth century, Latin), al-Tabari (ninth century, Arabic), Yefet Ben Eli (tenth century, Arabic-Jewish).

Through the extensive material concentrated in the book, it is also possible to deal with a fundamental issue: the extent to which the sages' derashot are interpretations of the Bible, a response to difficulties in the biblical text, and the extent to which the derashot are nothing but a literary means of presenting the sages' ideas. The book concludes with various indexes: biblical verses in derashot, verses that came in comments, sages' sources, the difficulties and interpretive solutions to their types and the association of each derasha (according to its book number) with the types of difficulties and the types of solutions.

The authors of the book are members of the Department of Biblical Studies at Bar-Ilan University and serve as senior researchers at the Institute for Jewish Biblical Interpretation alongside it.