By
subjecting the thought of the Holy Scriptures to a simple and
entirely rational examination, he not seldom succeeds in
determining it. Thus, as it were by divination, he lighted upon
the meaning of numerous Biblical passages. A long list might be
made of explanations misunderstood by his successors, and
revived, consciously or unconsciously, by modern exegetes. An
illustration in point is his explanation of the first verse of
Genesis, quoted above. Long before such Biblical criticism had
become current it was he who said that the "servant of God"
mentioned in certain chapters of the second part of Isaiah
represents the people of Israel.
Needless to say Rashi never tampers with the text. At most, as
is the case with Ibn Djanah, he says that a letter is missing or
is superfluous. Sometimes, too, he changes the order of the
words. Neither copyists' mistakes nor grammatical anomalies
existed for him. Yet he believed in all sincerity that the
ancient sages could have corrected certain Biblical texts to
remove from them a meaning startling or derogatory when applied
to the Divinity.
Rashi wholly ignored what modern criticism calls the Introduction
to the Scriptures, that is to say, the study of the Bible and the
books of which it is composed from the point of view of their
origin, their value, and the changes they have undergone. But
rarely, here and there in his commentaries, does one find any
references to the formation of the canon.
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