The Collections and Their Centuries

Midrash is not one book but a library assembled over roughly a thousand years. The earliest surviving collections, the halakhic midrashim, preserve tannaitic material and reached their present form in the third and fourth centuries CE. The amoraic centuries in the Land of Israel produced the first great aggadic compilations: Genesis Rabbah is generally dated to the fifth century, close in time and idiom to the Jerusalem Talmud, and Leviticus Rabbah and Pesikta de-Rav Kahana to the same Palestinian milieu. Lamentations Rabbah gathered the tradition's response to catastrophe around the destroyed Temple and the failed revolts.

Later centuries added the Tanhuma-Yelammedenu literature, Ecclesiastes Rabbah and the rest of the Rabbah cycle on the Five Scrolls, the narrative retelling Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer in the eighth century, and eventually medieval anthologies such as Yalkut Shimoni, which excerpted the whole inheritance verse by verse across the entire Bible. The collections differ in language as well as date, moving from Mishnaic Hebrew with Galilean Aramaic toward a more literary medieval Hebrew. What binds the library together is a shared conviction that Scripture is inexhaustible: that every generation may return to the same verses with new questions and find that the text, pressed once more, answers.