legal aspects of the Mishnah and the Talmud, the Midrash, in its fuller
development, became an independent branch of Rabbinical literature. Like
the Talmud, the Midrash is of a composite nature, and under the one name
the accumulations of ages are included. Some of its contents are earlier
than the completion of the Bible, others were collected and even created
as recently as the tenth or the eleventh century of the current era.

Midrash ("Study," "Inquiry") was in the first instance an _Explanation
of the Scriptures_. This explanation is often the clear, natural
exposition of the text, and it enforces rules of conduct both ethical
and ritual. The historical and moral traditions which clustered round
the incidents and characters of the Bible soon received a more vivid
setting. The poetical sense of the Rabbis expressed itself in a vast and
beautiful array of legendary additions to the Bible, but the additions
are always devised with a moral purpose, to give point to a preacher's
homily or to inspire the imagination of the audience with nobler
fancies. Besides being expository, the Midrash is, therefore, didactic
and poetical, the moral being conveyed in the guise of a _narrative_,
amplifying and developing the contents of Scripture. The Midrash gives
the results of that deep searching of the Scriptures which became second
nature with the Jews, and it also represents the changes and expansions
of ethical and theological ideals as applied to a changing and growing
life.

From another point of view, also, the Midrash is a poetical literature.
Its function as a species of _popular homiletics_ made it necessary to
appeal to the emotions. In its warm and living application of abstract
truths to daily ends, in its responsive and hopeful intensification of
the nearness of God to Israel, in its idealization of the past and
future of the Jews, it employed the poet's art in essence, though not in