Cees talked about the phenomenon which he termed “encyclopedic notes”, that can be found in Medievl English manuscripts. These are notes which are written at the edge of the page.
Cees characterized these notes by six things which I don’t remember; but I do remember that they have nothing to do with the content of the text, that they are encyclopedic in nature (give condensed information) formed many times in lists with numeric elements (the temple of Jerusalem was so and so long, so and so wide, took so and so long to build, or: a man has 219 bones, 365 veins and 32 teeth [sounds familiar?], etc). He also said that many of these notes are found more than once in the corpus (he collected some 200 such notes); some are found earlier in Latin, and later in Old English. These manuscripts are from the tenth to the twelfth century.
Cees thinks that these notes let us glimpse into the education system of the society where they originate. According to him, the content (and formulation) of these notes are what was leaned in schools (monastic), and that they were memorized.I think Cees published his findings in this article: ‘Anglo-Saxon Encyclopaedic Notes: Tradition and Function’, Foundations of Learning: The Transfer of Encyclopaedic Knowledge in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Rolf H. Bremmer Jr and Kees Dekker (Louvain: Peeters, 2007), 279–315. (I am not sure because I didn’t check the article, only heard him lecture about it, but the title seems to point to this same research).
I find Cees study very important. Here there is a proof that there is life outside the text, and not simply ‘life’, but intellectual memorized knowledge, which, except for these accidental cases of reader-boredom or whatever the reason was for people to write these notes, is completely absent from our eyes, and is usually not acknowledged.
Although this is a fact that everyone would agree with if asked, and it is a fact that historians constantly study in their own way (i.e. not doing all the philological research needed...), it is not a fact that is acknowledged in many of the studies which I read.
This knowledge, that information was available in antiquity orally, and in a formulaic manner, has a direct bearing on the study of midrash. Midrashic knowledge seems also, like the encyclopedic notes, be a corpus of knowledge comprised of small textual unites which are learned by heart. These textual units are attached to biblical verses, i.e. to each verse a textual unit is attached, which explains or interprets the verse.
I’ll give an example with which I am busy at the moment (I will lecture about it in the SBL in London in the beginning of July).
When The Holy One Blessed be He stood and said “I am the Lord your God” (Deut. 5:6) the mountains were shaken and the hills falling apart. And the Tabor came from Beit-Elim, and the Carmel from Aspamia, as it is said “As I live, said the King, whose name is the Lord of hosts, surely like Tabor among the mountains, and like Carmel by the sea, so shall he come” (Jer. 46:18), the one saying 'I was called' and the other was saying 'I was called'. When they heard from His mouth “who brought you out of Egypt” each of them stayed in its place saying – He only talked about those whom He brought out of Egypt.
(The underlined section is that one that will be reused in the later midrash; I will refer to it as the orally transmitted midrashic unit)
The point of this passage is that the mountains make the mistake of thinking that the event which God declares here is of a small-scale, because it is only intended to those coming out of Egypt, and therefore worthless, and they stop competing on the job.
A similar narrative is found in Genesis Rabba:
“Why are you shaken, mountains with bumps” (Ps. 68:17)...
Rabbi Yose explained that this verse is about the mountains:
When the Holy One Blessed be He prepared to give the Torah in Sinai, the mountains started running and debating with each other, the one saying: the Torah is given on me, the other saying: the Torah is given on me
The Tabor came from Beit-Elim, and the Carmel from Aspamia, as it is said “As I live, said the King, whose name is the Lord of hosts, surely like Tabor among the mountains, and like Carmel by the sea, so shall he come” (Jer. 46:18), the one saying 'I was called' and the other was saying 'I was called'.
The Holy One blessed be he said: Why are you shaken, mountains of peaks”, all of you are mountains, but all of you have bumps; what does this mean? Like in the verse (Lev. 21:20) “one with a bump or one who is too thin”
on all of you idolatry is committed.
But the mountain of Sinai, on which there is no idolatry {is} “the mountain which God wanted for His dwelling”
The orally transmitted midrashic unit, which we saw in the Mekhilta, is found in Genesis Rabba also. But other than this passage, the two composition tell a different story, even though there are common lines in the stories.
The differences are first of all that the narratives are different - one is not a copy of the other. Secondly, both start their story (which in the midrash is almost always an explanation of a verse) from a different verse (Mekhilta with Deut. 5:6, GenR with Ps. 68:17); thirdly, the messages of the two stories are different: in the Mekhilta, the mountains misunderstand the importance of the giving of the Torah, and in Genesis Rabba it is the vanity of the mountains, each wanting the important event of giving the Torah to happen on it. So, the mountains in the Mekhilta are ignorants, and in Genesis Rabba - vain. Now, it is not that the mountains were not vain in the Mekhilta as well, but this was not the point of the story. It is also true that in some things the stories are similar, this is logical, because both have the Bible as their cultural canon; but as a rule, these are two different stories.
But what is interesting for our purpose, is that both are using the same textual unit which I call the orally transmitted midrashic unit. This tell me that this the orally transmitted midrashic unit was part of the cultural canon of the two societies which created the two stories. Perhaps this unit was written at some point on a paper or parchment, just as the encyclopedic notes were written sometimes on the edges of the Old English manuscripts.
