Deut. R.

Deuteronomy Rabbah (Hebrew: דברים רבה‎‎‎) is an aggadah or homiletic commentary on the Book of Deuteronomy. Unlike Genesis Rabbah, the Midrash to Deuteronomy which has been included in the collection of the Midrash Rabba in the ordinary editions does not contain running commentaries on the text of the Bible, but twenty-five complete, independent homilies, together with two fragmentary ones, on as many sections of Deuteronomy, which for the larger part are recognized as "sedarim," the Sabbatical lessons for public worship according to the Palestinian three-year cycle.

The index to the Mikraot Gedolot (Venice, 1525) gives 27 sedarim in Deuteronomy; on 19 of these there are homilies in the present Midrash, as well as a fragment, which, according to the editions, belongs to another seder (Deut. xxix. 9). It may be due to differences of time and place in the division of the cycle of sedarim that in the Debarim Rabbah there are no homilies on seven or eight of the sedarim mentioned in that index—namely, Deut. xi. 10, xiv. 1, xv. 7, xxiii. 10, xxiii. 22, xxiv. 19, xxvi. 1, and occasionally and conditionally xxix. 9—and that, besides a homily on a section mentioned in other sources as a seder (Deut. iv. 25), there are five additional homilies on the sections Deut. i. 10, iv. 7, xi. 26, xxiv. 9, and xxix. 1, which were not otherwise known as sedarim.

In some of these homilies, moreover, the halakhic exordiums (see below) close with the words מנין ממה שקרינו בענין ..., which clearly show that the Scriptural sections on which the homilies were pronounced were used for public lessons. The editor of this Midrash, however, has probably included only the homilies on the Sabbatical lessons of the cycle of sedarim: for Debarim Rabbah contains no homilies on the lessons of the Pesiḳta cycle belonging to Deuteronomy, Deut. xiv. 22 and xxv. 17 (Deut. xxxiii. 1 is a seder as well as a Pesiḳta section).

The economy of this Midrash containing sedarim homilies on Deuteronomy, as well as the character of the individual homilies, could easily have been misconstrued and forgotten after the division of the Torah into pericopes according to the one-year cycle had come into general use. In present editions Debarim Rabbah is divided only according to these latter pericopes; it was not noticed that the homilies on כי תצא and כי תבא did not correspond with the beginnings of the pericopes Deut. xxi. 10 and xxvi. 1. The sidrot Nitzavim and Vayelech formed one pericope in the oldest Midrash editions (Constantinople, 1512, and Venice, 1545); hence in these editions Debarim Rabbah contains only ten sections, corresponding with the pericopes. The further designation of these sections as "parashiyyot" and their enumeration from 1 to 11, dividing Niẓẓabim and Wayelek, are addenda of the later editions.

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