Midrash is the act and process of interpretation of the Bible, but there is no one midrash. To fully understand this concept we must look at the purpose of midrashic methodology and how it works. In doing this we will be looking at Midrash Rabbah for the Book of Genesis or Bereshit. Midrash Rabbah contains two interpretations of the account of creation, which will allow us to better analyze midrashic methodology. Unlike the Talmud or Zohar, midrash does not refer to a single text but a type of text. In Back to the Sources, Barry Holtz defines midrash as, first, “(deriving from the Hebrew root ‘to search out’) is the process of interpreting. The object of interpretation is the Bible or, on occasion, other sacred texts; second, Midrash refers to the corpus of work that has collected these interpretations.” (Holtz, p.178) Midrash interprets in both halachic and aggadic aspects. As we learned in the Efron text, The Jews, halacha refers to text discussing civil and religious law. Although really all law was seen as religious, there wasn’t a specific separation between what we look at today as civil and religious respectively. Aggadah on the other hand is a nonlegal text of rabbinical Judaism that is more theological or ethics based. What does this mean for midrash? A midrash will look at biblical text and interpret its meaning in both legal and nonlegal ways. Midrash is able to account for the gaps in biblical text by giving an interpretation of what may have been meant, which is why there are also different interpretations of the same piece of text. A great example of this is pointed out in Back to the Sources, which states on p. 181 that the Bible states that Jews must observe the Sabbath, but only gives a few details as to what observing the Sabbath entails. This gave room for rabbinic interpretation, or midrash, to be written explaining what they interpret