The previous chapter illustrated Rashi’s abilities as a pashtan, manifested by the innovative philological-contextual readings of the biblical text he offers as alternatives to the midrashic readings otherwise current in his Ashkenazic milieu. Indeed, thanks to the continued efforts of Rashi’s students and their students throughout the twelfth century the Ashkenazic interpretive landscape had been forever altered – with new peshat interpretations competing with the older midrashic interpretive tradition. As Rashbam records, the latter were the province of the “early generations,” who, “because of their piety, tended to delve into the derashot,” which “inform us the haggadot (traditions, lore), halakhot (laws), and dinim (regulations) through the hints of (remizat) the peshat by way of redundant language, and through the thirty-two hermeneutical rules (middot) of R. Eliezer … and the thirteen hermeneutical rules (middot) of R. Ishmael.” To use Beryl Smalley’s characterization, midrashic interpretation features “pious meditations or religious teaching for which the text is used merely as a convenient starting-point.” By contrast, Rashi opened the gates of peshat interpretation with his systematic philological interpretations that respect the sequence of the biblical text. And yet, most of Rashi’s commentaries are actually drawn from midrashic sources, without being labeled as derash or being accompanied by an alternative peshat interpretation. In order to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of Rashi’s exegetical program, we shall now address the various ways in which the great northern French pioneer of peshat advances what appears to be a midrashic agenda.