Mashal

A Mashal is a short parable with a moral lesson or religious allegory, called a nimshal. "Mashal" is used also to designate other forms in rhetoric, such as the fable and apothegm. Talmudist Daniel Boyarin has recently defined משל as a process of "exemplification," seeing it as the sine qua non of Talmudic hermeneutics (Boyarin 2003: 93). He quotes Song of Songs Rabba: "until Solomon invented the משל, no one could understand Torah at all." The phenomenon has been compared to the more recent phenomenon of sampling in modern popular music, especially hip-hop (Levy 2010).