[Avodah] ain mikreh v. shabbas 55b; re: reuven, dovid, etc,

[harveybenton at yahoo.com]

chumash: "And it came top pass, when Israel dwelt in that land,
  that Reuven went and lay with Bilhah, his father’s concubine, and Israel
  heard."

Rav Alex Israel/Yeshivat Har Etzion:
http://www.vbm-torah.org/archive/intparsha67/08-67vayishlach.htm
 
Rashi cites the midrash brought on Shabbat 55b:
 
Because he switched around his [father's] bed, the Torah treats him as if he slept with her.  
Now, why did he switch and desecrate his bed?  When Rachel died, Yaakov took his bed, 
which was placed most frequently in Rachel's tent rather than the other tents, and Yaakov put his bed in Bilha's tent.  Reuven came to protest his mother's insult.  He said: "If my mother's sister was a rival-wife to my
 mother, should the maidservant of my mother's sister now become a
 rival-wife to my
 mother?"  Therefore, he
 made the switch......[snip]
 
Perhaps to emphasize our question, the "headline" for this midrash as it appears on Shabbat 55b is: "If you think that Reuven sinned, you are mistaken."  How are we to 
understand this rabbinic statement?  Clearly Reuven sinned—it is explicitly written in the Torah text!  How can Chazal utterly disregard the peshat?

hb 1; r. alex does not bring down the gm accurately in my opinion; the gemmara does not say reuven (or dovid, etc,) did not sin; only that "anyone who says so... is mistaken";  The loshon of the gemmara seems to be very round-about and does not explicitly say the people mentioned did not sin.....
2: we have a klal in torah that "ayn mikreh yotzei midei peshuto"; are we supposed to abandon this principle in favor of the gemmara's interpretation of
 events that appears to go against peshutei d'mikreh in chumash, novi, etc??? HB 
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