Torah in the Mouth.pdf

Torah in the Mouth, Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200 BCE - 400 CE
Jaffee, Martin S., Samuel and Althea Stroum Professor of Jewish Studies, University of Washington
Print publication date: 2001, Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003
Print ISBN-13: 978-0-19-514067-5, doi:10.1093/0195140672.001.0001
the necessary material foundation for literary preservation. What was true for the process of communicating and sharing literary texts held
true as well for the activities of their composition.
Precisely because texts were composed under the assumption that they would be read in the setting of oral performance, their
compositional styles drew deeply upon habits of speech and rhetorical traditions that had their living matrix in oral communication. 18 Yet it
is virtually impossible now for a modern reader—even one lucky enough to be holding the physical remnant of a Second Temple scribal
manuscript from the Judean desert—to penetrate the written surface of such texts to recover the actual oral discourses behind them.
Even a text composed orally for the purpose of written preservation stands at an esthetic distance from the actual speech of oral
communication, for literary diction in any form is not simply “talking,” even though it might seek to place speeches in the mouths of literary
characters. 19 Nevertheless, as literary ethnographers have impressively shown, it is quite possible to retrieve the oral-literary registers
—reflected in stylized diction, speech patterns, and rhetorical conventions—that nourished the writings that emerge from cultures of the
manuscript. 20
The oral/aural setting of Second Temple literary culture contributed to one other aspect of the book that needs to be considered here: a
given book normally circulated in a variety of textual forms, some longer and some shorter, one copy distinct in a variety of ways from any
other. 21 The line between the authorial creator of a book, its scribal copyists, and its interpretive audience was a rather blurry one and was
often crossed in ways no longer retrievable by literary criticism of the surviving texts. To the degree that a book was its oral declamation
and aural appropriation (rather than its mere material copy), the manuscript substrate of the book often bore the influence of the
performative contexts in which it was shared. 22
Scribal additions to manuscripts were not always set aside in marginalia to distinguish them from the “original.” The marginal notations
recording orthographic and other textual peculiarities of a canonically fixed document would not appear in Jewish Bibles for nearly a
millennium. Rather, as is true of many types of orally transmitted literature, the “original” text did not mean the “first” version that came
from the mouth or the pen of the author. In functional terms, the “original” text meant the version whose words reached the audience at a
given performative reading. 23 Accordingly, additions to the manuscript text were incorporated through copying into the next version of the
text in an incremental process of textual transformation. The desire to reproduce faithful copies surely explains the remarkable stability of
the most prestigious texts, such as the Torah of Moses. Yet the substantial evidence of textual
end p.18
variation suggests the presence of a tacit scribal assumption that a faithful copy might well include interpretive material that clarified the
author's thought in addition to the author's actual words. The scribe's judgment about what the author had meant, in other words, was
legitimately included in the record of what, according to the manuscript tradition, he had said.
Under these conditions, the “correct” text of a book was linked to the social boundaries of the community that preserved it. That
community would harbor and reproduce its particular manuscript traditions. 24 These would overlap in many ways with the traditions of
other communities who happened to have preserved the same book, but there would also be important local differences. These might
extend from differences in the spelling of particular words to variations in the sequence of particular passages and, in some cases, major
disparities of content. 25 Such variations were common in the texts of precisely those works that moderns—accepting as a fact of nature
the textual fixity of the printed Bible—would expect to be preserved most carefully in textually uniform copies. Only at the very end of the
Second Temple period—and more specifically in the decades leading up to the bar Kosiva rebellion of 132–135—does there seem to have
been some desire to overcome the textual pluriformity of books regarded by most ancient Jews as part of the “sacred writings” delivered to
Moses, David, and other ancient prophets of Israel.
Students of those Dead Sea Scrolls that preserve literary works now incorporated into the Jewish scriptural canon have discerned, among
a wide range of text types, a family of texts that conforms in many ways to the canonical versions (the so-called “Masoretic Text”)
transmitted in later Rabbinic Judaism. 26 It is not clear which scribal community sponsored such text types or whether such incipient
textual uniformity reflects a consensus among a number of socially distinct communities. But the very appearance of a uniform textual
tradition for key literary classics testifies to a transforming moment in the history of Second Temple Judaism. 27
The canonizing activities that extended not only to defining lists of approved books but to the authorization of specific textual traditions
signal a profound change in the perception of the book among literate Palestinian Jews. The ideological consequences of this change, as
will be seen at length in part II of this study, would not be fully developed until the flowering of the rabbinic movement in the third century
CE. But already at the end of the first century, the relatively open border between written texts and their orally governed cultural life,
between what the words of the text said and what they might mean, had begun to close. In the literary culture under formation in the wake
of the destruction of the Second Temple, the book—especially the portions ascribed to Moses or his prophetic heirs—was equated
increasingly with its written version rather than with the event of its interpretive performance. As the fixed, uniform text of Scripture
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