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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 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2003 - 2011. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/privacy_policy.html). Subscriber: Columbia University; date: 20 September 2011
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 became a cultural icon, scribes were increasingly hesitant to fold the results of the oral-performative interpretations of the text into its manuscript tradition. Accordingly the interpreted meaning of the literary text, the substance of its oral life, was perceived as something extraneous to it. No longer the omnipresent—hence invisible—environment in which written literature took shape and was transmitted, the oral tradition that mediated the meaning of the book was becoming an object with a reality of its own, seen as something distinct from the book. end p.19 In this sense, the oral-performative literary life of Second Temple scribal culture is the foundation of what would later emerge in ideological garb among the rabbinic Sages as Torah in the Mouth, an oral tradition represented as a primordial and necessary complement to a canonical corpus of sacred writings fixed forever at the moment of their original delivery to the prophet from whose pen the text had come. But it must be stressed that, during the Second Temple period itself , there is little evidence for reflection upon text-interpretive or oral- performative tradition as a reality independent of the books they brought to life. It was, rather, the book itself that dominated the attention of those who produced and circulated it. For the present, then, it is best to focus more sharply upon the social setting of Second Temple Judaic literary culture in which the oral and aural dimensions of the written word were taken for granted. There too we shall find some ideological conceptions of the oral word; but they are of a rather different nature than those produced in the early centuries of the post- Temple reconstruction of Jewish literary culture under the guidance of rabbinic Sages. Scribalism and the Oral Origins of the Book We should begin with the literati themselves, the scribes to whose activity we owe so much of the literary evidence of Second Temple Judaism. The English word “scribe” normally renders a number of Semitic, Greek, and Latin terms that span a wide range of meaning. These include the Hebrew term sofer and its Aramaic equivalent, safar , Greek terms such as grammateus and grammatikos, and the Latin libellarius (liblarios in Greek and lavlar in Hebrew). Depending on context, most of these terms can refer to a range of positions or professions in which literacy is a critical requirement, such as bureaucrats associated with official institutions, accountants, notaries, teachers of literacy skills, and finally, full-fledged transmitters and composers of legal, historical, or sapiential tradition. 28 For most of the Second Temple period, the primary employer of various sorts of literary scribes was the Jerusalem Temple itself, which served as the political and economic, as well as the cultic, center of the country. Under the administration of a succession of High Priests from the time of the Persian restoration until its destruction in 70 CE, 29 the operation of the Temple in its various roles depended upon its scribal infrastructure. It is surprising, then, how little information about scribes, their training, and their duties is transmitted in the literature of the period. 30 The earliest allusion to the existence of scribal schools in Jerusalem comes from the first quarter of the second century BCE in the writings of Yeshua ben Eliezer ben Sira. Toward the end of his collection of proverbs and hymns, this prominent scribe invites prospective seekers of wisdom to “take up lodging in the house of instruction” (Sira 51:23). 31 In light of the author's praise of the piety, learning, and social prominence of the scribe (sofer/grammateus: Sira 38:24–39:11), it is likely that his “house of instruction” denotes a setting for scribal education that included not only the skills of literacy, but a program of incorporating the knowledge of texts into a rigorous personal discipline. The scribe was not merely a recorder of texts but, to a genuine degree, an embodiment of their values. It is impossible to know the degree to which Yeshua ben Eliezer's school was typical of his era or whether his high ideals for scribal education were shared beyond end p.20 his own circle, 32 yet it is no great leap of faith to assume that institutions of technical scribal training stretched back to the Persian period. Jerusalem, with the restored Temple at its core, had been the main administrative center of Jewish Palestine since the latter portion of the sixth century BCE. Convenience alone would have dictated that most scribal training occur in and around the capital. 33 Scribes who served communities beyond Jerusalem or who were connected to institutions other than the Temple would necessarily have been trained in technical skills identical to those taught in Jerusalem: the preparation of writing surfaces and inks, as well as other aspects of bookcraft. It is also likely that scribal textual training, both in Jerusalem and elsewhere, would have included mastery of key legal and historical writings (such as the Torah of Moses and the core of the later prophetic canon) that underwrote the political legitimacy of the Temple and its priesthood. Unfortunately, outside of the writings of Yeshua ben Eliezer, no such curricula survive, either for Temple- employed scribes or for those who might have served in outlying areas. 34 Yet the existence of many texts from the mid-second century BCE and onward that severely criticize the Hasmonean (non-Tzadokite) High PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2003 - 2011. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/privacy_policy.html). Subscriber: Columbia University; date: 20 September 2011
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