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
Priestly establishment—especially the dissident “Tzadokite” writings found in some of the Qumran scrolls—force the conclusion that, at
least from that period, literary scribes worked in a variety of settings beyond the Temple administrative system and its elite culture. 35
Employing genres such as law, 36 visionary writings, 37 history, 38 and hymnody 39 that shaped the work of Temple literary scribes, dissident
scribes cultivated a kind of “revisionist tradition” which called into question the legitimacy of the established Hasmonean legal and political
order.
Such political or theological objections to the Hasmonean Temple state do not entitle us to assume that the dissidents were themselves
anti-priestly in outlook or nonpriestly in familial origins. The genealogical connections of Jerusalem's Temple scribes to priestly families
cannot be assumed. But even if a scribal career was not limited to men of priestly lineage, it was likely an important avenue of
employment for priests not directly connected to the lineage of the High Priestly families. 40 An earlier tendency of historians to posit the
existence of a large number of “lay scribes” serving the needs and political-religious interests of a nonpriestly urban middle class, and
establishing themselves in competition with official priestly teaching authority, has for some time come under criticism. 41 The existence
of lay scribes serving at the levels of the notary, as accountants, or as private tutors to the children of wealth is by no means out of the
question, but a significant nonpriestly literary community beyond the reach of Temple authorities, and functioning as an independent
center of literary or intellectual tradition among a growing class of urbanized intellectuals, is difficult to account for in economic terms.
The community that appears to have occupied the Qumran site more or less continuously from the early Hasmonean period until shortly
after the rebellion against Rome of 66 CE was decidedly not an example of such a class. This was not, first of all, a “lay” community.
Whatever its actual demographic composition, it was—as the next chapter will show—ideologically committed to priestly norms and
literary traditions. Moreover, through the pooling of resources as a requisite of membership, it was able to support its scribal members
through its own internal economy. Beyond
end p.21
such voluntary associations of highly committed individuals, it would have been possible to sustain the livelihood of a large professional
lay-scribal class only in major urban centers with a market for books. But such a market is hard to assume in Second Temple Judea
outside of Jerusalem itself or, perhaps, of Sepphoris in the Galilee. 42
A market for books requires two conditions: the wealth to purchase them and the need to own them. The wealth may have been available
in the small pockets of Palestinian Jewish urbanization, but we have already seen that the need for private copies of books is the product
of a type of literate environment that would not emerge in Palestine for some time. It is precarious, therefore, to link the economic viability
of lay-scribalism to the book trade.
A possible alternative, some have suggested, is that lay-scribes may have been supported as teachers in schools. On this model, a
socially and intellectually prominent class of lay-scribes might have been employed in schools that competed with Temple or priestly
authorities over the interpretation of common traditional texts. The problem is that there is little reliable evidence for the existence of a
widespread system of education in the Second Temple period, even among the prosperous urban merchants or landed gentry.
References to synagogues as places dedicated to study of Torah imply no more than popular public reading and preaching/teaching
associated with Sabbath and festival celebrations, not the sustained tutoring required for public instruction in literary tradition. 43 And
literary mentions of a widespread Second Temple school system that might have employed scribal teachers on a significant scale are, as
Goodblatt has observed, almost entirely confined to the rabbinic literature of a much later period. 44 It appears, then, that education in
literacy of any sort outside of professional scribal training remained socially confined to the private household, where it was managed by
older family members or hired tutors.
We are left with the impression that the extension of a genuine literary culture was socially confined to the Temple scribal administration, a
small nonscribal urban elite, and dissident, scribally trained groups who stood in political opposition to the Hasmonean state. 45 In other
words, scribal literary culture was largely a phenomenon associated with priests or those trained in priestly milieus, whose economic
existence was sustained by ideologically committed sociopolitical communities. It was not a “popular” culture. The bulk of the surviving
writings of the period corroborates this conclusion, both those texts now included in the canon of the Hebrew Scriptures and those that
eventually ceased to be copied and circulated in rabbinic communities.
As Morton Smith pointed out some time ago, the texts now incorporated into the scriptural canon of Judaism constitute the record of a
Second Temple cultic community centered in Jerusalem. 46 With some notable exceptions, 47 virtually the entire canon of Hebrew
Scriptures offers perspectives on the origins of the Temple cult and its officiants, the nature of cultic conduct, or events leading to the
cult's catastrophic termination and the consequences thereof for the ongoing life of Israel. However varied the constituent traditions of the
Hebrew canon might be, they are knit together in a very tight priestly weave. There are many different scenarios for
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