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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 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 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 end p.22 imagining the gradual emergence of this canon and explaining its ideological coherence, but crucial to virtually all of them is the role of scribal composers and transmitters of individual books and gradually expanding subcanonical collections of books emanating directly or indirectly from the Temple. 48 Precious little is known, on the other hand, about the social settings of much of the Second Temple literature that ultimately dropped from the canonical traditions of later rabbinic Judaism. Nevertheless, much of this literature, especially texts exploiting the apocalyptic genre, is preoccupied with issues surrounding the Temple and its priestly guardians. It is likewise dotted with suggestive scribal images. The Testament of Levi, an apocalyptic work of the second century BCE, is ascribed to the progenitor of the priestly lineage. This work draws an explicit link between priestly status and the cultivation of scribal skills: “Teach your children letters . . . so that they might have understanding throughout all their lives as they ceaselessly read the Law of God” (13:2–3). 49 A roughly contemporary text, the Book of Jubilees, confirms the connections of Levi's descendants to the world of the scribe, describing how a dying Jacob “gave all his books and his father's books to Levi, his son, so that he might preserve them and renew them for his sons until this day” (45:15). 50 Apparent here, as in the canonical corpus defined by later Judaism, is a discernible connection between the texts transmitted within literary tradition and the social setting of priestly scribalism. It appears that attempts to define the social identity of scribes from the content of their texts ultimately yields a few generalities, but little more. There is, however, a nearly universal rhetorical trait of all these texts, crossing virtually all genres, that does illuminate the nature of scribal literary culture wherever it appeared: scribes rarely took credit for the creation of their literary works. Instead, they generally observed scrupulous authorial anonymity, couching their compositions in the form of pseudepigraphic ascription to famous figures from the past. 51 Especially in writings designed to engage polemically matters of public concern, scribal compositions were cast as depositories of texts dictated long ago to a primordial scribal ancestor 52 and transmitted and amplified through the ages as communal possessions held in a kind of literary trust for the present generation. 53 As will shortly be seen, this characteristic rhetoric of anonymity, and its literary correlate of pseudepigrapy, are crucial clues for interpreting the way scribal communities grasped the relationship between written books and oral communication. Virtually any heroic figure from the past could serve as a scribal ancestor/author. Enoch, the obscure antedeluvian father of Methuselah (Gen. 5:21–24), was known by the third century BCE to have been a “scribe of righteousness” (1 Enoch 12:4) who ascended to Heaven to become the transcriber of angelic petitions (1 Enoch 13:4–7). Characteristically, upon his death he transmitted to Methuselah his scribal heritage: “And now, my son Methuselah, I recount to you and write down for you: I have revealed everything to you and have given you books about all these things. Keep . . . the books from the hand of your father, that you may pass (them) on to the generations of eternity” (1 Enoch 82:1; cf. Jubilees 7:38–39). 54 Presumably, the readers of the substantial and chronologically diverse Enochic literature believed their own copies to preserve, with the amplifications of ensuing tradition, the original dictation from heavenly angel, to Enoch, to Methuselah. 55 end p.23 Moses, of course, was said to have written down what he heard from the God of Israel at Sinai and at other moments in order to produce the Torah of Moses (Ex. 24:4, Num. 33:2, Dt. 31:9, 22). The second-century BCE composers and transmitters of the book of Jubilees merely supplemented the record by preserving what had also been dictated to Moses by a heavenly messenger in the same Sinaitic setting: “And the angel of the presence spoke to Moses by the word of the Lord saying, ‘Write the whole account of creation, that in six days the Lord God completed all his work and all that he created’ ” (2:1). 56 Moses recorded as asked; his scribal descendants transmitted what he had committed to their care, as they transcribed his book from the dictation of a reader or directly from a manuscript exemplar. The image of scribal transmission of the book from original dictation is ubiquitous. Testaments conveyed on the deathbeds of the sons of Jacob were portrayed as having been transmitted orally to them and preserved in scribal copies. 57 Another founding hero, Ezra, symbolized the perfect blending of priestly lineage and scribal craft (Ezra 7:1–6; cf. Neh.8:1–8). He too was a transmitter of written words first heard audibly. A late first-century CE apocalypse in his name, identified in apocryphal canons as 4 Ezra, offers remarkably vivid descriptions of his scribal activities in receiving illuminations and auditions from the transmundane world, transcribing them in books, and passing them on to instruct future decoders of their visions. It may be helpful to pause to consider them for a moment. The historical setting constructed by the narrator is the devastation following the destruction of the Solomonic Temple and the burning of the Torah. At this moment of crisis, Ezra petitions God to convey upon him the spirit of prophecy so that the scribe might “write everything that has happened in the world from the beginning, the things which were written in your Law, that men may be able to find the path, and that those who wish to live in the last days may live” (4 Ezra 14:22). 58 Then God replies: 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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