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
Prepare for yourself many writing tablets, and take with you Sarea, Dabria, Selemia, Ethanus, and Asiel—these five, because
they are trained to write rapidly, and you shall come here and I will light in your heart the lamp of understanding, which shall not be
put out until what you are about to write is finished. (14:23–25)
Ezra prepares for revelation as he would for the copying of a book, readying his materials and hiring copyists skilled in rapidly reducing to
text what their ears have received. But note too the particular role of the lamp of understanding placed in the scribal heart. This passage is
as clear a confession as can be found that, in the conception of the scribe, his own writing came from beyond him in a state of illuminated
intelligence.
The literary result of this illumination is worth a moment of attention. According to the narrator:
end p.24
[T]he Most High gave understanding to the five men, and by turns they wrote what was dictated, in characters which they did not
know. They sat forty days, and wrote during the daytime, and ate their bread at night. . . . And when the forty days were ended,
the Most High spoke to me, saying, ‘Make public the twenty-four books that you wrote first and let the worthy and the unworthy
read
them; but keep the seventy that were written last, in order to give them to the wise among your people. (14:42–47)
This passage draws unmistakably on an ancient and well-known legend regarding the scribal inspiration that produced the Septuagint, the
Greek translation of the Torah. Yet it makes a different point.
Proponents of the Septuagint, such as the Alexandrian allegorist Philo, were satisfied to praise the authoritative status of this translation
of the Torah of Moses by calling attention to the miraculous circumstance of its origins (Philo, Life of Moses 2:37): 59
Sitting [on the island of Pharos] in seclusion with none present save the elements of nature, earth, water, air, heaven, the genesis
of which was to be the first theme of their sacred revelation, for the laws begin with the story of the world's creation, they became
as it were possessed, and, under inspiration, wrote, not each several scribe something different, but the same word for word, as
though dictated to each by an invisible prompter.
Our late first-century Palestinian scribe is, by contrast, rather more ambitious. His reference to forty days and nights unmistakenly calling
upon Sinaitic imagery, he describes Ezra and his companions as a renewed vehicle of revelation, their work validating a full scriptural
canon of twenty-four books. 60 And not only this: our scribe claims to transmit a far larger corpus of inspired writings destined for only the
illuminated scribal worthies of every generation.
In passages such as these, the reality of scribal work has become the basis for authenticating the content of the scribally composed and
transmitted book. The composer of 4 Ezra shows the tight linkage of the rhetoric of literary authenticity in Second Temple literary culture
to the archetypical scribal method of copying from oral dictation. The book originated from an author's voice and extended that authorial
voice in writing through the mediation of a scribal copyist. The messenger who read out the contents of the book made present in his
voice the persona of the author. When the author was portrayed as a figure inhabiting the heavenly world, and when that author
communicated to a human medium, the resulting text could be represented as a prophetic product, a revelation. The original scribe, who
“received” the book from its transmundane author, was the prophet, and the scribes who transmitted his work continued the chain of
representing his persona as their texts were passed on and read as pregnant messages.
The humility of the scribal pseudepigrapher, who accepted no personal responsibility for the contents of works transmitted as tradition, is
the humility of the ventriloquist. A voice whose owner is hidden behind the image of a venerable literary persona can say things otherwise
best left unstated on one's own authority. Thus the actual practice of scribal dictation, familiar everywhere as a fact of life, became a
rhetorical convention verifying the authenticity of the written message. The representation of the visionary moment of illuminated dictation
announced that a particular scribal work was worthy of sustained and serious attention. It had come, after all, not from the scribe, but from
the transmundane author.
This last observation enables us to complete our understanding of the oral dimension of scribal literacy in the Second Temple period. At a
practical level, we have
end p.25
seen, the orality of scribal texts must be located in the simple logistics of book-life in a culture of the manuscript. Scribal works, trading
upon the rhythms of the world of literary speech, exploited orally grounded rhetorical conventions of composition and diction. The
handwritten book's lack of genuine closure and the absence of standard copies for all but the most widely known works, ensured that the
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