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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 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 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 copying and transmission of texts made ample room for the interpretive intervention of the scribe. Finally, the resulting written work was normally shared in performative settings and experienced as an aural phenomenon. But more crucially, as a matter of literary conception, the image of the professional scribe copying his text from the oral dictation of the real author established the connection of all texts to a primordial setting of oral communication. The original book was represented as having been dictated and recorded in the process of its commission to writing. Every public reading, therefore, was a rehearing, a restoration of the book to its pristine moment of oral origin, and a new occasion to recopy the dictated text, if only in the scroll of memory. “Listen, Baruch, to this word,” wrote an early second-century CE pseudepigrapher, adopting the persona of Jeremiah's scribe, “and write down in the memory of your heart all that you shall learn” (2 Bar. 50:1). 61 Summary We may now review some of the basic perspectives of the discussion of the nature of scribal culture in Second Temple Judaism and its relation to oral-performative literary tradition. This culture was rooted in the work of scribal professionals who, if they were not employed in Temple administration, would normally have received a training similar to those who were. The literature they cultivated was deeply rooted in their own institutional and social settings, and knowledge of most of it circulated primarily within those communities. Where it extended beyond scribal communities, literary culture was mediated primarily through the official Temple cultic system or unofficial, occasional public functions perhaps associated with ritualized readings of classic texts in the emerging institution of the synagogue. In this culture, the very definition of “reading” included the oral pronouncement of the text in public audition—its oral-performative tradition. This fact about the dissemination of any book also shaped the way the origins of prophetic books in particular were imagined. A stream of speech was posited at the moment of the prophetic book's first delivery into script. Imagined on the model of scribal dictation, the book was held to emerge as an author/composer delivered the text fully formed to the scribal copyist/transmitter entrusted with its effective communication to further audiences. An act of oral delivery, that is to say, was posited not only as the origin of a book, but as the guarantee of its authenticity. Nevertheless, the malleability that its oral life conferred upon the written text—in its various performative renderings, its expansions and contractions in diverse copies—went all but unnoticed. The book's authenticity was guaranteed by the image of its oral delivery to the first scribe, and this authenticity of origins enabled the text to accommodate a remarkable fluidity in end p.26 the course of its manuscript transmission and performative history. The book was the message heard, grasped as the restoration to speech of the original message. That its meaning depended upon an ongoing text-interpretive tradition of orally mediated reinscription and renewed exposition went, it seems, virtually unnoticed. As will be seen, the silence of the most articulate Second Temple scribal groups regarding the existence and nature of oral tradition—whether in association with written texts or independent of them—is virtually total. end p.27 This page intentionally left blank. 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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