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
2 Performative Reading and Text Interpretation at Qumran
Martin S. Jaffee
The Visibility of Unwritten Tradition
In chapter 1, we stumbled upon an important observation. A technological fact of manuscript culture—that books were commonly
composed and transcribed by dictation to a scribe—had become for at least some Second Temple scribal communities a trope in which
nothing less than the communication of humans with the divine order could be figured. By constructing narratives in which primordial
scribal ancestors heard and transcribed the words of God or his angels, Judean scribes of the second century BCE and later expressed
their own convictions of having received words original to the transmundane world from which prophecy ultimately had come.
Consider for a moment the notion that the prophetic book in particular originated in a moment of transmundane audition analogous to the
scribal recording of a human author's literary dictation. This scribal assimilation of the oral moment of mundane literary origins to the
otherworldly flash of revelatory illumination cast a long shadow upon the socially structured, oral-traditional environment in which the
transmission and communication of the book were steeped. The malleability of the physical copy of the book as it passed through a series
of scribal copyists, the performative conventions that rendered the aurally received book available and intelligible to audiences beyond the
scribal professionals themselves, the fund of text-interpretive traditions that lodged in multiple memories and enabled common
understandings of the written text's meaning—all these aspects of the oral culture that shaped the literary history of the written book were
virtually invisible to such communities despite (or perhaps because of) their very pervasiveness.
The pioneering scholar of primitive Christian oral tradition, Werner Kelber, has captured this invisibility of the ubiquitous in a provocative
metaphor. He likens oral-performative literary tradition to a biosphere, an all-but-invisible environment of intertextual associations and
ready-to-hand interpretive tropes that serves as the condition for the meaning of written texts, yet which cannot be reduced to their
linguistic contents. “Tradition in this encompassing sense,” he argues,
end p.28
is a circumambient contextuality or biosphere in which speaker and hearers live. It includes texts and experiences transmitted
through or derived from texts. But it is anything but reducible to intertextuality. Tradition in this broadest sense is largely an
invisible nexus of references and identities from which people draw sustenance, in which they live, and in relation to which they
make sense of their lives. 1
The result, as we observed in chapter 1, is the widespread perception of identity between the inscribed book and the interpretive
performance tradition in which the book's public meanings are proclaimed and absorbed.
These perceptions of identity of the book with its text-interpretive tradition could be challenged, of course, only where communities
preserving the same book found themselves at interpretive odds over its meaning. At that moment, the invisible “biosphere” of textual
meaning would become markedly clear, forcing a retreat to the inscribed text “in itself” to arbitrate the conflict of interpretations. It is
precisely in this manner that some communities of Palestinian Jews, who cultivated a rich engagement with books and the oral-
performative traditions of their exposition, did indeed come to draw important distinctions between the contents of books, confined to the
written text, and what now emerged as supplementary text-interpretive traditions that escaped written preservation even as they continued
to explain what was written.
The well-attested, ideologically charged sectarianism of Second Temple Jewish social elites—so superbly documented recently by Albert
Baumgarten 2 —expressed itself largely through conflict about the proper interpretation of prestigious texts regarded as a heritage from the
ancient past. Such scribal communities clearly recognized the distinctions between written books and their interpretive traditions. They
had then to explain (or, in the case of intercommunal antagonisms, to deny) the authority of orally mediated interpretive traditions that
circulated in association with venerable writings. It is important, then, to direct attention toward some of the instances in which
communities of learning reflected upon the authority of text-interpretive tradition as a body of knowledge related to, but distinct from, the
scribally authorized book.
The sources for exploring the matter are, paradoxically, too rich and too poor. As Michael Fishbane has shown with particular throughness
and brilliance, the entire canonical corpus of Hebrew Scripture testifies to manifold ways in which texts committed to manuscript were
shaped by their passage through the prism of orally mediated interpretive tradition. 3 Scribes may not have been formally endowed by
institutional fiat with the authority to interpretively improve the texts that passed through their hands, but they certainly did so—under the
assumption, apparently, that this was their commission.
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