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
Similarly, numerous students of the Second Temple literature have shown how richly the images and ideas of the canonical Scriptures
informed the diverse literary productions that laid claim to prophetic authority during the period. Here too the extensive reframings of well-
known narrative traditions and interpretive revisions of legal traditions dotting this literature are undertaken without ideological justification,
as if such revisioning were a natural, inevitable aspect of literary life. 4 The ubiquitous fact that interpretive traditions generated in social
settings of oral exchange
end p.29
served as the transformative medium of written texts does not, however, disclose the ideological systems by which the interpreters
grasped the authority of their own interpretive acts. Nor, in fact, does it tell us if they paid particular attention to the authorization of oral
tradition at all.
This is precisely where our evidence is poor. It is often quite difficult to summon up clear pictures of the social groups that carried and
developed various literary traditions. Nor do Second Temple writings always permit glimpses of the meanings such groups might have
ascribed to the oral or written status of the media that bore into the future results of their literary-interpretive activity. For example, there
are no texts deriving from the Second Temple period, in which writers defend the oral-performative interpretive tradition of their
communities by appealing to the tradition's very unwritten form as the principle of its authority to govern the meaning of scriptural writings.
In order to illustrate the dimensions of this silence about the authority of orally mediated traditions of textual performance and
interpretation, it is necessary to focus the discussion in this and the next chapter upon two well-studied groups. Each appears to have
developed at least implicitly recognized conceptions of the authority of the interpretive traditions that stood at the heart of its communal
engagement with written texts. But neither resorted—as far as the evidence can be pushed—to the polemical strategy that will emerge
among rabbinic Sages by the third century CE: namely, that the authority of communal understandings of key writings is guaranteed by
the exclusively oral medium in which those understandings are preserved.
We have already encountered the first group in the discussion of Second Temple scribalism. The community associated episodically with
the Qumran site from Hasmonean times on through the war of 66–73 CE may have had some connection to the Essenes, an apparently
ascetic fellowship mentioned by a number of ancient ethnographers and historians of Second Temple Jewry. 5 For the past half century,
however, all historical reconstructions of the Qumran group must be built upon writings, secreted in caves throughout the Dead Sea
wilderness during the war of 66–73 CE, which preserve some living connection to the traditions generated within the community. The main
task in this chapter will be to identify and reflect upon the conceptions of the authority of written texts and their oral-performative
transmission that may be recovered from these writings. I will indicate as well how these representations of various modalities of
interpretive tradition may point to attitudes that enjoyed a wide currency within the group for much of its history.
The next chapter will devote sustained attention to a second well-known Second Temple community of textual interpreters, the Pharisees.
This group represents a peculiarly complex problem for anyone attempting to reconstruct the nature of its ideological universe. Unlike the
Qumran community, whose world can be explored in some detail on the basis of its own literary remains, the Pharisees are known entirely
from writings produced by more or less partisan observers. As scholars now universally recognize, it is necessary to grasp the interests of
these observers—whether neutral or hostile—in order to evaluate the pictures of the Pharisees they preserve. Accordingly, when we reach
the discussion of Pharisaic tradition in chapter 3 we will pay particular attention to how the perspectives of these literary witnesses my
have affected what we have received.
end p.30
The Qumran Yahad and Its Text-Interpretive Tradition
After a half century of intense study, the scrolls found in the vicinity of Khirbet Qumran from 1947 through the early 1950s continue to
raise controversy. Among well-trained scholars there remain some who continue to deny that the site was in fact the center of any sort of
sectarian community. 6 Among the majority who accept the view that Qumran served as a sectarian settlement, there is continued debate
concerning the identity of the group. The early equation of the sect with the Essenes continues to enjoy strong consensual support, but
there is increasing appreciation of some significant and long-noted disparities between the ancient literary images of the Essenes and the
material and textual evidence from Qumran. 7
The questions about the identity of the group also touch upon the interpretation of the literary texts from the various caves. Which texts
are to be interpreted as reflecting the views and practices of the Qumran community, and which are reflective of larger religious currents in
Second Temple Palestine? To what degree is it possible to assume that the mere availability of a text in the Qumran cache indicates the
community's acceptance of some or all of its central ideas? The present study offers no opportunity to treat these questions at length.
I shall refer to the group alternatively as the “Yahad” or the “Tzadokites,” since both terms cluster together in a number of crucial works.
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