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
The study session described here is more than an occasion for spreading familiarity with the contents of authoritative books and
traditions. Rather, the session of the Many seems to have been understood as a setting for occasional disclosures or revelations that
were then transmitted as part of the community's fund of separatist knowledge. 29 It is important to recall in this context a common
metaphorical distinction, woven throughout the discourse of CD and 1QS in particular, between knowledge that is “hidden” (nstr ) and that
which is “disclosed” (nglh). 30
As in the following passage, this distinction coincides with the social boundary between the Yahad and the rest of Israel. The entrant into
the community:
must take upon himself, through a binding oath, to return to the Torah of Moses, according to all that has been commanded;/ with
a full heart and soul to all that has been disclosed concerning it [kkwl hnglh mmnh] to the Sons of Tzadok, the priests [lbny dwq
hkwhnym], 31 the guardians of the covenant and the expounders of His will. (1QS 5:8–9)
Here the penitent returns to the covenant of Israel through an act of assent to the particular reading of that covenant current in the Yahad.
From this perspective, the setting of study described in 1QS 6:7–8 is the context for the generation and dissemination of such disclosures
of the hidden. That is, the knowledge transmitted in the study session of the Many constituted the fund of prophetic disclosures that
enabled
end p.34
its participants ritually to draw and reinforce the social boundary that distinquished the Yahad from Israel in general.
The knowledge defining this boundary, apparently, was constituted by the social norms of the Tzadokite community, deemed always to
have emerged from the study of authoritative texts under the guidance of illuminated teachers. 1QS 8:15's interpretation of Is. 40:3 seems
to refer precisely to such a setting of occasional disclosures of new implications in the text of Torah. Explicating the prophetic injunction
to “prepare the way of the Lord in the wilderness, make straight in the desert a highway for our God,” the text defines the acts of
preparation and straightening as follows:
This refers to the exposition of the Torah [mdrš htwrh] which He committed into the hand of Moses to do, in accordance with all
that is disclosed from time to time 32 [kkwl hnglh ‘t b‘t : cf. 1QS 9:13], and which the Prophets disclosed through His holy spirit.
What is disclosed in periodic intervals of collective illumination becomes part of the reigning ethos of the community, shaping behavior in
accord with specific norms.
There is one final dimension of the exposition of the Ruling that needs consideration. We have already observed that the recitation of the
Book and exposition of the Ruling are part of a larger performance that includes the recitation of benedictions. The conjunction of public
study accompanied by benedictions suggests, as Fraade has pointed out, that the nightly rhythm of study was conceived as a liturgical
activity, a performance that ritualized the transmission of textual knowledge conceived on the model of a sacrificial offering. 33 The sounds
of the uttered words constituted a transaction between the human community and Heaven even as the communication of textual
knowledge bound the group into a common discipline. In deference, perhaps, to the actual ongoing sacrificial cult in the Jerusalem
Temple, the Tzadokite study-sacrifice was timed for the night, when the Jerusalem altar was inactive. Thus textual study, while sacrificial
in character, did not compete with the sacrificial system mandated in the Torah and conducted, as far as the Tzadokites seemed to have
held, by a flawed priesthood; it supplemented that system and, perhaps, made up for its subversion by the sitting Hasmonean priestly
regime.
This sacrificial interpretation of the Yahad's study-watch sheds some light upon another enigmatic passage (1QS 9:3–5), which, in line
with later rabbinic conceptions, has often been taken as a reference to the atoning effects of prayer: 34
When there comes to be in Israel, in accord with all these principles, a foundation for the holy spirit in eternal truth, they shall bring
atonement for wanton guilt and sinful transgression, and restore the Land to favor without the flesh of whole offerings or sacrificial
fats. And the offering of the lips through the Ruling [wtrwmt ptym lmšp ]will be as a sweet aroma of righteousness , 35 and
those who perfect their way will be like a freely given offering in that time.
The italicized passage intertextually recalls Hos. 14:3's prediction that “words” will one day achieve the effects of sacrifice. Redeployed in
the setting of the Yahad, the prophet is now understood to predict that it is nothing less than the oral utterances of communal study of the
Ruling that will in the future atone for Israel's historical transgressions.
end p.35
The final issue before us concerns the actual method of the textual study depicted in 1QS 6:6–8 and other relevant passages. Note first of
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