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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 3 The Media of Pharisaic Text-Interpretive Tradition Martin S. Jaffee The Problem of the Sources A standard, indispensable scholarly handbook on the history of Judaism in Second Temple and early post-Temple times states as common knowledge the following claim about Pharisaic Judaism. “Needless to say, according to the Pharisaic outlook not only the written Torah was binding; but also the exegesis and supplementation, known as the ‘oral Torah,’ provided by the scribes.” 1 This “needless to say” disguises a complex problem. This chapter, taking up a debate current among historians of early Judaism, will call into serious question arguments that the rabbinic conception of text-interpretive tradition as a primordial revelation of an Oral Torah originates in the pre-70 circles of the Pharisees. 2 The point, to be precise, is that the sources of information on Pharisaism and its traditions of textual interpretation surely suggest a high degree of Pharisaic pride in possessing an ancient tradition of authoritative interpretations of the Torah's laws in particular. But the sources offer little evidence upon which to identify among the Pharisees an ideological commitment to preserving a text-interpretive tradition in an exclusively oral-performative medium. That is to say, Pharisaic ideas regarding the oral origins of the prestigious book are likely to have been similar to those we found current among other scribal communities of Second Temple Palestine (see chapter 1). But the extent to which they were equally committed to the oral origins or exlusively oral transmission of non-scriptural traditions is, on the basis of available sources, impossible to surmise. Let us, then, take a look at the sources. All of them are at a second remove from the Pharisees themselves. There is not a single text from the Second Temple period that can sustain for long the argument that it was composed by a Pharisee for the purpose of expressing a Pharisaic point of view. 3 In contrast to the state of affairs among the Yahad, whose textual practices and conceptions of text-interpretive tradition can be explored through the study of texts produced or used within the community, any historical representation of the Pharisees' social system, Pharisaic practices, or the end p.39 Pharisaic thought-world is entirely dependent upon secondhand reports that come from a variety of witnesses. Each witness approaches description of the group from a particular point of view. Surviving accounts of the Pharisees, written by authors presumed to have had at least superficial contact with them, come from four quarters. The earliest of these observers are the composers of at least some of the Qumranian scrolls that exhibit signs of Tzadokite origin. While the Pharisees are never mentioned explicitly by name anywhere in the Qumran corpus, most scholars assume that they are alluded to as the “Expounders of Smooth Things” (dwršy h lqwt), mentioned by the composers of the Damascus Covenant, the Thanksgiving Scroll, the pesharim to the books of Isaiah and Nahum, and a few other texts found in the Qumran caves. 4 The antagonism toward them on the part of the Qumranian writings suggests that the Yahad came into political conflict with Pharisees at various points during the Hasmonean period. But the highly coded historical allusions are sufficiently veiled to make precise identification of the historical contexts and issues a precarious matter. Texts from the late first century CE comprise a second body of evidence about the Pharisees. Epistolary writings and hagiographical compositions preserved by early Christian communities in the names of the apostle Paul and the four evangelists have figured prominently in critical reconstructions of Pharisaism as it might have existed in the early middle first century CE. So too the historical writings of the foremost ancient historian of the Jews, Flavius Josephus (né Yosef b. Matityahu), are routinely mined for information about the earlier Pharisees of the Hasmonean and Herodian periods. While historians cannot work around these texts or dismiss their testimony, it is also difficult to know exactly how to move behind them to the Pharisaic reality they describe. Aside from two enigmatic passages in the letters of Paul, information about the Pharisees in early Christian literature comes primarily from the canonical Gospels, whose Pharisees serve largely as literary foils for the heroic character of Jesus. The evangelists completed their work during the last third of the first century CE, and their interest in the Pharisees—confined to the group's relationship to Jesus during the years of his ministry and, to a lesser degree, the response of Pharisees to the post-Easter activities of his disciples and apostles—is shaped largely by the rhetorical concerns of Christian proclamation. Historians, therefore, continue to puzzle over how much the Gospels' composers may project onto the context of the first third of the first century an antagonism that might be historically more pertinent to the tensions between Jewish-Christian or Gentile-Christian communities with other Jewish groups of the latter third of the century, including those from which rabbinism ultimately emerged. The third source, Josephus, offers the bulk of his discussion of the Pharisees in his two principal historical writings, the Jewish War 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 (composed by about 78 CE) and the Jewish Antiquities (a product of the mid-90s). In each he accords them central roles in the politics of the Hasmonean era, particularly during the reigns of John Hyrcanus (ruled 134–103 BCE), Alexander Jannaeus (ruled 103–76 BCE), and Alexandra Salome (ruled 76–67 BCE). Some of Josephus' sources of information regarding the Pharisees seem to go back to the lost writings of the Herodian court historian, Nicolaus end p.40 of Damascus, and so may represent more or less contemporary accounts. 5 In a third work, moreover, Josephus claims to have studied with some care the Pharisaic philosophy of his own day (Life 12). 6 This combination of primary literary sources and personal acquaintance has led many historians to place a great deal of confidence in the Josephan picture of the Pharisees. But it is increasingly understood that Josephus shaped his literary sources with relative freedom as he composed his historical writings, and that his various accounts of the Pharisees are influenced by his own concerns to present an intelligible view of Palestinian Jewry to his largely non-Jewish readership. It is, then, no simple matter to distinguish “historical fact” from “literary representation” in Josephus' accounts of the Pharisees. 7 Finally, the most recently composed body of sources regarding the Pharisees are those that dot the classical rabbinic corpus of late Roman, early Byzantine, and Sassanian times. These are among the most difficult to use. It is most likely that at least some Pharisees were included in the post-70 coalition of scribal scholars, priests, and administrative officers whose early-third-century CE heirs had begun to form the early literary traditions of rabbinic Judaism. 8 But the rabbinic literature of the third to sixth centuries is itself not much interested in Pharisaism as a historical phenomenon. The earliest rabbinic compilations, such as the Mishnah and associated compendia, do at times link some rabbinic traditions to teachers who may well have been Pharisees. But we shall see that depictions of Pharisaism as a coherent social movement are few and unsystematically drawn. Moreover, it will become clear that texts making the strongest claims of the filiation of rabbinism with Pharisaism are rather late in the development of rabbinic tradition, occuring exclusively in the Babylonian Talmud, 9 compiled in its extant form perhaps as recently as the sixth to seventh centuries. Any attempt to discuss ideological conceptions of text-interpretive tradition among the Pharisees as an exclusively oral possession must, therefore, be alert to the difficulties posed by our best sources. Let us, then, turn to each type of source in sequence, asking how it depicts the nature of Pharisaic interpretive tradition. Only after such a survey will we be able to ask whether a coherent picture emerges from the various representations. The Qumran Literature As was mentioned earlier, all knowledge of the Yahad's perception of Hasmonean-period Pharisees depends upon a slim set of references to enemies of the group known as “Expounders of Smooth Things.” Two interpretive issues are intertwined in reading the Qumran sources on this matter. The first is the basis upon which the Expounders can be identified as a group more or less identical to those Pharisees known, primarily through Josephus, to have been involved in Hasmonean court politics. The second issue concerns the name “Expounders of Smooth Things” itself. What are the Smooth Things expounded and why do they so antagonize the authors of these texts? We shall see that the common identification of the Expounders as Pharisees seems nearly incontrovertible. But there are grounds for being skeptical that the identification of the Smooth Things tells us as much about Hasmonean Pharisaic tradition as many scholars have wished to claim. end p.41 In most of the settings in which the Expounders appear, the context clearly presents them as some sort of organized group that high- handedly violates the Yahad's own sense of covenantal law and misleads the larger community of Israel. Thus the prophetic vision of the destruction of Nineveh (Nah. 3:7) is interpreted as follows: “Its explanation [concerns] the Expounders/ of Smooth Things, whose counsel [‘ h] shall perish and whose assembly [knst] shall be dispersed, and they will no longer persist in misleading [the] community, and the Innocent/ will no longer support their counsel” (4QpNah, fr. 3–4, 3:6–7). 10 At least two passages, moreover, suggest some sort of focused violence directed by the Expounders toward the Yahad. For example, the Damascus Covenant's opening homily about Israel's waywardness reports upon the rise of a “Man of Mockery” ('yš hl wn) who “sprinkled upon Israel from the waters of the Lie” (CD 1:14–15). In consequence, “they expounded Smooth Things and chose illusions [mhtlwt] and speculated/ about loopholes [pr wt] . . . / and caused the covenant to be transgressed and the statute to be abrogated. And they ganged up against the soul of the righteous, and despised in their souls all who walked/ in perfection. And they pursued them with the sword and relished conflict among the people” (CD 1:18–21: cf. 1QHodayot 2:31–32). In general, references to the Expounders are enmeshed in symbolic references that are difficult to decode, and the previous examples are 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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