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
between Pharisees and Sages or for the development among Pharisees of an ideological commitment to the transmission of an
exclusively oral tradition of textual interpretation.
The general lack of rabbinic interest in drawing historical connections between Pharisaic and rabbinic intellectual lineages is surprising,
given the great value assigned in the Mishnah and all later rabbinic compilations to delineating patterns of intellectual tradition through
chains of transmission (e.g., M. Avot 1:1ff.). It is therefore curious that, while there are a number of rabbinic texts that refer to Pharisees
as an identifiable Second Temple community, there is little suggestion in them that the transmitters of these texts found here references
to their own immediate predecessors. We can confine ourselves, for present purposes, to the Tannaitic compilations that most probably
contain traditions formulated from the second through the early third centuries. 54
The most important of these, because it is commonly read as proof of rabbinic continuity with the Pharisees, is found in M. Yadayim 4:6
–7. The passage records a series of disputes between Pharisees and Sadducees 55 regarding matters of law for which the Torah provides
no explicit ruling:
1. (M. Yad.4:6) Sadducees say: We challenge you, Pharisees! For you rule: “The sacred writings render the hands unclean, but the
end p.55
Homeric books do not render the hands unclean.” 56
2. Said Rabban Yohanan b. Zakkai: And have we only this against the Pharisees? Behold, they rule: “The bones of an ass are clean, but
the bones of Yohanan the High Priest are unclean!” 57
3. [The Sadducees] replied: According to their preciousness is their uncleanness, so that a person will not turn the bones of his father
On the basis of purely literary-formulaic considerations, the passage consists of two distinct elements. A list (1–2 + 4–6) governed by a
distinctive compositional formula (X say: We challenge you, Y, because of Z) has been supplemented by explanatory material (3, 7). This
formal distinction between the compositional elements corresponds to an interesting distinction in viewpoint as well.
In the core list, Pharisees and Sadducees are set against each other with no explicit suggestion as to which party the composer favors.
Indeed, there may even be a hint of preference for the Sadducean positions: an important Sage of the early Yavnean period, Rabban
Yohanan b. Zakkai, weighs in against the Pharisees with his own complaint (2), and the Sadducees fire the last salvo (6). The
supplements to this core list, however, reorient the entire point. The interchange between Rabban Yohanan and Sadducees at 3 now
shows his statement at 2 to have been ironic: he in fact agrees with the Pharisees on the capacity of Scriptures to defile the hands, and
he bases his view on a principle that the Sadducees themselves are made to articulate: “preciousness” and the capacity to defile are
integrally connected. Similarly, the debate between Sadducees and Pharisees at 7 results in a Pharisaic victory grounded in the power of
logic. 61
and mother into spoons!
He replied: So, too, regarding the sacred writings—in accordance with their value is their uncleanness. But the Homeric books,
which have no value—they do not render the hands unclean.
4. (M. Yad.4:7) Sadducees say: We challenge you, Pharisees! For you declare clean the spout of liquid. 58
5. Pharisees say: We challenge you, Sadducees! For you declare clean a stream of water flowing from a cemetery! 59
6. Sadducees say: We challenge you, Pharisees! For you rule: “My ox and my ass that have caused damage—we are obliged for
compensation [as at Ex. 21:35]; but my male or female slave who has caused damage—we are exempt from compensation.” 60
7. But consider: concerning my ox and my ass, upon which I'm obliged to perform no commandments, I am still obliged for damage
they cause; doesn't it follow, concerning my male and female slave, upon whom I'm indeed obliged to perform commandments, that
I should be obliged for damage they cause?
They replied: No! If you raise the case of my ox or my ass, which have no power of intention, will you also persist regarding my
male or female slave, who indeed have the power of intention? For if I abuse him, he may go and torch another's harvest, and I
would be obliged for compensation.
As I have already pointed out, it is dangerous to attempt to date the “composition” of any compositional unit in the rabbinic corpus. But
insofar as the legal positions ascribed here to the Pharisees tend to be adopted in other Mishnaic passages, it seems likely that M.
Yadayim 4:6–7 (+8) reached its present form during the late second-century or early third-century decades that witnessed the overall
compositional work that yielded the Mishnah. Its core list, however, is likely to be older. How much older, it is impossible to say. At least
two of these disputed issues (2, 4) are attested in the Qumranian Halakhic Letter (4QMMT B:22–23, 55–58) to have separated its writer
from a dominant Jewish party in the second century BCE. 62 So even if we cannot date the formulation of the core list that early, it surely
preserves memories that emerge very early in the historiography of legal Jewish disputation.
What appears to have happened is that a pre-70 catalogue of Pharisaic–Sadducean disputes, represented at least in part by our core list,
has been preserved in the rabbinic Mishnah. Its preservation, however, came at the price of editorial modifications that shift the original
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