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
clerks.”
The point is crucial, for it may have something to do with the characteristic ideological shift that distinquishes Second Temple scribal
groups—whether the Yahad, the Pharisees, or the as yet unidentified groups behind the Enochic and related literatures—from the rabbinic
communities of the third century. The difference concerns perceptions of the role of oral communication in the genesis and transmission of
literary tradition. The scribal literati of Second Temple times, we saw, found the oral life of written texts ideologically meaningful only when
reflecting upon the origins of the works they themselves composed, copied, and taught. Interpretive tradition per se—the oral-performative
matrix of textual communication and explication—was nearly invisible to them as an object of reflective thought.
By contrast, the figures whose opinions are formulated for transmission in the earliest rabbinic texts seem to have been intensely aware of
possessing a comprehensive, orally mediated textual tradition containing, among other things, norms that affected the smallest patterns of
daily life. That this tradition was found most immediately in the instructions of Sages rather than in written books was taken for granted.
end p.66
In association with this assumption about the oral means of transmitting authoritative tradition, the figures of priest and scribe, who
dominated Second Temple images of legitimate literary tradents, recede from view as principal transmitters of tradition. They are replaced
by the image of the Sage, whose authority is grounded not in his scribal skills or his priestly genealogy, but rather in his mastery of
wisdom heard from a chain of masters.
Within two and a half centuries of the end of the Second Temple period—surely by the latter quarter of the third century—rabbinic scholars
had developed the essential outlines of their conceptions of Torah in Script and Torah in the Mouth. 9 Unlike their predecessors in Second
Temple scribal milieus, these Sages had developed a clear distinction between the written sources of textual study and the oral-literary
tradition within which the texts were interpreted and the results themselves framed for preservation in a distinctive oral-performative
tradition.
The chapters in part II of this study explore aspects of this emergence to ideological explicitness. Chapters 4 and 5, for the most part,
focus on the foundations of an ideology of oral tradition in the earliest surviving jurisprudential and historiographic materials preserved
within the rabbinic literary record. The focus is on the literature ascribed in the Talmuds to the Tannaim, the “repeaters of tradition” who
lived from the late first century BCE to the early third century CE. 10
First and most important among the Tannaitic sources is the Mishnah, the earliest compilation of rabbinic legal thought, edited in Palestine
at the turn of the third century. 11 The Tosefta, a Palestinian companion to the Mishnah, will also figure in this discussion. 12 We shall
consult as well a number of Palestinian biblical commentaries (midrashim)—commonly regarded as representing Tannaitic opinion—which
offer models of early rabbinic text-interpretive tradition in explicit association with the text of the Mosaic Torah, particularly the books of
Exodus (Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael), Leviticus (Sifra), Numbers, and Deuteronomy (Sifre). 13
This literature offers a rich, if unsystematic, testimony to the ways in which early rabbinic Sages formulated their awareness of
possessing an oral-literary tradition that was at once textually distinct from Scripture yet in some sense definitive of its meaning. It
provides as well the basic outlines of how the legal aspects of that oral-literary tradition were perceived by the Sages as constituting the
textual foundation of an oral-performative tradition of its own.
The Repeated Tradition as Oral-Literary Tradition
The Tannaitic literature everywhere assumes a simple dichotomy regarding the communication of religiously authoritative knowledge. 14
Knowledge recorded in scriptural texts is “recited” (qr'), that is, it is read aloud by sounding out the cues from a written text before the
reader's eyes. 15 The resulting recitation is mqr' (miqra), a term that, by extension, comes to designate the entire tradition of
Scripture—“that which is recited [in public instruction as divine teaching].” The rabbinic practice of “reading” is thus wholly continuous with
the oral-performative textual delivery familiar from Second Temple scribalism.
The distinction of rabbinic culture from earlier forms of scribal culture becomes evident from the way in which Sages conceived of the text-
interpretive tradition that
end p.67
mediated the orally performed scriptural text. Interpretive tradition received by a Sage from his own teacher and transmitted to a disciple is
“repeated” (šnh) on the basis of what has been “heard” (šm‘) in association with the written text. 16 That is, knowledge surrounding the
scriptural text is a mnemonically managed tradition, reported aloud from memory without any reference to a written source. There is, in this
representation at least, no written record to verify the truth of a report, other than the general consensus of tradents regarding what has
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