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 first attempts to describe the nature of literacy in the Second Temple period and the role of oral-performative and text-interpretive
traditions in particular within a broadly sketched representation of “scribal culture.” The chapter's main conclusion is that, to the degree
that scribal groups were aware of orality as a cultural form for the transmission of literary tradition, they ascribed ideological value to it only
as the original form of the sacred book. That is, the oral moment of tradition was perceived as the dictation of the book to the first scribe.
By contrast, the orality of the traditions that mediated the results of writing—what we have called the oral-literary, oral-performative, and
text-interpretive traditions—were of relatively little interest to Jewish scribes. I suspect that the explanation is simple: where Scripture
itself had not yet achieved textual uniformity as a cultural icon, social divisions focused upon the textual tradition embodied in the book
rather than upon the traditions of its exposition.
Chapters 2 and 3 illustrate and amplify this point in reference, first, to the scribal community that seems responsible for at least some of
the Dead Sea Scrolls and, second, to that other well-studied scribally oriented community of textual exegetes, the Pharisees of late
Second Temple times. These chapters find little reason to assume the existence during this period of any articulate ideological formations
of oral-literary tradition as a distinctive Judaic cultural possession. It was the oral delivery of the sacred book itself that served as the
focus of ideological reflection. In light of the common view that the idea of Oral Torah is distinctively Pharisaic, it will be necessary to look
rather closely at the evidence usually adduced for this view.
Part II is composed of four chapters that turn exclusively to the problem of the rabbinic construction of oral-literary, oral-performative, and
text-interpretive tradition as Torah in the Mouth. Chapters 4 and 5 focus upon the earliest compilations of rabbinic literature, the Tannaitic
compilations routinely regarded as reflecting traditions formulated from the late Second Temple period through the late second century CE.
These chapters explore the degree to which this literature conceives of its roots in essentially oral processes of transmission, and they
chart the diverse ideological constructs by which this orality was understood.
I agree with other scholars that the conception of Torah in the Mouth emerges first in this literature, although I will quibble with some who
see it as having existed in nascent rabbinic culture since the earliest decades of that community's formation in the Yavnean academy.
Even by the third century, we shall see, it hardly constituted a universally accepted conception within this early literary corpus. Chapter 6
illustrates why. There I offer close textual studies of various texts in the Mishnah and the Tosefta that, to my mind, offer the strong
suggestion that the compilation of these foundation texts of Torah in the Mouth were made possible by the technology of pen, ink, and
writing surface. An oral-literary tradition among the Tannaim there certainly was; but its relation to surviving texts such as the Mishnah
remains to be understood.
This is, I think, a curious result. In the Tannaitic material we find for the first time in Palestinian Judaism all three aspects of an
ideologically self-conscious oral-literary tradition: orally transmitted texts, specific settings and procedures of transmission, and an
ideological trope that explains the significance of the entire oral-traditional enterprise in terms of a primordial revelation co-original with that
of what
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is now called the Torah in Script (twrh šbktb). And precisely here we find evidence that the very texts regarded as embodying this oral-
literary tradition were preserved (by whom and by how many we cannot know) in written recensions.
Finally, chapter 7—the summation of the rabbinic part of the inquiry—reflects extensively upon this curiosity. It asks how the generation
that received this substantial heritage of Tannaitic textual material—the third- and fourth-century masters of oral tradition responsible for
the Palestinian Talmud and great Amoraic compilations of scriptural exegesis—made its own sense of a Torah in the Mouth that had been
written down in manuscript. The classical form of the concept of Torah in the Mouth, I suggest, is associated with a broad redefinition of
the authority of the Palestinian rabbinic master in shaping not only the intellectual life, but also the emotional and religious sensibilities of
his disciples. It is bound up, moreover, with the attempts of such masters to distinguish the discipline of rabbinic discipleship from that of
other highly articulate Greco-Roman discipleship communities just then coming to dominate the intellectual and religious landscape of
early Byzantine Palestine.
Offered in part II, then, is a set of reflections upon the social role of writing and oral performance of written texts in a society that, as a
matter of ideological principle, came to deny that the written sources of its oral-performative tradition exist. In the epilog, chapter 8, I will
offer my own estimate of what this denial might tell us about the relationship of Torah to its textual representations in classical Rabbinic
Judaism.
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