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 italicized material identifies the organizing thematic superscriptions which structure the diverse lists. Boldface identifies the listed
items. Material in plain type is formally and thematically secondary to the list. Let us turn to the lists themselves.
Lists 1 and 2 address the problem of grain that may be used to satisfy the obligation to eat unleavened bread at the seder. There are two
issues: (1) the type of grains that yield bread and (2) the necessity to remove sanctified offerings from the grain prior to making and
consuming the bread. Lists 1 and 2 are balanced by lists 3 and 4, which address a parallel question: which types of herbs may be used to
satisfy the obligation to eat bitter herbs at the meal? Again two issues emerge: (3) identification of the types of greens and (4) the need to
remove the appropriate offerings. The topical mnemonic structure is rather simple:
1 types of grains
2 types of offerings
+
1 types of greens
2 types of offerings
This simple parallelism controls a more complex chiasmic structure within and between the two basic groups: Lists 3–4 are an inversion of
lists 1–2. List 2, dealing with offerings from grain, is actually a balanced pair, divided into a positive (“they fulfull”) and a negative (“but not”)
sublist. So too is list 3, which deals with types of greens. Lists 2 and 3, then, which constitute the transition from the topic of grain to that
of greens,
end p.110
are mnemonically managed by the parallelism of their internal structure as lists of paired opposites. We can represent the mnemonic of
the master list as follows:
1. (A) They fulfill with a (grains)
2. (B) They fulfill with b /but not with c (tithes)
+
—and with pepperwort;
—and with endive;
—and with bitter herb.
They fulfill with them whether fresh or dried, but not:
—with pickled;
—nor with stewed;
—nor with cooked.
And they join together to constitute an olive's bulk.
4. And they fulfill:
—with their stalk;
—and with doubtfully tithed produce;
—and with first tithe from which the heave-offering of the tithe is removed;
—and from second tithe and Temple-dedications which are redeemed.
1. (B) They fulfill with d /but not with e (greens)
2. (A) They fulfill with f (tithes)
Now this is a remarkably powerful structure for transmitting the complex information of the list. In an ideal-typical oral setting one can
imagine any number of migrations within the items of the list, while the superscriptions firmly control the basic contours of the
informational package. 36
Thus a strictly “oralist” analysis would isolate the series of superscriptions as the surviving oral elements behind Pesahim 2:5–6. The
items under these rubrics would have probably varied from one setting to another in the oral-performative settings of transmission, since
there is no fixed numerical mnemonic governing the items themselves. But, as before, the “oralist” analysis is made more complex by the
literary framework of the text's preservation. That the present version of the list was known as a written source to the composers of
Mishnah Pesahim seems confirmed by the material I have indented. These glosses, formally disjunctive and innocent of any concern for
the mnemonic of the encompassing literary structure, are intruded episodically and without particular plan into the completed lists. As with
the glosses earlier observed in the song of Mishnah Tamid, they testify to a transmissional setting in which scribes and copyists were
quite free to add to texts on an ad hoc basis. Whether such additions arose first in the event of performance or only in the silence of a
mind reflecting upon a mastered text is impossible to say. It is clear only that the intrusions have themselves in due course become part
of the transmission and, thus, of the performance. 37
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