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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 Part One Oral Tradition and Second Temple Scribalism The Spoken Word and Ideologies of the Book end p.13 end p.14 1 Social Settings of Literacy and Scribal Orality Martin S. Jaffee Oral/Aural Literacy in Second Temple Judaism Palestinian Jewish society of the last centuries of the Second Temple period was, like others in the Greco-Roman world, intimately familiar with the written word. Writing—in Greek as well as the native Hebrew and Aramaic—was employed in a variety of economic functions and legal instruments across various social strata. 1 In markets and town squares, legends on coins and seals proclaimed propoganda on behalf of regional minting cities and contenders for political hegemony. 2 Complex works of literature—historical, legal, ethical, hymnodic, and even novelistic—were composed and circulated. 3 Social movements of various kinds embraced ancient, revered books as symbols of identity and authenticity and used the written word polemically to position themselves in relation to each other along a spectrum of explosive social and religious questions. 4 There was even enough of a literary public in the country's three languages to sustain efforts to render important Hebrew texts into Greek and Aramaic. 5 But, for all its literacy, this was not a “bookish” society of the type that has existed in the modern world since the development of mass- produced, printed literature. 6 For one thing, the group of people who could actually compose, transcribe, and communicate the contents of written compositions—whether brief letters or lengthy literary works—was quite small in relation to the society as a whole. 7 Such skills were regarded as esoteric professional acquisitions rather than a general cultural patrimony. Persons possessing them were, for the most part, members of elite scribal guilds associated with official institutions of palace, law court, and temple. Outside such groups, the ability to write was routinely limited to elementary forms of record-keeping. For most people, reading was a matter of retrieving and utilizing the information of such records. 8 Except for those trained in technical scribal schools, individuals did not usually have equal facility in writing, composition, and reading. The capacity to decipher, for example, a simple written receipt recording a land transaction didn't always end p.15 imply a person's ability to read a literary work, copy a written text, or transcribe one from oral dictation. It therefore remains an open question as to how many habitual readers of, for example, business records or legal contracts could master the more complex writings that circulated among the literarily productive cultural elites. One consequence of this socially stratified character of literacy in Second Temple Judaism is that the consumption of a literary text was not commonly a matter of an individual reader communing silently with a text in a moment of privacy, as in modern times. Such acts of reading for pleasure, for information, or for personal enrichment—the common experiences in literate societies since the sixteenth-century invention of the mass-produced book—were exceedingly rare as a cultural pattern. 9 Part of the reason is that books, expensive and time- consuming to produce and copy by hand, were themselves primarily objects of the official, rather than the domestic, domain. In addition, inscribed objects in general, and books in particular, commonly functioned as ritual objects whose iconic significance transcended that of the information they preserved. 10 This last observation is a point to which we shall return shortly. We observe for the moment, however, that the scarcity of books, and the sacral aura that commonly surrounded them, help us to grasp another aspect of Second Temple literary culture: the social distribution of book collection. Large collections of books were not found in private homes, and there is only slender literary evidence (and virtually no uncontroversial physical evidence) of institutionalized libraries accessible to a broad public of readers. Rather, collections of literature may have been created in connection with ideologically self- conscious religious or cultic communities, such as the ruling priestly groups associated with the Jerusalem Temple or dissident communities of the kind that stood behind at least some of the Dead Sea Scrolls. 11 In contrast to governmental archives devoted to preserving written records concerning official acts, these collections of books were not storage bins for documents that would be read only to the degree that their information was of instrumental value. Rather, the collections were specialized in focus, preserving primarily those materials that, precisely because they figured prominently in the ideological program 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 of its users, would be consulted repeatedly, their texts often memorized and their values internalized in the context of public instruction. 12 Even in such ideologically articulate circles, where sophisticated literacy could be assumed for most members, there was commonly a distance between the physical book and its audience. An important impediment to the simple perusal of a book's contents was the form of the book itself. The codex—with its coveniently leafable pages bound into a pamphlet at the spine—would not revolutionize literary culture and information retrieval in the Roman Empire until well into the second century CE. For Palestinian Jews of the Second Temple period, as for anyone else of that time, books were preserved on sheets of papyrus or treated leather bound end to end into scrolls of varying length. Long books made for long, heavy scrolls. 13 As a result, unless one wanted to read a book from beginning to end in one or a series of sittings, the scroll was virtually useless as a handy source of information. One might have to scroll many yards through a text to consult a particular passage. Accordingly, the most effective use of the scroll for information retrieval was available end p.16 only to people—scribes themselves or others closely associated with textual performance—who were so familiar with the text that they would know more or less where in the scroll to find what they needed. 14 In other words, those best able to use the scroll for what we might call “informational” purposes would be people who in a basic sense already knew its contents through approximate memorization. The text was as much a fact of their memory as it was a physical object. This point was well articulated by M. Martin long ago and it is worth quoting him at length: 15 The primary function of a scribe . . . is that of one whose work consists in transcribing a text by his own hand. I use the word transcribe deliberately. The scribe may, in effect, perform his professional work in one of three ways, or by a combination of one or two or all three of them. He may, on the one hand, copy out his text by eye having beside him the exemplar to be transcribed. This method relies on the purely visual medium and the regular split-second effort of memory with or without oral repetition of what he is transcribing. On the other hand, he may transcribe his text from dictation. This method relies on the purely aural medium and aural memory with perhaps again some oral repetition of what has just been read to him for transcription. Or, as a third way, he may transcribe his text from memory. And here we must remark that our modern conception of memory has been modelled and seriously affected by the advent, difffusion, general use and plenty of the printed word. The medium in this third method is far more delicate and liable to error and subjective affection than the other two. The scribe's memory may be a predominantly aural one or it may be predominantly a visual one, or it may be an audio-visual one, and depending on its character, the errors and subjective affections of his work will follow suit. But it is true that if we were to conceive of a hierarchy in scribal proficiency dedicated to the transcription of sacred books and writings more or less canonically . . . fixed in their number and text, we would certainly place in the first place as a master-scribe the one who through skill and practice in his profession not only possessed a fine handwriting but could also be expected to transcribe by rote the sacred books or treasured writings whose transcription constituted his professional calling. I say, were we to conceive such a hierarchy, because the ancient powers of memory and retention are things which we can with difficulty represent to ourselves. It is, of course, impossible at this historical distance to estimate the percentage of a given literary community that, following Martin's model, would have mastered most of its books in memory. It is even more precarious to guess how closely memory approximated written versions. But it is likely that the material form of the scroll encouraged readers to view it as a mnemonic safety device—a storage system for texts already held substantially in the memory—rather than a reference source of information outside the reader's knowledge. Earlier I alluded briefly to another consequence of the form of the scroll upon the way it was read. With the exception of scribes actually engaged in book production and copying, the reading of books was commonly connected to ritualized, public ceremonies rather than private study. For most people, and for most of the time, a book was a commodity that one “heard” through the medium of another human voice; “reading” was the activity of declaiming a text before an audience in a social performance approaching the gravity of ceremonial ritual. 16 The book was a locus of end p.17 power and authority far more than information. It was precisely its power that made the information worth attending to. And its authority was manifested publicly in and through the human voice—often that of an officially appointed communal teacher—that sounded out the text's words and expounded its mysteries. 17 All that has been described here should remind us that, in the time and place at hand, the characteristic organs of the literary life were the mouth and the ear, and its main textual reservoir was the memory. Literary culture was commonly delivered orally and received aurally, the memory serving as the connector between mouth and ear. The intervention of the eye and the hand was confined largely to creating 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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