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
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1 for the large pyre
and 1 for the second pyre of incense
and 1 for maintaining the fire
and 1 for limbs and innards unconsumed from evening
and 1 they added on that day
These texts bear complex relationships to each other as well as to M. Yoma. Let's summarize them briefly before reflecting on their
connections to the Mishnah exegesis at Y. Yoma. We will then illumine these relationships in light of the model of oral permutations of a
written text in the Progymnasmata.
M. Yoma differs from its parallel sources in two respects. The first concerns a mnemonic matter. M. lists its distinctions between daily
liturgy and Yom Kippur in descending numerical order (Meir–4/5, Yose–3/4, Yehudah–3/2), while all the parallels reverse the mnemonic,
moving in ascending numerical order from Yehudah through Meir. The second obvious difference is that all the parallel passages contain
material absent from M. Yoma but crucial to grasping its implications—that is, only the parallels enumerate the precise sorts of pyres
assumed by Meir, Yose, and Yehudah.
So the Tannaitic parallels together share traits that distinguish them collectively from the Mishnah. They also differ from each other,
primarily in their economy of supplying the information missing from the Mishnah. T. Kippurim offers a complete list of pyres only for
Yehudah's view and then specifies the further pyres Yose and Meir would add. Printed editions of Sifra and B. Yoma, for their part, are
progressively more ample, the former supplying complete lists for Rabbis Yose and Meir, the latter supplying them for all three authorities;
however, Codex Assemani's version of Sifra is virtually identical in this regard to the Bavli's text.
As renderings of Tannaitic tradition, all the pericopes are textually distinct from M. Yoma, but they fall into two basic groups. Bavli and
Sifra, organized for mnemonic convenience, represent versions of a single textual tradition, while T. Kippurim, composed without
mnemnonic requirements in mind, represents an independent way of organizing the same information. The same mnemonic patterning in
Sifra and B. Yoma indicates that both are closer than T. Kippurim to the mnemonically arranged textual tradition of M. Yoma. They merely
reverse the order of M.'s mnemonic cues and fill in M.'s gaps, while T. Kippurim shows no attempt to follow the Mishnaic mnemonic at all.
Let us now reflect upon this complex set of literary relations with the help of the model offered by Greco-Roman rhetorical practice. In that
setting, the disciplined transformation of memorized texts was a routine aspect of rhetorical training that prepared students to deploy texts
in various versions in their spoken and written discourses. Moreover, the transformation of such texts involved not only expansive
elaboration (as in Hermogenes) but also exercises in simple grammatical reconstructions of the core text (as in Theon). There are
instructive analogies to such transformations in the Tannatic texts before us.
Surely it is not difficult to arrange M. Yoma, Sifra, and B. Yoma as a single pattern of transformations. All share an identical mnemonic
(albeit in reverse order), and the latter two texts seem to expand M. Yet one must ask: is this expansion “exegetical” in the sense that it
supplies information needed by a textual exegete to interpret the Mishnah? Or does it simply give textual expression to knowledge the
Mishnaic tradent already assumed on the part of students? I suggest the latter. M. Yoma could hardly have conveyed much useful
information at all unless its audience was already familiar with the kinds of pyres used in daily and festival liturgy.
The Mishnah is, in fact, formulated with such information in mind. In order to yield to the rigor of its overall mnemonic program (M. Yoma
4:4–6), M. 4:6 has simply
end p.138
omitted what its framers assumed could be taken for granted. Sifra and B. Yoma, from this perspective, are not “commentaries,” supplying
by exegetical ingenuity information wholly independent of the text they cite. Rather, they restore to the text the oral audience's implicit
referential system. M. Yoma, then, is bound up with Sifra and B. Yoma in an oral-peformative hermeneutical circle that appears impossible
to open from our own historical distance. On what grounds might we determine that the Mishnaic form is textually primary and the others
secondary or, to the contrary, that the Mishnah formulates in its own way material already known in the forms preserved in Sifra and B.
Yoma?
Here, it would seem, lies the one crucial difference between the example of the Progymnasmata and the Tannaitic examples. While the
rhetoricians supply us with the written versions of the chreiae that serve as the basis of mnemono-technical exercises, there appears little
hope in the rabbinic case of firmly determining which text—if any—is the “base” and which the “transformation.” In this example, however,
there may be a way out of the echo chamber of oral tradition. The key lies, perhaps, at T. Kippurim.
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