Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism 200 BCE-400 CE

254 Pages·2001·14.836 MB·English

by  Martin S. Jaffee

TORAH IN THE MOUTH
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Torah in the Mouth
WRITING AND ORAL TRADITION
IN PALESTINIAN JUDAISM
2OO BCE-4OO CE
Martin S. Jaffee
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
2OO1
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Copyright © 2001 by Martin S. Jaffee
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jaffee, Martin S.
Torah in the mouth : writing and oral tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200 BCE~4oo CE
/ Martin S. Jaffee.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-19-514067-2
1. Judaism —History—Post-exilic period, 586 B.C.-210 A.D.
2. Judaism —History—Talmudic period, 10-425. 3. Tradition (Judaism) —History of
doctrines. 4. Rabbinical literature —History and criticism. I. Title.
BM176 .J35 2000
296'.09'014—dc21 00-028485
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For
Nisan Barukh b. Avraharn Jaffee
truly his brother's keeper
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Preface
The seeds for this study were sown during my graduate studies in the late 1970S. It
was then that I first read, through the critical lens of Jacob Neusner's monumental
achievement, the great studies of Birger Gerhardsson on Jewish and Christian oral
tradition. The seeds germinated for the first half decade of my postgraduate profes-
sorial career as I began to reflect upon the literary character of texts I had translated
and commented upon in a series of rather narrow and —as the justifiably few readers
of those studies might agree —ultimately arid exercises. It was only in the late 1980S,
after a chance encounter with Werner Kelber's marvelous study of oral tradition in
the early Christian communities, that I learned of the enormous, and continually grow-
ing, scholarship on oral literature and tradition that had emerged since Gerhardsson
and Neusner had made their contributions to the field.
It took me the entire decade of the 1990S to absorb this scholarship, to catch up
with its diverse reverberations in the various fields of classical and biblical studies,
and to find my own particular way of bringing it to bear upon the interpretation of
the rabbinic theme of Torah in the Mouth. The resulting study—this book—is both
the result and a kind of record of this game of catch-up.
The second and largest part of the book—the part devoted to the rabbinic tradi-
tion per se—has at its core a series of my essays published in various venues from
1991 to 1998. These have been thoroughly revised, rethought, and expanded in light
of what I have learned since. The first part of the book, which discusses the shape of
oral tradition in the Second Temple period, was written most recently—for the ex-
plicit purpose of contextualizing the rabbinic portion of the study. As I got down to
work, I realized that if I did not deal with the question of oral tradition in Second
Temple Judaism in a paragraph, it would require at least 150 typescript pages. I made
the choice of writing the 150 pages.
In the course of teaching myself a body of scholarship which was by no means
my intellectual patrimony, it soon dawned upon me that I had found the theme that
would make of my accumulated rabbinic studies a genuine thesis about the history
of oral tradition in early Judaism — namely, while Second Temple Jewish scribal
viii Preface
culture had a rich oral-literary culture, it had as yet formulated no ideological self-
consciousness about it. What we find in the rabbinic conception of Torah in the
Mouth, accordingly, is the conjoining of an oral-literary culture rooted in the Sec-
ond Temple period with a decidedly recent rabbinic ideology that explained the
relation of that culture to prestigious written Scriptures and the human Sages who
served as the guardians of tradition. Just how recently that ideology had emerged,
under what cultural constraints, and for what purposes are all matters that I have
attempted to clarify in the second part of the study.
Readers will soon notice that the argument of the book is built upon successive
close readings of translated texts. I am responsible for the translations of all texts from
the Dead Sea Scrolls and rabbinic literature. Translations of the Hebrew Bible and
New Testament generally follow the Jewish Publication Society Tanakh and the Re-
vised Standard Version respectively, although I have taken liberties where I felt it nec-
essary to highlight a particular interpretive possibility. Citations from other Second
Temple period Jewish literature or from Greco-Roman literature generally follow stan-
dard translations and these sources are identified in the notes where appropriate.
In translitering Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek material I have tried to accommo-
date scientific accuracy and the reader's convenience. Greek transliterations attempt
nothing more than to reproduce the Greek sounds with appropriate symbols of the
Latin alphabet. Hebrew and Aramaic are a bit more complicated. Here I have used
two systems. Sometimes I reproduce only the consonantal text using a rather stan-
dard system of transliteration, where ' - 'aleph,' = 'ayin, h = het, t = tet, k = kaf, s =
samekh, s = tzadi, q = quf, s = shin, and s' = sin. At other times, I transliterate in
accord with modern spoken Hebrew. Thus, mitzvah renders mswh, halakhah ren-
ders hlkh, divrei soferim renders dbry swprym, and so forth.
Acknowledgments
While this work does include some previously published material, the vast bulk of
the writing and revision took place between the summers of 1998 and 1999. During
that period I was the beneficiary of a fellowship from the National Endowment for
the Humanities, which freed me from the classroom and enabled me to spend virtu-
ally every working day in my study. I wish to acknowledge the generosity of the NEH
in supporting my work. It would never have appeared without the support of that
remarkable institution.
The beginning of the writing also coincided with my appointment as the
Samuel and Althea Stroum Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wash-
ington. Mr. and Mrs. Stroum have been wonderful supporters of Jewish Studies at
the university and have been particularly generous to me personally. I wish to thank
them here for their support. May this volume give them some pleasure and a sense
of significant return on their investment in my career.
During the years in which this study germinated, I have of course benefitted
enormously from numerous conversations with colleagues around the world on vari-
ous topics connected with it. Those whose criticisms and questions have taught me
the most include Professors Albert Baumgarten (Bar-Ilan University), Marc Bregman
(HUC-JIR, Jerusalem), Yaakov Elman (Yeshiva University), John Miles Foley (Uni-
versity of Missouri, Columbus), Steven Fraade (Yale University), Robert Goldenberg
(SUNY, Stony Brook), Catherine Hezser (The Free University of Berlin), and David
Stern (University of Pennsylvania). In addition, I owe great thanks to two younger
scholars, Professors Elizabeth Shanks Alexander (University of Virginia; Ph.D., Yale,
1998) and David Nelson (Washington University; Ph.D., HUC-JIR, Cincinnati, 1999).
Both risked their academic necks by incorporating my developing work into their
own dissertation studies of orality in rabbinic tradition, and honored me by the invi-
tation to serve as an outside advisor on their dissertation committees.
Ms. Cynthia Read, executive editor for religion at Oxford University Press, sent
my manuscript to two readers, both of whom —I was gratified to learn—were enthu-
siastic about the study. I inadvertently discovered the identity of one of them, Profes-