Wollenberg’s learned new book, The Closed Book: How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible, makes two interrelated claims. Part 1 argues that “rather than valorizing the Pentateuch and its prophetic echoes as perfect transcripts of the divine will, many early rabbinic practitioners experienced the Bible as a problem.” Or, not the Bible per se, but the Bible as a written text. What makes the written Bible problematic? Insofar as the Bible takes a material form, the Bible becomes “susceptible to repeated erosion, loss, and change”; these concerns come to the fore especially around the figure of Ezra. Written revelation is “inherently brittle and imperfect,” as reflected in the shattering of the first tablets. The Bible is a “dangerous artifact that can leave death and destruction in its wake.” (17) Its dangers are reflected in the ways in which the rabbis aimed to minimize exposure to biblical scrolls: “by discouraging informational reading in general, by placing restrictions on reading the Bible at certain times and on certain days, and by proscribing the circulation of vernacular copies of biblical texts.” (18)
If the biblical text was so problematic, how could it have played so central a role in rabbinic thought? Part 2 answers this question by arguing that the rabbis did not conceptualize the Bible chiefly as a written text at all, but as something spoken. “[T]he memorization-heavy reading practices described in early rabbinic literature had already rendered the written text of the Hebrew Bible a secondary, even superfluous, witness to the biblical tradition in daily practice.” These practices were rooted in elementary education, which did introduce basic literacy, but not for the purpose of enabling “informational reading.” Written texts served in the educational context only as “secondary—and often temporary—props in the transmission of recited formulas from teacher to student.” (19) Correlative to this praxis, the rabbis cultivated a bifurcated conception of Sinaitic revelation, consisting of a more original and authoritative Spoken Scripture, which continues to echo in the ritualized reading tradition (מקרא) that is performed in the synagogue, alongside a secondary Written Scripture (מסורת). The distinction between Spoken Scripture and Written Scripture transposes the conventional contrast between Written Torah (Scripture) and Oral Torah (the rabbinic corpus) into Scripture itself, in a new mode.
Wollenberg links these two sets of claims, but it is important to weigh them separately, on their own terms. Wollenberg’s contention that the rabbis conceptualized Scripture first and foremost as a spoken or recited object is on the whole as compelling as it is striking, well supported as it is, especially in chapter 4, by new and detailed historical and philological work. This chapter illuminates the methods of elementary scriptural education in the rabbinic world through comparison with contemporaneous methods in the Greek world. We discover a common emphasis on memorization in both contexts, and shared memory technologies. Literacy was one such technology. To the extent that written scriptural texts figure in the rabbis’ vision of elementary education, the student’s goal in reading them was not to extract new information from them, but to have them call to mind what was already stored in his memory, the Spoken Scripture that he had been taught through a sing-song method of “prereading” or “preliminary reading.” Corresponding to the role of memorization in elementary education, the rabbis engage with Scripture chiefly as a memorized, oral text. Wollenberg notes, for example, the boast attributed to R. Ishmael b. Yose: “I can write all of Scripture (כל קרייא) from my mouth (מן פימי, i.e., from memory)” (yMeg 4:1 [74d], cited at 168). To the evidence collected by Wollenberg we can add, among other things, Jerome’s observation (in his commentary to Isa 58:2) that the Jews repeat the prophetic books and the Pentateuch “from memory” (memoriter), and the eulogy for R. Eleazar b. R. Shimon (LevRab 30:1) that praises him as a master transmitter of Scripture (קריי) and a master transmitter of tannaitic traditions (תניי).[1]
I am less persuaded by the claim that the rabbis conceived of written biblical texts as problematic and/or dangerous. The generative matrix for Spoken Scripture was precisely the mundane educational context that Wollenberg so rigorously illuminates. Spoken Scripture emerged organically from this context. It was not the result of an ideological concern about or hostility toward Written Scripture, nor did it produce such concern or hostility.
Some rabbinic passages do tell of moments in Jewish history when Torah was lost or forgotten, but these passages do not focus exclusively on the written text of Scripture, nor do they seem terribly troubled by the threat; there is always someone there to restore what was lost. And the means of restoration, at least in some cases, is precisely the production of new written copies of the Bible (bBM 85b/bKet 103b, discussed at 42-44). Likewise, while the rabbis do know to tell how a martyr like Hanina son of Teradyon was caught with a Torah scroll on his lap by the Romans (bAZ 18a, discussed at 84 ff.), there is little reason to connect his death to the presence of written biblical text. There are references in rabbinic literature to restrictions on reading from Scripture scrolls (e.g., tShab 13:1, analyzed at 112 ff.), but these restrictions are in general understood to apply only on the Sabbath. To the extent that a more general reluctance comes to the fore (as, on one possible interpretation, in yShab 16:1 [15c], introduced at 114), it is grounded in a preference for Mishnah over Scripture, not in any concern about Written Scripture per se.
Because the prominence of Spoken Scripture in rabbinic circles was mainly bound up with conventional educational praxis and was not, I believe, connected with an ideological concern about Written Scripture, we will not be surprised to find that written scriptural texts do sometimes figure in scenes of rabbinic instruction and study. In a book that appeared last year, A.J. Berkovitz collects a considerable number of passages from rabbinic literature that feature Psalms scrolls.[2] For example, the Bavli tells a story in which a Palestinian sage is studying Scripture with his son and another student. When they come to the end of a certain (unnamed) biblical book, the scroll is taken away (סליק סיפרא), and then they “bring” Psalms (איתי תלים).[3] Or in a different way: The Palestinian Talmud (yKil 3:1 [28c] = yShab 9:2 [12a]) links a halakhic debate about the planting of mingled seeds to the spelling of the word “its seeds” (זרועיה) in Isa 61:11. In the course of the discussion, the Talmud cites the view of R. Haggai, a prominent amora of the 3rd generation, who construes the word as lacking a waw, and in fact reports that “wherever I find it [with] a waw, I erase it.” The debate in this passage turns on an element of orthography that only becomes manifest in writing, and a rabbinic sage speaks of regularly encountering and correcting written copies of Isaiah to accord with his position on the proper spelling.[4]
If the bifurcation of Scripture into Written and Spoken did not, so far as I can tell, render Written Scripture seriously “problematic” for the rabbis, then what were its consequences? For one, I would venture, it cemented Written Scripture as Written. Thus, when the rabbis pictured a situation of reading Scripture for its content—in contrast with recitative repetition of Scripture in the synagogue or consulting Scripture in an academic context as an aide mémoire—they conceptualized it primarily as an act of reading, and only secondarily as an act of Torah study or the like. This is evident, for example, in the reason that R. Nehemiah supplies for the prohibition against reading scrolls of Scripture on the Sabbath: so that one will refrain from reading legal instruments, for a person will reason that if he may not read Scripture, then a fortiori he should avoid reading business documents. Such reasoning presupposes that a person will mentally classify the act of reading Scripture, in the first instance, as a reading act. The same presupposition underlies other passages that group biblical scrolls with other written texts.[5]
Did the presence of Scripture in rabbinic circles predominantly as an oral object impact the ways in which the rabbis interpreted Scripture? Wollenberg does not directly confront this question.[6] I could imagine a connection between midrash and Spoken Scripture. One of the characteristic features of midrash, for example, is inference across verbal parallels: If the same word or words occur in two different contexts, one can assume that a feature of one context is present also in the other. This method is grounded in the sound assumption that like cases can shed light on each other, but in the rabbinic context it comes to be applied mechanically and pervasively. Could it be that verbal parallels loom larger in a context where Scripture is located more in the heart and in the mouth than on parchment, so that this feature of midrash—characteristic, in its mechanical instantiation, of Akivan more than Ishmaelian midrash—should be correlated with the notion of Spoken Scripture? Should the active, agentive role assigned to Scripture as writing (הכתוב) in the exegetical works of the school of R. Ishmael point us toward a different calibration of Written and Spoken Scripture in that circle?[7] Detailed engagement with the topic of exegesis can also put Wollenberg’s notion of Spoken Scripture into conversation with scholarship that finds especially in the intersection of rabbinic interpretive motifs and the targums evidence that the Torah text that the rabbis studied and transmitted was accompanied by an exegetical apparatus so tightly bound to it as to have amounted, in a sense, to part of the text itself.[8]
Wollenberg’s book compels us to keep firmly in mind what the trope of Written Torah v. Oral Torah tends to obscure, namely, that the rabbis absorbed, studied, and taught Scripture chiefly as an oral text. Surely, renewed attention to this fact will lead us to new conclusions about rabbinic scholasticism and perhaps also rabbinic theology.
[1] For discussion of the passage from Jerome and other similar ones see Samuel Krauss, “The Jews in the Works of the Church Fathers, VI: Jerome,” JQR 6 (1894), 232 n. 3. On the Leviticus Rabbah passage see Moulie Vidas, “What is a Tannay?” Oqimta 7 (2021), 50-51. The Jerome passage raises the question: To what extent did the possession of Scripture as a memorized text mark Jews as distinctive in relation to Christians?
[2] See A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), especially chapters 1 and 2, on the “material Psalter.”
[3] I cite from ms Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, 1337, as transcribed in Maagarim. For discussion see ibid., 59-60. Wollenberg takes up this passage at 166 n. 14. The passages concerning Psalms scrolls suggest a methodological question: To what extent can we consider Scripture as a single category in evaluating whether and to what degree the rabbis knew it as a written or as a spoken object? The same question arises, from the opposite direction, around the fact that a not inconsiderable percentage of the evidence collected by Wollenberg for memorized Scripture (165-75) relates to the book of Esther.
[4] The continuation of the passage refers to a certain “R. Huna, ‘scribe’ of the academy (ספרא דסידרא),” consulted as an expert in the spelling of the word in Isa 61:11. The characterization of this figure as a ספרא does not necessarily indicate involvement in the copying of biblical texts.
[5] See the bookend cases of the sectarian debates in mYad 4:6-8; bBB 164b. For the second of these passages see the discussion in Berkovitz, A Life of Psalms, 40.
[6] In her Introductory Remarks (8), Wollenberg sets her findings in contrast with recent scholarship that identifies points of contact between rabbinic scriptural exegesis and contemporaneous Greco-Roman approaches to Homer. This scholarship singles out, for the tannaitic period, the school of R. Ishmael as especially attentive to the contextual sense, and insistent that the Torah should be read as one would read a text authored by a human being. But in her Concluding Remarks on the medieval period (224-25), Wollenberg pushes back against the correlation of a particular conception of Scripture with specific exegetical approaches.
[7] On the agentive role of הכתוב in Ishmaelian exegesis see Azzan Yadin, Scripture as Logos: Rabbi Ishmael and the Origins of Midrash (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
[8] See especially Menahem Kister’s term, “a ghost version” (נוסח רפאים), for a version of the biblical text not directly attested in rabbinic literature but that was known to and evidently impacted rabbinic interpretation, or even for the case of an ancient exegetical tradition that accompanied the transmission of their biblical text. See Menahem Kister, Dynamics of Midrashic Traditions in Second Temple and Rabbinic Literature (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2024), 50-51.