The Closed Book
How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible
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"Judaism is often described as the religion of the book par excellence-a religious movement built around the study of and commentary on the Hebrew Bible and steeped in a culture of bookishness that evolved from an unrelenting focus on a canonical text. Standard works of modern scholarship reinforce this view--that the Jewish tradition has always embraced the Bible as a blueprint for the religious life. In this monograph, Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg argues that this depiction of the tradition does not hold for much if its existence--and more specifically, not for the first thousand years after...
"Judaism is often described as the religion of the book par excellence-a religious movement built around the study of and commentary on the Hebrew Bible and steeped in a culture of bookishness that evolved from an unrelenting focus on a canonical text. Standard works of modern scholarship reinforce this view--that the Jewish tradition has always embraced the Bible as a blueprint for the religious life. In this monograph, Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg argues that this depiction of the tradition does not hold for much if its existence--and more specifically, not for the first thousand years after the Bible was first canonized. Prior to the modern era, late antique and early medieval rabbinic authorities were deeply ambivalent about the Hebrew Bible (aka Old Testament, aka Torah). The Bible can be a really unsettling book because of its repeated depictions of impiety, taboo behavior of all sorts, and unapologetic expressions of doubt and skepticism. It's no accident, then, that Jews--including their rabbis--seldom opened a Bible during this long period. But how can you avoid Bible reading while being part of a community in which that same Bible is supposed to be a central pillar of communal identity? The rabbis met this challenge by instituting two workarounds. On the one hand, they incorporated ritualized readings of biblical passages into liturgical gatherings, so that the text was 'read' (or chanted) in a rote, formulaic way--a way that did not lend itself to deep musing about meaning. In such gatherings, the Torah scroll was treated as an entity that manifests sacred powers in its own right (hence the development of rituals governing the handling of the scrolls, including the practices of binding, unrolling, and rolling them). On the other hand, the rabbis constructed a vast edifice of interpretation of Scripture that came to be known in the tradition as the 'Oral Torah', including rabbinic stories, commentary, and laws (and associated with terms such as midrash and Talmud). Both of these workarounds, argues Wollenberg, served to marginalize the written text of the Hebrew Bible as a source of cultural transmission and knowledge"--
