From Scrolls to Memory: How Early Rabbis “Read” the Bible
In popular imagination, the ancient rabbis were attentive readers. We imagine them slumped over a scroll day and night, carefully unpicking the threads of the ancient teachings of the Torah. Such an image has also long been assumed in religious scholarship. The Pentateuch is and always was seen as a pristine and perfect record of divine will, right? Well, Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg has done her utmost to challenge this narrative in popular and academic minds with her new publication called The Closed Book: How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible. In focusing on rabbinical texts from the period from 200 CE to 650 CE, Wollenberg explores how early rabbinic thinkers perceived the biblical text, envisioning it not as an unblemished divine revelation but rather as a dynamic and evolving entity — a “make-shift scripture.” This scripture, they believed, echoed greater truths, shaped by history and lovingly reconstructed by human hands.
(Not) Reading the Bible
The first step to understanding how engagement with the Pentateuch might have worked is to understand the pedagogical practices of the times. How and what were people in the Greco-Roman and Semitic language contexts taught?
In contrast to modern alphabetic education alphabetic phase of a late antique child’s elementary reading education was often limited to inculcating basic phonetic decoding skills. That is, most elementary students were not expected to master the alphabetic word or sentence as a mode of communicative language in its own right by cultivating those facets of literacy that facilitate the process of extracting sense directly from written text, such as sight-word recognition. Rather, the purpose of early literacy education in these contexts was to make the elementary student sufficiently familiar with the sounds associated with the written letters so he could transform these signs into the more ‘natural’ mode of language furnished by the spoken word.
That means that children were not taught to “read” in order to understand the content of the words. Rather, they were taught to decrypt the text as a set of sounds and then correlate it to spoken words that they learned through oral transmission.
Before a student pronounced the text himself, his teacher would demonstrate to him how the text should be read — either individually as each student arrived at the passage in question or collectively as a classroom of students who moved through the same text. The latter process is the practice most frequently described in rabbinic literature (…). In the Latin context, this practice of reciting a passage before turning to study the written text would come to be known as the praelectio (prereading).
Therefore, education consisted of memorizing oral formulas and matching them with the text so it makes perfect sense that the vocalized Masoretic text of the Tanakh did not emerge until the 7th–10th centuries CE. It simply was not needed. One did not read the scroll unless one already knew what it was going to say. “When a late antique rabbinic Jew ‘read’ the Bible according to this practice, he did not extract words or meaning from written signs but rather pulled words and formulas from memory which could then be brought into ritual association with a written text. (…) To read-recite in the rabbinic context always meant to recite from memory — whether one did so in conjunction with a written text or without one.” In that sense, the written text was not the basis of the transmission of the content of the revelation. That was the job of the spoken tradition.
The (Un)changing Torah
Surely, we have all heard that the Torah was written down by Moses and thus has a singular author. The Bible is a perfect transcript of the divine will expressed at Sinai. Such belief seems not to have been one shared by early rabbinical sources, though. According to Wollenberg, the fact that the text does not change was not a condition for the text being sacred in the minds of early rabbinic thinkers.
In some early rabbinic traditions, Ezra the Scribe was imagined to have altered, reconstructed, or composed the Pentateuch as we know it. (…) such traditions embraced the Ezra authorship postulate to articulate an instinct that the extant text of the Hebrew Bible was in some fundamental way a second edition — a textual tradition ravaged by history and time, which correlated only imperfectly with the original Sinaitic revelation.
According to 4 Ezra, the text of the Hebrew Bible was lost during the Babylonian invasion of Jerusalem in 586 BCE and Ezra provided a replacement copy of the work. (…) Porphyry of Tyre, who is purported to have remarked in his (now lost) work Against the Christians: It appears to me to be replete with stupidity [to say]: ‘If you would believe Moses you would also believe me for he has written concerning me’ (John 5:46). . . . Nothing Moses wrote has been preserved, for all his writings are said to have been burnt with the temple. All those written under his name afterward were composed anew (συνεγράφη) one thousand one hundred and eighty years after Moses’ death by Ezra and his followers.
The sources that Wollenberg chooses do not do a sufficient job of convincing me that the Torah was completely lost and rewritten at any point. However, we do know that the original version of the Pentateuch was written in the Paleo-Hebrew script, not the Assyrian script that we are familiar with today, so changes certainly occurred, and it is not completely implausible that some parts could have been lost and rewritten from memory, given what we now know about how the transmission worked.
Rather than seeing the Torah as an immutable, inscrutable record of divine words, it might be better to view it through the lens of the two sets of tablets given to Moses on Mt. Sinai. “ — a first, lost, revelation written by God in a moment of hope and a second, extant, revelation written by Moses during a period of human failing. From its inception, these traditions suggest, the text of the Torah that was ultimately given to the world was a second edition, which had already been shaped by human inadequacies and marked by the compromises inherent to written communication.”
According to these early rabbinical traditions, the record of the divine revelation is by no means pristine but rough. It is a makeshift scripture, an approximation of greater truths, imperfect given the inescapable nature of its medium.
Torah №3 — The Scent of Life
Modern thought typically concentrates on the two Torahs. The written and the oral. The oral being basically records of rabbinical discussions. Both were supposed to be transmitted at Sinai, but perhaps the picture was more complex in the early rabbinical period. Since the rabbis possessed the written scrolls, the memorized oral formulas, and the oral tradition itself, Wollenberg proposes a distinction of three Torahs. The oral, the written, and the spoken. The claim goes that the spoken Torah stood between the oral and written tradition and constituted a sort of soul to the written body of the Torah. This claim is supported by the rabbinical approaches to the written Torah itself.
In the rabbinical mind, the written text was not intrinsically holy. It could even be a source of great danger.
Just as the human soul was subtly betrayed by the body that allowed it to enter the world — diminished by containment and made vulnerable to forces of temptation, physical coercion, and destruction — so sacred truth was subtly distorted by its reduction to a tangible form and thereby made vulnerable to misuse and misdirection.
This was most manifestly seen when the text ended up in the hands of sectarians, e.g. Christians. In other words, the body of the Torah is like the body of a beautiful woman. Beautiful, enchanting she is, that’s for sure, but she could also be an adulteress and lead you astray. And that’s… bad. Without the soul, the right mindset, the written body is as dangerous as it is divine. On the other hand, the written body of the revelation in the right hands was also thought of as a very powerful ritual object. The scroll is less a material object than a biological body. It acts as an embodiment of God’s presence just like icons or idols. This should not be understood metaphorically because remnants of that thinking are still with us today. Think of the parade of Torahs through the community at the synagogue during services with everyone clamoring to touch it; think of the mezuzot on our doors, just a small piece of the written text represents the divine presence in all its might. Nevertheless, whether we believe so today or not, for objects such as these to maintain their power in early rabbinic thought, they had to be inaccessible. The Torah is deployed as a whole, not as a sum of its content. “(…) the most ritually powerful forms of sacred writings in the classical rabbinic tradition were frequently those that had been made illegible — whether through erasure, enclosure, or some other means. In the rabbinic imaginary, the most supernaturally powerful book was an unreadable book.”
Such an approach to the written text did not limit itself to just the ancient period, but we see evidence of it in different traditions and much later, e.g., 17th century England: “Regarding those stories from the English civil war involving ‘the marvelous preservation of soldiers by Bibles in their pockets which have received the bullets.’ The implication in all these cases is that the power of the Bible lay not simply in its text, to be unlocked by rigorous exegesis, but rather in its ineffable holiness, its sacred magic. The Bible as an object, symbolizing and encapsulating the word of God, was believed to do duty comparable or superior to the Scripture as text.” A talisman simply doesn’t speak.
Side Note — Rabbinical Bumblers
Since “reading” the text was not really on the menu for early rabbis, and exegesis of the content being done mainly on the basis of memorised oral formulas, practices like assigning numerical values to letters and divining their meaning become a lot more suspicious:
“These (אלה (are the things [that God commanded you to do: Labor on six days and the seventh day will be a holy Sabbath for you” (Exod 35:1–2). The 106 chapter 3 rabbis of Keisrin said . . . ‘[We derive the number of thirty-nine forbidden labors from the gematria of the word ‘these’ (אלה[(: Aleph (א (is one, lamed (ל (is thirty, and het (ח (is eight, [which adds up to thirty-nine].’ For the sages did not refrain from explicating a verse [to distinguish] between hehת) (ח) het and) ה).”
Occasionally, exegesis may rely on the wrong spelling and sometimes there were attested deviations of the spoken and written text:
“There were certain words, for instance, that were traditionally “read but not written or written but not read” — such as the word ‘Euphrates’ vocally interpolated into the read-formula of the verse ‘David defeated Hadadezer son of Rehov, the king of Tzovah, on his way to return his rule to the river [Euphrates]’ (2 Sam 8:3; bNedarim 37b–38a). Other early rabbinic traditions also marked differences between ‘what is written’ and what ‘we read’ that do not reflect our contemporary consonantal transcripts or spoken formulas (bYoma 76b).”
Conclusion
Wollenberg certainly paints a very vivid and powerful picture of religious engagement in the early rabbinical period and provides a fresh perspective on the understanding of the Torah and religious practices that occupy our minds today. It seems that the miracle in all of this is not that a bunch of people managed to copy a book accurately over thousands of years, but that the vocalized transcript of the Bible that existed completely independently of the text in the minds of expert readers made it all the way from its inception to the 7th century Masorets without diverging all that much from the written form. In addition, Wollenberg exposes many ritual practices surrounding the Torah as derived from a pretty ancient school of thought indeed and raises a banner of caution. When you are reading the text, beware that even that which is “black on white” is never certain. It is inherently imperfect. It is not the text that keeps the divine revelation alive, but the community that practices it:
“Leviticus 12:5, one might read the consonantal text as ‘seventy’ (shivʿim) so that a birthing mother would be impure for seventy days after giving birth to a girl child but, according to the read-formula, we pronounce the word ‘two weeks’ (shevuʿayim).”
How would one ever know, if the oral/spoken traditions were lost? Perhaps the oral tradition deserves more credit and attention. Perhaps we should see it as containing valuable shards of the spoken revelation rather than pointless anthologies of halachic laws as it often is seen in non-orthodox movements of Judaism.
Wollenberg, R. S. (2023). Closed book: How the rabbis taught the jews (not) to read the Bible. Princeton University Press.
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