Jewish Concepts of Scripture: A Comparative Introduction
()
About this ebook
What do Jews think scripture is? How do the People of the Book conceive of the Book of Books? In what ways is it authoritative? Who has the right to interpret it? Is it divinely or humanly written? And have Jews always thought about the Bible in the same way?
In seventeen cohesive and rigorously researched essays, this volume traces the way some of the most important Jewish thinkers throughout history have addressed these questions from the rabbinic era through the medieval Islamic world to modern Jewish scholarship. They address why different Jewish thinkers, writers, and communities have turned to the Bible—and what they expect to get from it. Ultimately, argues editor Benjamin D. Sommer, in understanding the ways Jews construct scripture, we begin to understand the ways Jews construct themselves.
Related to Jewish Concepts of Scripture
Related ebooks
Sinai & Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Inheriting Abraham: The Legacy of the Patriarch in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5New Testament Conversations: A Literary, Historical, and Pluralistic Introduction Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPortraits of Jesus: A Reading Guide Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Story, Ritual, Prophecy, Wisdom: Reading and Teaching the Bible Today Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPermission Granted--Take the Bible into Your Own Hands Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAbraham on Trial: The Social Legacy of Biblical Myth Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Zionism and the Quest for Justice in the Holy Land Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Three-Dimensional Jesus: An Introduction to the Synoptic Gospels Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFinding God in Suffering: Journeying with Jesus and Scriptures Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Faith of Jesus: The Jesus of History and the Stages of Faith Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGathered on the Road to Zion: Toward a Free Church Ecclesio-Anthropology Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTheology as Construction of Piety: An African Perspective Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChrist the King: The Messiah in the Jewish Festivals Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsToward an Anabaptist Political Theology: Law, Order, and Civil Society Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJesus Is There: Discovering Jesus at Work in the Old Testament Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJesus of Bethlehem: Davidic King of the Jews Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJesus Swagger: Break Free from Poser Christianity Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Jingjiao: The Earliest Christian Church in China Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Church and Work: The Ecclesiological Grounding of Good Work Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuestioning the Incarnation: Formulating a Meaningful Christology Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLife Unsettled: A Scriptural Journey for Wilderness Times Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhy We Love Middle-earth: An Enthusiast's Book about Tolkien, Middle-earth, and the LotR Fandom Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsElecting Not to Vote: Christian Reflections on Reasons for Not Voting Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWouldn’t You Love to Know?: Trinitarian Epistemology and Pedagogy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFinding Jesus in His Prayers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Not Scattered or Confused: Rethinking the Urban World of the Hebrew Bible Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChristianity and the Social Crisis Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGod Without Violence, Second Edition: A Theology of the God Revealed in Jesus Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5"The Formation of the Christian Church" - An Alternate Biblical History Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Jewish History For You
The Violinist of Auschwitz Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz: A True Story of Family and Survival Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Dressmakers of Auschwitz: The True Story of the Women Who Sewed to Survive Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Book Thief: A Novel by Markus Zusak | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Josephus Complete Works Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Weight Of Ink Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5History of the Jews Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story Of Auschwitz [Illustrated Edition] Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews, A History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5"Our Crowd": The Great Jewish Families of New York Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Words That Hurt, Words That Heal: How To Choose Words Wisely And Well Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Jews Don’t Count Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5NIV, First-Century Study Bible: Explore Scripture in Its Jewish and Early Christian Context Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsToward a Meaningful Life: The Wisdom of the Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5999: The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Jewish Transport to Auschwitz Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Bravest Voices: The Extraordinary Heroism of Sisters Ida and Louise Cook during the Nazi Era Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Five Books of Maccabees in English: With Notes and Illustrations Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCommandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Holy Bible: Paragraph Edition Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Lily's Promise: Holding On to Hope Through Auschwitz and Beyond—A Story for All Generations Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Jews in America Trilogy: "Our Crowd," The Grandees, and "The Rest of Us" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Related categories
Reviews for Jewish Concepts of Scripture
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Jewish Concepts of Scripture - Benjamin D Sommer
Jewish Concepts of Scripture
A Comparative Introduction
EDITED BY
Benjamin D. Sommer
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
www.nyupress.org
© 2012 by New York University
All rights reserved
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jewish concepts of Scripture : a comparative introduction /
edited by Benjamin D. Sommer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8147-4062-0 (cl : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8147-6002-4 (pb : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8147-2479-8 (ebook)
ISBN 978-0-8147-2460-6 (ebook)
1. Bible. O.T.—Criticism, interpretation, etc., Jewish.
I. Sommer, Benjamin D., 1964 –
BS1186.J474 2012
221.1—dc23 2012015882
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.
Manufactured in the United States of America
c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
There, beyond the house,
on the horizon,
the lofty mountains, wearing
their secret as a gray veil,
live their mute lives,
and beneath the floor of the house
the dust
lives its hidden life,
its unique and solitary life,
along with all that is hidden in it—
seeds, roots, springs . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
An expression—uncertainty, just so—is poured
over the surface of its dark stones—
and after all, that is almost faith.
—Zeldah, The Old House,
in Shirei Zeldah
(Tel Aviv: Haqqibbutz Hame’uchad, 1985), 9
Translation by Benjamin D. Sommer
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction: Scriptures in Jewish Tradition, and Traditions as Jewish Scripture
Benjamin D. Sommer
2 Concepts of Scripture in the Synagogue Service
Elsie Stern
3 Concepts of Scripture in Rabbinic Judaism: Oral Torah and Written Torah
Steven D. Fraade
4 Concepts of Scripture in the Schools of Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael
Azzan Yadin-Israel
5 Concepts of Scriptural Language in Midrash
Benjamin D. Sommer
6 Concepts of Scripture among the Jews of the Medieval Islamic World
Meira Polliack
7 Concepts of Scripture in the School of Rashi
Robert A. Harris
8 Concepts of Scripture in Maimonides
James A. Diamond
9 Concepts of Scripture in Nahmanides
Aaron W. Hughes
10 Concepts of Scripture in Jewish Mysticism
Moshe Idel
11 Concepts of Scripture in Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig
Jonathan Cohen
12 The Pentateuch as Scripture and the Challenge of Biblical Criticism: Responses among Modern Jewish Thinkers and Scholars
Baruch J. Schwartz
13 Concepts of Scripture in Yehezkel Kaufmann
Job Y. Jindo
14 Concepts of Scripture in Moshe Greenberg
Marc Zvi Brettler
15 Concepts of Scripture in Mordechai Breuer
Shalom Carmy
16 Scripture and Modern Israeli Literature
Yael S. Feldman
17 Scripture and Israeli Secular Culture
Yair Zakovitch
Glossary
About the Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Jennifer Hammer from New York University Press for suggesting that I edit this volume and for her patience. I worked on the volume during sabbaticals at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Tikvah Center for Law and Jewish Civilization at New York University School of Law and also while serving as a faculty member at Northwestern University and the Jewish Theological Seminary. All these places provide settings that nurture rigorous and engaged scholarship, and I am privileged to be associated with each of them. Funding for producing the indices and proofreading was provided by the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation. I am, always, very grateful to their support for research in Jewish Studies. My friend Richard Tupper gave me consistently excellent advice on matters of writing, conceptualization, and style. Andrew Katz did a fine job of editing the manuscript and preparing it for publication. Leslie Rubin did a masterful job preparing the index and aiding me with the proofs. It was a pleasure working with her. My family—Jennifer, Avraham Ayyal, Sarah Gilah, and Eliana Shlomit—create the perfect mix of respect and love, sometimes letting me sit in my office to study and work, and sometimes coming in and thus reminding me it’s time to play.
Benjamin D. Sommer
October 7, 2011
Teaneck, NJ
Chapter 1
Introduction
Scriptures in Jewish Tradition, and Traditions as Jewish Scripture
Benjamin D. Sommer
On one level, there is a simple answer to the question What is scripture for the Jews?
For roughly the past two thousand years, Jews have had a canon of twenty-four books that form the Jewish Bible,¹ starting with Genesis and ending with Chronicles.² Some Jewish groups up until about two thousand years ago accepted additional books as scripture, but by the end of the first century CE the canon used by Jews today was more or less universally accepted by all Jews. In this respect, Jews differ from Christians, since to this day there are books regarded by Orthodox Christians and Catholics as scripture that Protestants either reject or regard as less than fully scriptural.³ The anthology containing these twenty-four books is known to Jews by several names: Kitvei Ha-qodesh (sacred texts
), Miqra (Reading
), and Tanakh (an acronym for the three sections of the Jewish canon: Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim).⁴
On a deeper level, however, Jews of different times, places, and sects would answer the question What is scripture?
in profoundly different ways. However much they agree on what books and even what precise words, consonants, and vowels constitute scripture, they have a wide range of views regarding the nature and purpose of these texts. The chapters in this volume attempt to answer the questions: How have various Jewish thinkers and movements conceptualized scripture? What is scripture for? What type of information does one get from it—historical, scientific, theological, moral, or something else? Is one primarily supposed to get information or guidance from it, or does it have some other purpose altogether? For example, are copying it, decorating it, or marching around a sacred space with it commendable ways to show reverence to God? By chanting it, can one acquire merit or perhaps alter the Godhead or even perform magic? Answering these questions involves not so much studying how various Jews have read scripture (that is, examining the interpretive methods Jews have used to derive meaning from it) but asking prior questions: Why do they read it, or perform rituals with it, in the first place? For what reasons have Jews turned to this anthology?
The varied answers to these questions in the chapters that follow will speak for themselves. Before turning to them, however, it is useful to consider an overview of certain core ideas regarding scripture that almost all Jewish groups have assumed for the past two thousand years. We will see that these ideas differentiate Jewish conceptions of scripture from Christian ones in fundamental ways. To be sure, all twenty-four books of Jewish scripture are part of the Christian Bible in its various forms. Nonetheless, in many respects these texts function so differently in the two traditions that one can rightly say that the books in question are not the same books at all but entirely different works that happen to have the same words.
The Primacy of Torah
We should begin by noting that the twenty-four books of the Jewish canon are not all equal. The first five books (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, often referred to in Hebrew as the Torah or the umash and in English as the Five Books of Moses or the Pentateuch) are by far the most important, the most authoritative, and the most familiar to Jews. The remaining books are traditionally divided into two groups, the Nevi’im, or Prophets (a category that includes not only prophetic books such as Isaiah and Jeremiah but historical works such as 1–2 Samuel), and the Ketuvim, or Writings (sometimes called the Hagiographa). On a practical level, however, it would be more helpful to say that the Jewish Bible has two parts: First and foremost, there is the Torah—the T in the acronym Tanakh. Also, there is the rest of the Bible—the Nakh of the acronym; in fact, one does sometimes hear the term Nakh used among Jews to refer to the part of the Bible coming after the Torah.
Only the Torah is chanted in its entirety in the course of synagogue worship (usually, over the course of a year); only a fraction of the remaining material is chanted in the synagogue. Jewish schools tend to give much more attention to the Torah than they give to the Nakh. While Jewish beliefs flow from and to some degree claim to be based on the whole Tanakh, Jewish law—the core of Jewish practice and identity—claims to be based on the Torah alone.
Scripture and Tradition
One can justly wonder whether it is accurate to equate scripture
in Judaism solely with the Tanakh. The historian of religion William Graham writes in his very useful article on scripture in The Encyclopedia of Religion that the term scripture
designates texts that are revered as especially sacred and authoritative in . . . religious traditions,
and he goes on to describe a number of characteristic roles and attributes of scriptures in religious traditions from around the world.⁵ As one thinks about Graham’s definition from the point of view of Judaism, one quickly realizes (as Graham himself notes)⁶ that the classical works of rabbinic literature—that is, the Mishnah, the Talmuds, and the midrashim⁷—fit the definition almost as well as the Bible, and in some ways even better. For example, Graham writes that the written scriptural text symbolizes or embodies religious authority in many traditions (often replacing the living authority of a religious founder such as Muhammad or the Buddha).
⁸ This sentence applies to both the Bible and rabbinic literature in Judaism; more specifically, we might say that the Bible symbolizes religious authority, while rabbinic literature embodies it, for on a practical level Jewish religious authorities seeking directives regarding Jewish law and ritual turn not to the Bible but to rabbinic texts. Similarly, Graham points to the importance of scripture both in public ritual (where it may be recited aloud or it may serve as a ritual object) and in private study (which shapes devotional and spiritual life). It is true that the Torah and, to a lesser degree, passages from the Prophets and the Writings play roles in public ritual in a way that rabbinic texts do not: they are chanted in synagogue worship according to highly formalized rules, for instance—and in this respect, the Bible is more typically scriptural than rabbinic literature is. Nonetheless, in many forms of Judaism (especially in the culture of ultra-Orthodoxy), studying as a devotional act focuses on the Talmud and not on the Bible⁹—and in this respect, the Talmud is more scriptural for many Jews than the Bible is. Every text that achieves scriptural status in a religious community elicits extensive popular and scholarly exegesis and study of its contents,
Graham points out, and this exegesis tends to stress what Graham calls the unicity
of the scripture, its wholeness and its lack of self-contradiction.¹⁰ Here again, rabbinic literature fits the description just as much as the Bible does; whole literatures emerged in medieval and modern Judaism that comment on the Bible and the Talmud, and these literatures often stress the unity of the texts they interpret, focusing on harmonizing what appear to be contradictions between different parts of the biblical or talmudic whole. In the case of the Babylonian Talmud, a whole literature of commentaries, known as Tosafot, arose whose main concern is to emphasize this harmony of the whole talmudic corpus. Graham asserts that a text is only ‘scripture’ insofar as a group of persons perceives it to be sacred or holy, powerful and meaningful, possessed of an exalted authority, and in some fashion transcendent of, and hence distinct from, other speech and writing.
¹¹ This sentence fits the Mishnah and also, for many Jews, the Zohar, the central work of Jewish mysticism; but it is even truer of the Tanakh, or at least of the Torah (indeed, the Zohar itself makes claims about the exalted, transcendent, and ontologically distinct nature of the Torah that it does not make about itself).
One senses, then, that in Judaism scripture is not an either/or category. Biblical books and some postbiblical texts are scriptural, but in different ways and to different extents. Within the Tanakh, the Torah is more scriptural than the Prophets and Writings are. Within rabbinic literature, the Babylonian Talmud is more scriptural than the Jerusalem Talmud is, and some, but not all, Jews accept the Zohar as having what Graham identifies as scriptural attributes. One can even argue—and some classical Jewish thinkers have argued—that in many ways some works of rabbinic literature are more canonical than the biblical Prophets and Writings are.¹² Thus, for Judaism, the whole category of scripture is more fluid than it is in Christianity (especially in Protestant Christianity). In this regard, Judaism has much more in common with, say, Hinduism or Buddhism. In a magisterial work titled What Is Scripture? (whose probing analyses underlie the whole project of the book you are now reading), the historian of religions Wilfred Cantwell Smith shows that a theoretically somewhat informal scripture
exists in Hinduism, an amorphous or polymorphous set of texts that are variously sacred, authoritative, transcendent, and/or influential.¹³ Much the same can be said of the manifold scriptures of Mahayana Buddhism and even of the more restricted, but still polymorphous, scriptures of Theravada Buddhism.¹⁴ Precisely the same situation exists in Judaism. Pausing to examine the ways that several types of literature (biblical, rabbinic, and otherwise) are variously sacred, authoritative, transcendent, and/or influential will be worth our while.
The modern Jewish thinker Moshe Halbertal distinguishes between two types of canon, which he calls normative and formative. Texts that are canonical in the normative sense are obeyed and followed; they provide the group loyal to the text with guides to behavior and belief. Texts that are canonical in the formative sense are taught, read, transmitted and interpreted. . . . They provide a society or a profession with a shared vocabulary.
¹⁵ For Jews, both the Bible and rabbinic literature function as canon in the formative sense. Both are studied, taught, transmitted, and interpreted, and consequently both help to form Jewish identity.¹⁶ Halbertal suggests in passing that the Bible is canonical in the normative sense, but I think that in practice this is not the case. In Judaism, the Bible is taught and read, transmitted and interpreted, but it is not the location of legal norms that are followed on a practical level. When one wants to know whether a pot is kosher or whether a business transaction is acceptable or what time the Passover Seder must begin, one does not open up a Bible. One turns instead to works of rabbinic literature. Crucial beliefs regarding messianism, resurrection, and the nature of God are also articulated in rabbinic and postrabbinic texts rather than in the Bible.¹⁷ Judaism’s normative canon is found primarily within rabbinic literature rather than in the Bible.
In short, one can make a very strong argument that the religious category scripture
applies in Judaism to both the Bible and rabbinic literature, even though the latter has usually been thought of as belonging in the extrascriptural category that theologians and scholars of religion refer to as tradition.
For Jews, however, the categories of scripture
and tradition
overlap; the very distinction between them is a Protestant one, and its application to Judaism can lead to misunderstanding.¹⁸ Many Jewish texts apply the Hebrew term torah to both the Bible and rabbinic literature. As Steven Fraade explains in his chapter in this volume, rabbinic texts use the term Written Torah
to refer to the Bible and Oral Torah
to refer to works of rabbinic literature. Both, according to classical rabbinic thought, were revealed at Sinai.¹⁹ The classical rabbis often stress the unity of these two Torahs, effectively denying that there is an ontologically significant difference between them at all.²⁰
All this raises the question: if this volume is concerned with Jewish conceptions of scripture, should it limit itself to describing how various Jewish thinkers and movements view the Bible? Perhaps in our discussions we should include rabbinic literature under the rubric scripture
; some works of Jewish philosophy and mysticism might come under this rubric as well. A strong argument can be made that in focusing on the Bible, this volume imports a Protestant Christian notion of scripture into Judaism and thus misrepresents the tradition it is attempting to explicate.
Nonetheless, several arguments, both theoretical and practical, support the decision to limit this volume’s discussion to Jewish conceptions of what might—without redundancy—be termed biblical scripture.
First, for all the emphasis in some rabbinic texts on the close relationship and underlying unity of the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, Jewish tradition does distinguish between them. As a ritual object, the Written Torah has a status that the Oral Torah lacks. Scrolls of Written Torah used in synagogue worship (especially scrolls of the Pentateuch, but also of the book of Esther and in some synagogues of other works from the Writings and the Prophets as well) serve as rule-bound loci of holiness in a way that editions of rabbinic texts do not. Jewish law regulates and ritualizes the chanting of biblical texts in liturgy, but it does not do so for rabbinic texts. (Here we should recall that Judaism is a religion of law, and thus the highest honor Judaism bestows on a person or thing is to subject it to rules. That biblical texts are rule bound to a far greater degree than rabbinic ones is therefore significant.) On a more theoretical level, Jewish thinkers and movements have invested considerable time and effort into conceptualizing both the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, but they do so in different ways; and thus it makes sense to focus our discussions on one or the other. A book that attempted to treat conceptions of the Bible as scripture as well as conceptions of rabbinic literature as scripture would either be too long or too shallow. The chapters that follow focus therefore on the Bible, but the reader will always need to keep in mind the scriptural characteristics of some post-biblical teachings in traditional Judaism.²¹
The Term Scripture
The English term scripture
is misleading in a discussion of Judaism for two reasons. First, this term focuses our attention on the Bible as a written document and may lead us to forget that the Bible was both a written and an oral/aural text for most of Jewish history.²² To be sure, the Bible is known in rabbinic literature as the Written Torah, and rabbis often cite biblical verses with the phrase kakatuv, as it is written.
But one of the most common terms for the Bible in Hebrew, miqra, comes from the verb qara, which means not only read
but read aloud, call
; similarly, biblical verses in rabbinic literature are often cited with the phrase shene’emar, as it is said.
For centuries, most Jews knew the Bible primarily from hearing it chanted. Many Jews memorized large parts of it (and here it is useful to recall that the Hebrew word for memorizing by heart,
‘al peh, literally means memorizing by mouth
). The technology through which one comes to know information shapes how we use that information, and thus it is important to recall the extent to which the Bible was as much an aural/oral document for Jews throughout the ages as a written one. When scripture was mostly memorized, recited, and chanted, it functioned in one set of ways, and people searched it for certain types of information or guidance. When it became more widely available in handwritten copies and, ultimately, in printed editions, changes occurred in the ways it was interpreted and the sorts of information people tried to get from it.²³ The chapters in this volume by Sommer and Harris describe a move from an ancient approach to the Bible as a collection of verses to medieval and modern views of the Bible as a collection of stories, poems, and legal corpora; the rabbis of the ancient period read the Bible atomistically, while later scholars tended to read it more holistically. Many factors contributed to this change, but the greater availability of written texts played a particularly important role.
The term scripture
is misleading in another way: for much of Jewish history, the plural form scriptures
would be more appropriate than the singular.²⁴ In the modern West, we tend to think of the Bible as a single entity. Typically, one owns a Bible in one volume. But in antiquity, this was not the case; individual biblical books were written on individual scrolls. Thus, the conceptual category of a unified scripture was less prominent. (This situation probably played some role in engendering Judaism’s two-tiered conception of the Tanakh, in which Torah is most sacred and Nakh less so.) One might have expected this situation to change with the invention in the first century CE of the codex, a one-volume format that could contain the whole Bible, or with the rise of printing in Europe in the fifteenth century. Even then, however, the situation stayed largely the same. Jews continued to use individual scrolls of the Pentateuch for liturgical purposes; indeed, Jews still use these scrolls for liturgical reading in synagogue. For study, they used multivolume editions that usually included only part of the Bible, along with rabbinic commentaries; many Jews use these volumes for study to this day. In the majority of cases, these editions contained the Pentateuch or, somewhat less frequently, the Pentateuch along with those selections from the Prophets used in synagogue lectionary.²⁵ These simple facts had profound effects on the way Jews conceptualized the Bible until fairly recently. For contemporary Jews, the idea that one might have a conception of the Bible
seems natural: the Bible
is a category we think with, since the Bible
is a volume many of us own. But religious Jews prior to the twentieth century rarely owned a Bible. Rather, they owned multi-volume collections that contained both biblical texts and rabbinic commentary; or they did not own any books at all but heard selections from the Bible chanted from scrolls and explicated by preachers at a synagogue. Thus, they were less inclined to think of the Bible
as a category, though they were not entirely unfamiliar with it either.
Several factors fortified the notion of the Bible (as opposed to scriptures
) as an important category for modern Jews. These included, first of all, the rise of Zionism, which emphasized the Bible instead of the Talmud as the central text of the Jewish people.²⁶ Thus, for example, Israeli school-children and new recruits to the Israeli military are normally given a small, one-volume Tanakh—an important cultural artifact that conveys certain values even if the student or soldier rarely opens it. Another factor, at least for central European and North American Jews (and Jews elsewhere influenced by them), was greater contact with Protestants, for whom scripture was a central category of religious thought. We should recall that the increasing prevalence of the one-volume Bible and, with it, the greater prominence of the concept of scripture
as opposed to scriptures
in Judaism are very recent developments in Jewish history.
Theologies of Scripture versus Conceptions of Scripture
This book is meant to complement another volume published by NYU Press, Christian Theologies of Scripture: A Comparative Introduction, edited by Justin Holcomb. The differences between the books, which begin with the title, are instructive, because they reflect some essential differences between Judaism and Christianity. First, Judaism is not only a religion but in wider senses a culture, and the Jews are not only a faith community but an ethnicity.²⁷ One can be a Jew and an atheist in a way that one cannot be a Christian and an atheist. (Jewish law, especially as established by Maimonides, regards an atheistic Jew as a sinner, but in Jewish law such a Jew remains a Jew.) As a result, this volume cannot limit itself to discussions of theologies of scripture. The Bible plays roles not only in Jewish religious thought and practice but throughout all realms of Jewish culture. Secular Jews (and especially secular Zionists) have found the Bible more useful, more relevant, more malleable, and more interesting than they have found rabbinic literature and other Jewish religious writings. On a practical level, the Bible has an even more important place in secular Judaism than it has in religious Judaism—hence the need for chapters by Yair Zakovitch and Yael Feldman on the place of the Bible in Israeli culture and Israeli literature. (Had space permitted, chapters on the Bible in Yiddish literature and in American Jewish culture would have been appropriate additions to this volume. Given Feldman’s focus on Israeli fiction, a separate chapter on the fascinating roles the Bible plays in Israeli poetry might have been written as well, but space did not allow this.)²⁸
Second, the discipline of theology does not have the same place in Judaism that it has in Christianity, while the genre of commentary does not have the same importance in Christianity that it has in Judaism. Both types of literature are known in each religion, but commentators play for Jews the central role that theologians play for Christians. Jewish children start learning Rashi—not Maimonides—as early as third grade; adults, laypeople and scholars alike, study both, but they are rather more likely to study the commentaries penned by the former than the philosophical works of the latter. When religious Jews do study Maimonides, they are more likely to study his legal works, which points to another central literature in Judaism: halakhic texts, including both legal codes and responses to specific questions addressed to legal authorities over the centuries. Thus, my statement regarding the role of theologians might be rephrased: for Jewish communities, commentators and legal authorities play a central role that theologians rarely achieve. We saw previously that the Jewish thinker Moshe Halbertal discusses formative canon
—that is, the curricula that shape Jewish lives not only within the walls of educational institutions but far beyond them as well.²⁹ The formative canon of Jews for the past two thousand years has involved commentaries on the Bible and on rabbinic literature; it has involved legal texts; but to the extent that it has included theological and philosophical works, their influence has been more mediated, and their place in curricula has been less robust.
Consequently, unlike the volume that Holcomb edited, this volume does not limit itself to theologians. It attends to biblical scholars and interpreters, ancient, medieval, and modern: Azzan Yadin-Israel discusses the interpretive schools of Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Yishmael; Meira Polliack and Robert Harris discuss medieval commentators; Baruch Schwartz, Job Jindo, and Marc Brettler discuss various modern Jewish biblical scholars. (In Schwartz’s case, the discussion of how Jewish scholars in the past two centuries responded to modern theories about the Pentateuch not only lays out several schools of modern Jewish thought but clarifies core attitudes to the Pentateuch among premodern Jews as well.) This volume does include discussions of some theologians, but it is noteworthy that most of them were biblical commentators and/or translators as well. This is the case for Nahmanides, whom Aaron Hughes discusses, for Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, whom Jonathan Cohen examines, and for Mordechai Breuer, whom Shalom Carmy analyzes; this also applies to some of the mystics whom Moshe Idel discusses in his chapter. (Similarly, Yehezkel Kaufmann, whom Jindo discusses, might be considered a Jewish thinker or theologian as much as a biblical critic.) Maimonides, the subject of James Diamond’s chapter, is the only thinker who could not in some sense be considered a biblical commentator. Yet even Maimonides devotes close to a third of his philosophical magnum opus, The Guide of the Perplexed, to explaining the nature of biblical language and metaphor. Mindful of W. C. Smith’s thesis that scripture is a human activity, often manifesting itself through ritual,³⁰ I also commissioned Elsie Stern’s chapter on the conception of scripture that emerges from the Jewish lectionary cycle (a conception, Stern reminds us, that has enjoyed the most widespread purchase among actual Jews throughout history). Some ritual uses of scripture are also discussed in Idel’s chapter.
The list of topics that appeared in the preceding two paragraphs will raise a question among many readers: why these thinkers and movements and not other, equally important and influential ones? There is no doubt that this volume is impoverished by its many absences. There are dozens of commentators, ancient, medieval, and modern, to whom space might have been devoted. Among the philosophers and theologians, many of great interest are missing: Saadia Gaon on one end of the historical spectrum, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Emmanuel Levinas on the other. Conceptions of scripture in nonrabbinic forms of ancient Judaism, such as the community responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls, were vastly different from what has been surveyed here, and their absence is keenly felt. Several modern biblical scholars³¹ have taught us that scripture existed before Scripture, torah before the Torah: already in the biblical period itself, long before the Bible was canonized and indeed before many biblical books had been edited into the forms in which we know them, some texts were already regarded as sacred and authoritative. These included, for example, sayings of the prophets that were later edited into the prophetic books we know and law codes attributed to Moses that later became parts of the Pentateuch. Thus, even before there was a Bible, there was scripture in ancient Israel; one might say that texts regarded as holy in the preexilic biblical period gradually became the Bible in the postexilic biblical period and the early postbiblical period. Consequently, chapters on ancient Israelite conceptions of scripture would have added much to this volume. Had we but space enough, and time, we could have added more chapters, but the resulting volume would have been impossible to publish. So this smaller volume will have to suffice. Turning its pages, readers will not find everything in it; but the fact that finishing its work is impossible should not dissuade one from beginning it.
NOTES
1. To count twenty-four books, one needs to recall that Jewish tradition regards twelve short prophetic books (beginning with Hosea and ending with Malachi) as a single unit, known as Trei Asar (the Twelve); so, too, Ezra-Nehemiah are a single book, as are First and Second Samuel, First and Second Kings, and First and Second Chronicles.
2. In a few manuscripts, the order of these books differs slightly; for example, in the oldest manuscript of the Masoretic text, the Aleppo Codex, Chronicles appears before Psalms rather than at the end of the canon. This fact hardly overturns my observation that there has been unanimity among Jews regarding the canon’s contents over the past two millennia.
3. Specifically, most Protestants do not accept certain Jewish books from the late Second Temple period as part of their scripture; they often term these books the Apocrypha.
Catholics and Orthodox Christians, however, do accept these books as scriptural (and thus do not traditionally refer to them as Apocrypha). These books have not been part of Jewish scripture for around two thousand years, but many of them were probably regarded as scriptural by some Jewish groups in the late Second Temple period.
4. In English, Jews generally refer to the anthology as the Bible.
Contrary to what some people assume, they do not typically refer to it as the Hebrew Bible
; that term is a neutral, nondenominational one used in academic settings to refer to the anthology in question, instead of using the specifically Christian term the Old Testament
or the specifically Jewish term the Bible.
5. William Graham, Scripture,
in Encyclopedia of Religion, 16 vols., ed. Mircea Eliade and Charles Adams (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 13:133b–45b; the definition is from 133b.
6. See ibid., 134a–b, and cf. 141b. See also the discussion of Talmud as parascripture
in Wilfred Cantwell Smith, What Is Scripture? A Comparative Approach (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 204–6.
7. For brief definitions of these terms (and of similar terms that occur throughout this volume), see the Glossary at the end of the book.
8. Graham, Scripture,
138a–140b.
9. On the relative place of Bible and Talmud in Jewish curricula through the ages, see the helpful summary in Moshe Halbertal, People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 98–100, with extensive references to primary and secondary sources. This book is crucial reading for anyone interested in Jewish conceptions of scripture.
10. Graham, Scripture,
141b, 143a.
11. Ibid., 134b.
12. For references to such thinkers, see Menahem Kasher, Torah Shelemah, 48 vols., in Hebrew (Jerusalem: Beit Torah Shelemah, 1979), 19.277 §108. See further my discussion of this issue in Unity and Plurality in Jewish Canons: The Case of the Oral and Written Torahs,
in One Scripture or Many? Perspectives Historical, Theological and Philosophical, ed. Christine Helmer and Christof Landmesser (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 119–20.
13. Smith, What Is Scripture?, 126–27, 299n. 3; see also Graham, Scripture,
134a–b, 141b.
14. See Smith, What Is Scripture?, 146–75, esp. 150–53
15. Halbertal, People of the Book, 3.
16. Some groups focus more on one, and some more on others. The Bible is a much more important part of the formative canon for secular Israeli Jews; rabbinic literature, and especially the Babylonian Talmud, is a more important part of the formative canon for ultra-Orthodox Jews.
17. To be sure, traditional Jewish thinkers have linked these beliefs and practices to the Bible through exegesis, but one would not be able to note their presence there without the rabbinic commentaries.
18. In many ways, scripture
in Judaism (and in Catholicism) is a subset of the larger category of tradition,
or in any event tradition is conceptually and historically prior to scripture rather than, as many people assume, vice versa. See my remarks in Unity and Plurality,
109–11, esp. n. 3, and 124–25, esp. n. 46.
19. Note that at this point we have seen three distinct uses of the term Torah
in this chapter, all of them frequently found in Jewish literature:
• Torah
(especially, "the Torah") can refer to the first and most important part of the Jewish Bible, the Five Books of Moses.
• The Written Torah
refers to all twenty-four books of the Jewish Bible.
• Oral Torah
refers to works of rabbinic literature. The boundaries of this sort of Torah are fluid and ever expanding; clearly, the Mishnah and Talmuds and classical midrashim are part of it, but so are some (though not all) comments made by both students and teachers during classes held at a yeshiva or a synagogue just yesterday, and today, and tomorrow.
A fourth use, also common in Jewish circles, should also be noted:
• Torah
(but not "the Torah") can mean all Jewish learning in all times, whether written down or not.
It is worth pausing to ask which meaning a classical Jewish text intends when it uses the term Torah.
In some cases, the answer to this question is not entirely clear—a circumstance which further supports the notion that Jewish scriptures represent the sort of polymorphous, theoretically informal scripture that W. C. Smith describes in Hinduism.
20. See Sommer, Unity and Plurality,
121–27.
21. There are exceptions to what I have said here about the scriptural nature of rabbinic tradition in Judaism, especially in the Judaism of the Sadducees, the Karaites, and perhaps also the Dead Sea Scrolls. On the Karaites, see chapter 6 in this volume by Meira Polliack.
22. On the importance of recalling the oral/aural aspect of scripture not only in Judaism but in religious traditions around the world, see Smith, What Is Scripture?, 7–9 and 376, s.v. Oral/aural,
as well as Graham, Scripture,
137b–39a. Graham has devoted an entire volume to this crucial issue: William A. Graham, Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
23. The invention of the printing press (a relatively recent event, from the point of view of Judaism’s long history) had a profound effect on the ways people related to the Bible and conceptualized it. The availability of the Bible in easily searched and retrieved digital formats today is likely to have a significant effect on Jewish and Christian notions of scripture in the future, indeed in the very near future.
24. Smith, What Is Scripture?, 13–14, 53–56, 126–27.
25. See Herbert Zafren, Bible Editions, Bible Study and the Early History of Hebrew Printing,
Eretz Israel 16 (1982): 240–51. Zafren’s listing of early printed editions shows that only about 15 of the 142 Hebrew editions of biblical texts and commentaries printed between 1469 and 1528 contained the full Tanakh. The way these early Hebrew printers responded to the market’s demand shows that above all, Jews wanted editions of the Pentateuch and Pentateuchal commentaries; to a lesser extent, they wanted other biblical texts chanted in synagogue; and to some degree they also wanted copies of the Psalter. Printings of all other biblical texts seem to have been the early equivalent of hardcover books purveyed by a European academic press. Zafren’s study covers the first century of printed Bibles; my impression is that similar tendencies endured until the twentieth century, when Zionism and other factors encouraged the proliferation of small one-volume editions of the whole Tanakh—though a visit to a traditional Hebrew bookstore will show that to this day multivolume editions with commentary, most often consisting of the Pentateuch alone (or Pentateuch with prophetic lectionaries), remain exceedingly common.
26. See chapter 16 by Yael Feldman and chapter 17 by Yair Zakovitch in this volume on the centrality of the Bible in Zionist and Israeli identity.
27. To be sure, all religions are in some sense cultures, but in the case of Judaism, nonreligious aspects of the culture are unusually prominent.
28. For such a discussion, see Chana Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 114–40 (originally published in Prooftexts 5 [1985]: 129–40), as well as Ruth Kartun-Blum, Profane Scriptures: Reflections on the Dialogue with the Bible in Modern Hebrew Poetry (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1999).
29. See note 15.
30. Smith, What Is Scripture?, 18 and passim.
31. I think of James Barr, John Barton, Alexander Rofé, Yair Zakovitch, Avigdor Shinan, and Michael Fishbane. These scholars followed up insights from their predecessors, especially Yehezkel Kaufmann and Isac Leo Seeligmann.
Chapter 2
Concepts of Scripture in the Synagogue Service
Elsie Stern
For most contemporary Jews, the Jewish Bible
is a single volume containing the twenty-four books of the Tanakh, which is readily available and accessible through the process of reading. While totally familiar to us, these paired phenomena—the Bible as a book and reading as the primary means of accessing it—are relatively new developments in the history of Jewish encounters with scripture. Until the onset of printing, most Jews would never have encountered a Bible.
They might have encountered a Torah scroll in the synagogue or scrolls or volumes containing selections from other parts of the canon. However, manuscripts of the entire biblical corpus, bound together in a single volume, would have been quite rare. In addition, while it is difficult to gauge past rates of literacy with any precision, it is likely that most premodern Jews would not have read
the Bible.¹ Rather, they would have heard texts contained in the Bible either recited or retold in various settings. Of these settings, the synagogue was, by far, the most common. Since as early as the first century CE, the synagogue has been a site for the encounter between Jews and Torah.² By the mid-third century, the authors of the Mishnah were already advocating the regular recitation of biblical texts in the synagogue.³ The rudimentary practices outlined in the Mishnah became the foundation for a lectionary practice that continued to grow and develop throughout the medieval period and continues to be a central part of synagogue practice today.⁴ While there have always been opportunities for more educated Jews to encounter texts of scripture in school settings, since the earliest days of Judaism, the majority of Jews have encountered scripture primarily in synagogue.
This sociological reality has important implications for our understanding of Jewish scripture. In theory, the entire contents of the Tanakh are invested with scriptural status and wield the communal authority that this status brings. However, most Jews would never have encountered texts that were not recited in the synagogue. For example, many Jews would never have encountered the books of Chronicles or Ezra-Nehemiah as well as vast swathes of the prophetic literature. They might have been entirely ignorant of the contents of these books and, in some cases, might not have known the books even