The closed book: how the Rabbis taught the Jews (not) to read the Bible

Media type: E-Book

Title: The closed book : how the Rabbis taught the Jews (not) to read the Bible

Contains: Frontmatter
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations and Citation Practices
Rabbinic Literature: Editions Cited
Introductory Remarks: The People of the Book before the Book
1 A Makeshift Scripture: Tales of Biblical Loss, Reconstruction, and Forgery
2 A Book That Kills: Rabbinic Stories about Lethal Encounters with Biblical Text
3 A Neglected Text: Mistaken Readings, Bible Avoidance, and the Dangers of Reading as We Know It
4 A Spoken Scripture: Unlinking the Written from the Oral in Rabbinic Practices of Bible Reading
5 A Third Torah: Oral Torah, Written Torah, and the Embrace of a Spoken Scripture
6 A Closed Book: The Torah Scroll as the Body of Revelation
Concluding Remarks: From the Third Torah to God’s Monograph
Index

Contributor: Wollenberg, Rebecca Scharbach [Author]

Published: Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, [2023]

Extent: 1 Online-Ressource (xiv, 256 Seiten)

Language: English

DOI: 10.1515/9780691243306

ISBN: 9780691243306

Identifier:

RVK notation: BD 3900 : Allgemein

Keywords: Judentum > Rabbiner > Bibel > Bibel > Bible. Pentateuch > Kanon > Rabbinische Literatur > Hermeneutik > Geschichte

Origination:

Footnote:

Description: A groundbreaking reinterpretation of early Judaism, during the millennium before the study of the Bible took center stageEarly Judaism is often described as the religion of the book par excellence—a movement built around the study of the Bible and steeped in a culture of sacred bookishness that evolved from an unrelenting focus on a canonical text. But in The Closed Book, Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg argues that Jews didn’t truly embrace the biblical text until nearly a thousand years after the Bible was first canonized. She tells the story of the intervening centuries during which even rabbis seldom opened a Bible and many rabbinic authorities remained deeply ambivalent about the biblical text as a source of sacred knowledge.Wollenberg shows that, in place of the biblical text, early Jewish thinkers embraced a form of biblical revelation that has now largely disappeared from practice. Somewhere between the fixed transcripts of the biblical Written Torah and the fluid traditions of the rabbinic Oral Torah, a third category of revelation was imagined by these rabbinic thinkers. In this “third Torah,” memorized spoken formulas of the biblical tradition came to be envisioned as a distinct version of the biblical revelation. And it was believed that this living tradition of recitation passed down by human mouths, unbound by the limitations of written text, provided a fuller and more authentic witness to the scriptural revelation at Sinai. In this way, early rabbinic authorities were able to leverage the idea of biblical revelation while quarantining the biblical text itself from communal life.The result is a revealing reinterpretation of “the people of the book” before they became people of the book

Access State: Restricted Access | Information to licenced electronic resources of the SLUB

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