Athanasius Kircher, Turris Babel (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
From my earliest scholarship, beginning with my doctoral dissertation, “Enosh and His Generation: Scriptural Translation and Interpretation in Late Antiquity” (1980) and its revision as my first book, Enosh and His Generation: Pre-Israelite Hero and History in Post-Biblical Interpretation (1984), I have been intrigued by the dynamic dialectic between scriptural translation and interpretation, as between the main languages of Jewish antiquity: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. This interest tracks to my graduate studies and interests in the mid-1970s, to which I find myself returning periodically. One of the main changes that I made in revising my doctoral dissertation for publication, for example, was to move the section on targum from an opening chapter on “classical translations and versions” to a later chapter on “rabbinic interpretations.” In other words, I concluded that the targumim (and similarly for other ancient translations) are better understood with respect to their most proximate interpretative culture than alongside, say, the Samaritan Pentateuch as a textual-critical witness. But the opposite argument is also apposite, highlighting the ambiguity of translation as both a textual witness and a hermeneutical offspring. The book was hailed as an example of what at the time was called (but not by me) “comparative midrash,” drawing on a wide array of ancient sources—Second Temple Jewish, early rabbinic, early Christian (including patristic and Syriac), Samaritan, and Mandaean—focusing on the interpretation of a scriptural verse (actually, half of a verse) through its various interpretive trajectories across time and place, as an ever-changing product of those variegated cultural contexts (a “world in a gram of sand”).
In my second book, From Tradition to Commentary: Torah and its Interpretation in the Midrash Sifre to Deuteronomy (1991), winner of the 1992 National Jewish Book Award in the category of scholarship, I decided to focus at length on a single early rabbinic commentary (rather than across a range of extracted comments from various sources, as in my first book), now concentrating on the questions of what the commentary form is, and why it was so broadly adopted and adapted by the early rabbinic sages, in contradistinction (with important exceptions) to the prevailing forms of scriptural interpretation in pre-rabbinic (Second Temple period) antecedents. I also sought to understand the commentary form as employed in rabbinic literature in relation to its Greco-Roman analogues (viz. Philo of Alexandria). Instead of simply extracting meaning from the text, I stressed the dialogical nature of the commentary (and our reading of it) as a function of its pedagogic performativity, that is, what does it “do” and how and how does it do so. While my first two books focused mainly on narrative midrash, upon completing my second book I decided to ask the same questions regarding rhetoric and form, with adjustments, of legal texts, both rabbinic and non-rabbinic. In particular, I focused on passages from Sifre Deuteronomy that dealt with revelation, the rabbinic sage, Torah study, judges, and courts, as a way of determining how commentary sought hermeneutically and rhetorically to bolster rabbinic interpretive and judicial authority.
From my first book to my most recent, comparison (and its pitfalls), both within Judaism and without, has been a constant preoccupation as I continued to focus on texts of legal interpretation, and to struggle with how best to translate the rabbinic texts upon which I was commenting and to what extent either should inform or presume the other. As the Dead Sea Scrolls became increasingly available to scholars, much of my attention turned to comparisons and contrasts between them and early rabbinic traditions and rhetorical structures, especially legal structures. These studies proved to be richly rewarding and revealing. They were collected and published as two volumes, the first being a conference volume that I co-edited with the late Aharon Shemesh, of blessed memory: Rabbinic Perspectives: Rabbinic Literature and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Proceedings of the Eighth International Symposium of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature, 7-9 January, 2003 (2006); and Legal Fictions: Studies of Law and Narrative in the Discursive Worlds of Ancient Jewish Sectarians and Sages (2011). These illustrate the advantages of combining close textual reading (beginning with translation) with the conceptual and comparative breadth of higher commentary. Topics include the rabbinic reconfiguration of a number of biblical figures and institutions such as the king, the high court, and the priesthood. Key ancient texts that received my particular attention were (from the Dead Sea Scrolls) the Community Rule, 4QMMT, the Damascus Document, the Temple Scroll, and (from early rabbinic literature) the Mishnah, the Tosefta, the Mekhiltas, the Sifra, and Sifre Deuteronomy, with constantly renewed interest in the dynamic relationship between law and narrative across the Qumranic and rabbinic corpora, along with forays into the visuality of revelation and the relevance of visual archaeological realia to our understanding of Judaism(s) in situ.
My two most recent book projects continue along these trajectories, and revisit the question of the relation between translation and commentary as mutually enlightening forms of reading, again with one foot in the Dead Sea Scrolls and another in rabbinic attitudes toward language, multilingualism, and translation. The first new book is a complete translation with annotations and commentary to one of the most important of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Damascus Document, as the next volume in the Oxford Commentary on the Dead Sea Scrolls (November/December 2021). It was a six-year opportunity for textual intimacy during which to continue and extend a persistent interest in the relation between law and narrative (as evidenced in Legal Fictions) since the Damascus Document, perhaps modeled after the book of Deuteronomy, dynamically combines the two on many levels, as, I show, do 4QMMT, the Mishnah, and the tannaitic midrashim. As I state in the preface, the Damascus Document seeks performatively to “Bring the Messiah through Law,” by interlacing rather than isolating them from one another, as modes of both reading and study/teaching.
The other book that I recently completed comprises a set of essays on the multilingual context in which ancient Judaism was born and developed, and the rather explicit and remarkable ways that the rabbis confront, both thematically and performatively, the role of translation and an understanding of languages in contact in that context. It is provisionally titled, Before and After Babel: Language(s) and Translation in Ancient Judaism. I anticipate that it will be published in 2022, the culmination of some forty-five years of reflection and wrestling with regard to what appears on virtually every page of every text of rabbinic Judaism: intense interest in the relation of Hebrew to other Jewish and non-Jewish languages, and the common practice of “code switching” between them, often in relation to layered commentary. These continue as central features of Jewish culture and society (and self-understanding) throughout their long and vital history to today.
Finally, a high point of my academic career was the gift of a festschrift by my students, colleagues, and friends, resulting from a conference at Yale on the occasion of my sixty-fifth birthday: The Faces of Torah: Studies in the Texts and Contexts of Ancient Judaism in Honor of Steven Fraade (ed. Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, Tzvi Novick, and Christine Hayes, 2017). Many of the above themes and approaches are explored by some of my closest colleagues of many decades. It is a testament that the texts, topics, and methods with which I have wrestled for so long will continue to be studied and appreciated for many years, if not generations, to come.
Steven Fraade is the Mark Taper Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University.