The Closed Book:
How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible
Princeton University Press, 2023.
In some ways, the story of The Closed Book begins with the day my survey course on Jewish biblical interpretation was banned by an ultraorthodox Jewish chaplaincy on campus. Early in the semester, a Conservative dayschool graduate taking the course (let’s call him Ari) came into office hours looking sheepish. He hemmed and hawed a bit. But eventually he worked up the courage to tell me that he had accidentally gotten my biblical interpretation survey course put on this chaplaincy’s blacklist of courses that Jewish students at the University of Michigan should never take.
As Ari explained it, he had been sitting next to the rabbi at Friday night dinner and began asking questions about some of the things I had taught them the previous week. When I inquired what precisely he’d said to the rabbi to elicit this extreme reaction, Ari reported that he had asked the rabbi what he thought of the idea that Joshua had finished writing the Torah after Moses died, what it meant that Moses himself might have written the book of Job as a sacred allegory, and how much Ezra might have changed about the language or script of the Torah in the process of re-issuing the Torah to the returned people of Israel after an Aramaic-seeped Babylonian exile. Apparently, the rabbi had objected to the idea that vulnerable young minds should be exposed to such heretical freethinking about the Tanakh and its origins. When I heard this, I just stared at Ari for a minute. “Ari…” I started, “Ari, did you tell the rabbi that I was just reading to you from the gemara that day? All of those stories are from Bava Batra and Sanhedrin…” “Oh,” Ari says, looking even more sheepish. “I guess I missed that part.” I couldn’t help but laugh. “So, you’re telling me that you somehow managed to get me banned from teaching Jewish Studies to Jewish student by quoting chazal (the founders of rabbinic Judaism as we know it)...?”
That was the moment that The Closed Book began to take its current shape. How was it possible, I wondered, that a student who had been to Jewish schools for twelve years didn’t even recognize classic statements about the origins of the Hebrew Bible as Talmud? How had we reached a juncture in contemporary Jewish life where the authors of early rabbinic literature recorded opinions about the Torah that a modern rabbi would declare dangerously heretical? Is our own understanding of how Torah She-Bichtav (Written Torah) works really so distant from the concept of Bible embraced by the founders of rabbinic Judaism?
The short answer is: yes.
We live in a world that has been divided by biblical criticism. If the academic field of biblical studies has a foundation myth it is the idea that a great chasm was opened by the advent of Bible study in the universities. On one side of this great divide are the university professors who deconstruct the Bible with scientific critical analysis. On the other side of this temporal canyon are all premodern religious thinkers who embraced the Bible, in the words of James Kugel, “as an utterly consistent, seamless, perfect book”[1] in which God speaks directly to his reader and gives them a perfect, unchanging blueprint for how to lead the good life.
I am not sure whether any scholarly idea has ever captured the public imagination quite as successfully as the great divide theory of biblical studies. In the culture war debates about the appropriate role of the Bible in contemporary American life, both sides have been quick to embrace the idea that premodern religious thinkers universally embraced a transcription model of scriptural revelation.[2] (That is, the idea that God himself painstakingly dictated or wrote out the Torah word for word, exactly as we have it now.) It is easy to see why this idea caught on so readily—since this version of scriptural history allowed both sides to walk away with valuable spoils of war. In this model, the academy gets credit for values like innovation, scientific achievement, and intellectual progress. In exchange, certain types of religious Bible readers are allowed to lay claim to the weight of nearly two thousand years of religious history.
Rabbinic Judaism is often given credit for being the example par excellence of this sort of obsessive close reading of a perfect biblical text. Of course, we can credit part of that stereotype to Paul—who famously announced that the “letter [of the law] kills” but the “spirit [of scripture] gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6). Since then, Jews have often been accused of obsessing over the dead letter of the Bible.
But if we survey the sorts of things that the authors of the Mishnah, Talmuds and Midrash actually said about the Hebrew Bible, a very different vision of the rabbinic relationship to the Bible emerges. While the early rabbinic authorities theoretically established the newly canonized Hebrew Bible as a central pillar of Jewish life, many early rabbinic statements about the biblical text and its status were ambivalent at best. In other words, we find that many early rabbinic authorities liked the idea of the Bible but were less enthusiastic about the actual biblical text itself.
It is not that the early rabbinic authorities were critical of the Hebrew Bible the way that modern scholars are (text)critical of the Bible: as an amalgamated and historical text definitively shaped by human hands. Indeed, it isn’t clear that early rabbinic authorities saw anything wrong with the textual record of their written revelation at all. But The Closed Book argues that many early rabbis had a much more capacious and flexible vision of the Sinaitic revelation and its biblical products than modern descriptions of these late ancient thinkers might suggest.
The Closed Book is divided into two parts—a question and an answer, if you will. It is still something of a commonplace to imagine that the late antique Jewish inheritors of the biblical text embraced that varied anthology as a perfect and harmonious blueprint for the religious life. The first half of the book confounds this portrait by exploring early rabbinic traditions in which the biblical text is described as very far from perfect and the practice of engaging with the biblical text as a blueprint for religious life is treated as positively dangerous. The first half of the book is divided into three chapters. Chapter one (A Makeshift Scripture: Tales of Biblical Loss, Reconstruction, and Forgery) analyzes a diverse body of early rabbinic traditions that imagine the biblical text as repeatedly lost, reconstructed, and remade into a makeshift approximation of the divine message. I argue that these stories shouldn’t be read as historical accounts but rather as a form of narrative theorizing about the vulnerabilities inherent to textual transmission and the implications of that vulnerability for the prospect of preserving an authentic written revelation. The second chapter (A Book that Kills: Reading Narratives about Lethal Bibles) explores a genre of early rabbinic fantasy in which close encounters with the biblical text result in literal death. Again, these stories are read not as incident reports but as a form of allegory. In these tales, rabbinic authors paint vivid literalizing portraits of the spiritual dangers they thought adhered to a written text that channels the power of the divine mind without being able to adequately represent or control that power. The third chapter (A Neglected Text: Mistaken Readings, Text Avoidance, and the Dangers of Reading as We Know it) analyzes legal limitations imposed on Bible reading in early rabbinic communities. It asks what we can learn about the nature of rabbinic concerns regarding written scripture from the nature of their practical attempts to quarantine the biblical text within religious communal life. Taken together, the first half of the book might be said to outline a previously unrecognized rabbinic ‘problem with the Bible.’
The second half of the book explores how it came to be that religious authorities who were deeply ambivalent concerning the biblical text nevertheless established the Bible as a central pillar of early Jewish religious life. The second half of The Closed Book argues that early rabbinic doubts concerning biblical textuality did not destabilize the emerging shape of rabbinic Judaism as a biblical religion because late antique rabbinic practitioners engaged with written text very differently than we do. Rather than deriving new information from written words, rabbinic readers overlayed the biblical text with memorized recited formulas that were thought to provide meaning to the ritual signs of written letters—not unlike many bnei mitzvah in our own times. Many of these late antique practitioners, moreover, came to conceptualize the written revelation in a way that followed their reading practices—bifurcating the record of biblical revelation into a communicatively-inert written parchment transcript and a separate tradition of memorized spoken formulas that preserved the biblical revelation as a living recitation tradition passed down by human mouths, which was thought to function beyond the limitations of written text.
The second half of the book is also divided into three chapters. Chapter four (A Spoken Scripture: Unlinking the Written and the Oral in Rabbinic Practices of Bible Reading) argues that doubts about the biblical text were less pressing in early rabbinic circles because the written text had already been rendered a secondary, even superfluous, witness to the contents of the biblical revelation in this religious reading practice in which most practitioners “read” a canonical text by memorizing an oral formula that roughly corresponded to that text and ritually reciting it from memory—sometimes in physical conjunction with a written text but never drawing meaning directly from written words. The fifth chapter (The Third Torah: Oral Torah, Written Torah, and the Embrace of Spoken Scripture) demonstrates that many early rabbinic thinkers would come to imagine this memorized oral echo of the biblical tradition as a separate and more authentic witness to the biblical revelation that transcended the fixity, narrowness, and fragility that made the written transcript of the Pentateuch seem such an unlikely record of the divine will. This spoken scripture came to be imagined as a third category of revelation, somewhere between the fixed transcripts of the biblical Written Torah and the fluid traditions of the rabbinic Oral Torah. Chapter six (A Closed Book: The Torah Scroll as the Body of Revelation) explores how these rabbinic thinkers came to conceptualize written text of the Hebrew Bible once they had been rendered communicatively silent in communal practice. It argues that these parchment objects came to be treated less as a record of communication than a form of priestly body—their biological components forming an almost living conduit between realms.
The book concludes by taking a more speculative step into the middle ages. The final chapter of the work (Concluding Remarks: From Third Torah to God’s Monograph) suggests that this new portrait of the early rabbinic relationship with the Hebrew Bible might help us to better understand the sudden global spread of the ‘peshat revolution’ (biblical commentary as we know it) in Jewish circles from Baghdad to Troyes around the end of the first millennium. Within a century or two, Jewish authors across the world were suddenly writing new kinds of biblical commentaries that shared certain basic orientations but were so were markedly different from one another in their styles of execution that many scholars have questioned whether they can really be traced to the same source. The Closed Book suggests that this sudden transformation in Jewish modes of engaging with the biblical text has proven difficult to explain in part because medieval rabbinic attitudes about the biblical text have been retrojected into the early rabbinic period in various ways—obscuring an important moment of transition. The concluding chapter proposes that this sweeping but variegated transformation in Jewish literary culture was spurred by the emergence a new conception of the Bible in Jewish circles. As the Hebrew Bible came to be imagined for the first time as a purposeful single-authored work (a sort of sacred monograph), this abstract portrait was then applied in each milieu in keeping with local literary modes—thereby accounting for both the sweep and the diversity of the peshat turn.
While The Closed Book was written to address certain confusions and ambiguities in our understanding of how Jews have read the Bible, it also calls into question in a broader way whether the Bible works the way we think it does. There exists a surprisingly resilient notion in both the scholarly and public imagination that biblical religions are, at their core, reading religions—communities in which religious thought and practice are derived from earnest (if sometimes creative) interpretation of the biblical text. Despite the growing body of evidence that many (perhaps most) religious practitioners have not historically engaged with written scriptures in the way that we previously imagined, this information has had surprisingly little effect on the abstract scholarly vision of what a scriptural religion looks like—or how the biblical text in particular has functioned in religious communities that engaged with it. Instead, this new body of evidence has largely been treated as eating away at the edges of the previous model. In the face of this erosion, an ever-shrinking circle of historical Jewish and Christian communities has functioned as a protected conceptual space in which deeply held cultural presuppositions concerning the nature of sacred text and its cultural influence have continued to flourish in the face of opposing evidence. Rabbinic Judaism especially continues to be imagined in many fields as the religion of the book par excellence—a religious movement emerging from study of the Bible and steeped in a culture of scholasticism that evolved from that unrelenting focus on a canonical text. The Closed Book seeks to unsettle this paradigm at its core by showing that even a historical community widely imagined to sit at the very center of this reading project did not relate to the Bible in the ways that we ascribe to them.
[1] James L. Kugel, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 15. For a recent review of scholarship on this issue, see Duncan MacCrae, Legible Religion: Books, God, and Rituals in Roman Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 143–47.
[2] On which term, see Benjamin Sommer, Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 2.