“This learned and innovative book upends conventional assumptions about the centrality of a fixed written Bible in rabbinic thought and practice. This is a great book, and a unique and valuable contribution to the field.”-Laura Suzanne Lieber, Duke University It also presents an insightful history of modern biblical scholarship. “ The Closed Book is an exciting and important contribution to the field of rabbinics, with significance for understanding the development of the Hebrew Bible. The result is a revealing reinterpretation of “the people of the book” before they became people of the book. In this way, early rabbinic authorities were able to leverage the idea of biblical revelation while quarantining the biblical text itself from communal life. 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 “third Torah,” memorized spoken formulas of the biblical tradition came to be envisioned as a distinct version of the biblical revelation. 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. 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. 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. 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.
Early 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.
0 kommentar(er)
