By Rabbi Rachel Esserman

Most scholarly works on the Bible focus on its composition, for example, how the book was written and/or who wrote it. Little thought has gone into the way the ancient rabbis actually read the text. According to Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg’s fascinating, but difficult to read, “The Closed Book: How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible” (Princeton University Press), that’s because we assume their method of study was similar to that of medieval time and contemporary times. Wollenberg, though, believes this is a faulty assumption: her evidence shows that the ancient rabbis were ambivalent about the written word and approached the physical Torah scroll as a potentially dangerous object.

The author notes that in Second Temple times, the Bible was not a closed canon; there was no fixed and stable text. The rabbis came to question the nature of the biblical revelation itself since the first revelation was given orally when God spoke to the Israelites at Mount Sinai. The first tablets, which Moses broke, were written by God, while the second tablets were transcribed by Moses, meaning that they were written by human hands. Which of these revelations were the full and correct word of God?

Some rabbinic traditions recorded in the Talmud also question whether the written scroll of the Torah text is the original text Moses transcribed. They speak of a Torah written by Ezra and other scribes, who were thought to have reconstructed the text from memory. In these traditions, Ezra is said to have “composed a new edition of the Bible while the people were in exile – adapting both the writing and the language to their new home by bringing the ancient Hebrew tradition in line with the majority culture’s [Babylonian] imperial writing conventions.” This included changing both the lettering and some of the words into Aramaic, which was the language used in Babylon.

Physical contact with the biblical scroll was also thought to be potentially dangerous. Wollenberg notes that in later Babylonian traditions, “simple proximity with the biblical text can wipe out both individuals and populations without any spiritual mechanisms at work. In such traditions, the every existence of a material written revelation had become a source of multiform and inchoate terror.” For example, there are stories where someone dies because they are holding a copy of the Torah text. The rabbis also worried about the danger that the text could be read and interpreted incorrectly: their concern was that the followers of Jesus, sectarians or heretics could misread God’s word.

The most challenging section of “The Closed Book” is the author’s discussion of how the ancient rabbis approached studying the text in very different ways than in later historical periods. According to Wollenberg, people did not learn the text by reading from the written scroll, but rather learned to quote from memory. Students were taught to read just enough so they could recognize words, but their main study was to memorize set portions of the Torah, which they were expected to recite when called upon. Even when a scroll was used in a ritual, the readers did not look at or sound out the words, but used the text as a prompt for reciting the memorized version. 

Wollenberg also offers stories from the talmudic text that limits when and how long a person could hold and read from a scroll. Deaths were recorded as a punishment for violating these restrictions. Plus, sections of the Torah were changed/censored when read aloud: the four letter name of God was never to be sounded out and sections of the written text that were thought to be incorrect were to be read in corrected versions. When studying, quoting from the text was to be done by memory, rather than reading from the scroll. While it was OK to check a word or a phrase to make sure it was correct, it was considered improper for the teacher to lead the discussion from a written text. 

Perhaps the most intriguing part of Wollenberg’s discussion is her idea that the ancient rabbis believed there were three versions of Torah: an oral memorized version, a written one and the original revelation at Sinai that was an experiences that could not be put into words. The author writes, “Many early rabbinic thinkers would treat Spoken Scripture (mikra) as a generational echo of this first, more authentic, biblical revelation that issued from the mouth of God – the fuller spoken scriptural revelation that was captured all too briefly on the first tablets of the law before escaping its written prison to return to its natural state. According to this vision of Sinai and its products, the original spoken iteration of the biblical tradition survived the destruction of the first tablets and would be passed from mouth to mouth as an intangible accompaniment to the written text – as a sort of universal soul of the biblical revelation that was linked to written parchment bodies preserving the revelation on the second tablets, but not contained by them.”

The idea of a Torah scroll as a living body that serves as an intermediary between God and humans is also found in some rabbinic texts. The physical scroll becomes a sacred object – something of far more value and worth than its parchment and ink – and was considered a path between humans and God as a kind of replacement for what once occurred in the Temple cult of sacrifice. In fact, some thought the Torah scroll had its own soul and, therefore, was an object to be venerated and handled with care.

Wollenberg notes that, by the Middle Ages, the ancient rabbinic style of study began to disappear, with people focusing on the details of the written word in order to draw meaning from each and every word in the text. While she is unable to pinpoint an exact time and reason why this occurred, she does posit that its occurrence was due to the changing physical nature of what was used for studying, meaning the use of books rather than scrolls. The written version of the text was now thought to have Divine authorship, leaving readers to puzzle out the meaning behind contradictions and variant spellings of words in different parts of the Bible. Some commentators of the time declared that the text was not supposed to be easy to read. Its difficulties were there as a challenge for rabbis/commentators to discover its true/hidden meanings.

“The Closed Book” is a scholarly work with prose that can be difficult to read due to its use of foreign terms and academic terms that might not be familiar to all readers. This reviewer is not enough of a scholar to judge whether Wollenberg’s theories are correct, but her work made for interesting and challenging reading. Anyone interested in the development of the Bible and biblical commentary will want to read “The Closed Book” and judge for themselves.