Torah in the Mouth

"Oral Torah is the comprehensive body of exegetical, theological, ritual, and legal tradition preserved within rabbinic Judaism. Transmitted in small, face-to-face discipleship circles in rabbinic communities from the Galilee to Mesopotamia, this tradition came to be the principal trait that distinguished rabbinic Judaism from the other Judaisms that preceded and surrounded it in the world of Late Antiquity. As the very name Oral Torah (torah she-be'al peh) implies, the transmission of this crucial cultural patrimony was deeply beholden to oral forms of instruction and preservation. By the close of the classical period of rabbinic culture in the seventh century C.E., rabbinic disciples believed as well that their orally transmitted tradition had its origins in a primordial revelation delivered at Sinai to Moses and Israel along with the covenantal Torah." "In this new study of rabbinic oral tradition, or "Torah in the Mouth," Martin S.^

Jaffee offers a fresh account of the social, cultural, and historical settings that shaped the conviction that the substance of rabbinic culture had been disclosed to Moses at Sinai. Taking advantage of a generation of fresh scholarship on the nature of oral traditional societies, the role of writing in cultures of the manuscript, and the manifold relationships of orally composed and performed texts to written versions and exemplars, Jaffee explores the role of written texts and writing in the shaping of rabbinic oral tradition. Building upon a growing body of studies of Second Temple-period Judaism and the role of scribal cultural within it, he explores the degree to which the Jewish communities of this period, including the Pharisees, may have been committed to the preservation of exclusively oral texts not entrusted to written documents.^

He suggests that the emergence of convictions about the Sinaitic origins of Oral Torah was bound up with efforts to shore up and institutionalize characteristic forms of rabbinic discipleship in the Galilean rabbinic communities of the third and fourth centuries C.E." "Jaffee's effort to rethink the nature and history of Oral Torah as a discipleship praxis and ideology of tradition will be of interest to students of the relationship of oral to literary textual practices, as well as to students of Second Temple Judaism, early Christianity, and rabbinic Judaism."--Jacket.