What is Jewish Scripture?

Performed Scripture in the Rabbinic Period

A handful of texts from the second temple period testify to the fact that many Jewish communities engaged communally with material they identified as torah. For example, Josephus states that Jewish law prescribes that “every week men should desert their other occupations and assemble to listen to the Law and to obtain a thorough and accurate knowledge of it (Against Apion 2, 175). Similarly, Philo writes “He required them to assemble in the same place [houses of prayer] on these seven days and, sitting together in a respectful and orderly manner, hear the laws read so that none should be ignorant of them (Hypothetica 7, 12). However, these sources give little detail regarding the nature or contents of these engagements with torah. The earliest narrative depiction of the communal recitation of scripture in the synagogue appears in Luke 4:16–22. This text describes an incident during Jesus’ visit to the synagogue in Nazareth as follows: “And he stood up to read; and there was given to him a book of the prophet Isaiah. He opened the book and found the place where it was written. …”

The first rabbinic comments regarding communal scripture performance appear in the third and fourth chapters of the Mishnaic tractate, Megillah (compiled c. 250 ce). These prescriptions are expanded upon in the corresponding chapter of Tosefta Megillah, another early collection of rabbinic dicta, as well as in the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds (the 5^th–6^th century commentaries on the Mishnah and other early traditions). The rabbinic dicta treat topics ranging from the lectionary structure of the performed scripture to regulations regarding the performance itself.

In the aggregate, these dicta describe the lectionary structure as follows: Torah performances occurred on Sabbaths, festivals, Mondays, and Thursdays. On Sabbaths and festivals, the performed torah consists of a lection from the pentateuch (hereafter, parashah, pl. parshiyot) and a lection from the prophetic literature (hereafter, haftarah, pl. haftarot). The weekly parshiyot follow the order of the canonical pentateuch: according to one system, each successive parashah picks up where the previous one left off. In an alternate system, the Sabbath parshiyot are consecutive while the weekday parshiyot are “previews” of the next Sabbath's lection. The haftarot for regular Sabbaths, however, are not arranged sequentially. Instead, they are excerpts from the prophetic corpus that are linked to the parashah through a thematic or lexical connection. On Mondays and Thursdays, there is no haftarah, and a shorter unit of pentateuchal text is recited. Depending on locale, the consecutive reading of the pentateuch was completed in either one year or approximately 3 ½ years. On festivals and special Sabbaths, both the parshiyot and hafatarot are linked to the occasion on which they are read. While over time, the haftarot became fixed, in the rabbinic period only the haftarot for holidays and special occasions were designated (t. Meg. 3:1–9; b. Meg. 29a–31a). Haftarot for ordinary Sabbaths probably differed from community to community and may have differed from year to year in a single community. A few other scriptural texts were also performed in the synagogue: in the early rabbinic period, the book of Esther was recited on the festival of Purim. By the end of the rabbinic period, the books of Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations and Ecclesiastes were also designated as readings for the festivals of Passover, Shavuot (Pentecost), the Ninth of Av and Sukkot (Tabernacles), respectively. A collection of Psalms, known collectively as Hallel was also recited on festivals.

In addition to describing the structure of the lectionary, the rabbinic texts also mandate performative aspects of the ritual including the number of readers for Sabbaths and festivals (m. Meg. 4:1–2) and the categories of people who can perform the recitation (m. Meg. 4:6). According to the Mishnah, the recitations are preceded and followed by blessings (m. Meg. 4:1) and by the end of the rabbinic period, an elaborate ritual had developed around the recitation which included the ritual procession and display of the torah scroll (Sof. 14). The Mishnah also mandates that the torah performance include an intra-linear translation of the Hebrew text into Aramaic. In the case of the parashah, the torah reader recites a verse from an open scroll and the translator recites a purely oral translation of the verse (m. Meg. 4:4). According to y. Meg. 4:3, he is not allowed to refer to a written translation text. The process is the same for the haftarah except that the reciter of the Hebrew text can read as many as three verses before pausing for the translation (m. Meg. 4:4).

It is important to note that written torah scrolls were central to these performances. A wide range of ritual behaviors identified them as holy objects that were loci of the divine word and focal points of communal devotion. However, for most participants in the performance, the function of torah scrolls was primarily iconic or symbolic. Only the reciters themselves experienced the written text as the vehicle or primary communicator of scriptural content. For the members of the audience, the oral performance was the vehicle for the communication of scriptural content, not the text itself.

For most readers of this essay, the phenomenon of scripture performance is probably a familiar one. Many readers have probably participated in the communal recitation of scripture as either performers or auditors. However, there is a crucial difference between our experiences of scripture performance and those of Jews in late antiquity. Most, if not all, of us are not only reciters/auditors of scripture, but also readers of scripture. For us, the ritual performance of scripture in the church or synagogue is one of two (or more) modalities through which we experience scripture. For most of us, the experience of hearing scripture is subordinated to, or embedded within, the more primary experience of reading scripture.

This was probably not the case for most Jews in antiquity. As I noted above, most Jews in late antiquity were probably illiterate. For Jewish women and for most Jewish men, the ritual recitation of torah in the synagogue would have been the primary, if not the only, mode of engagement with scripture. Thus the performed scripture of the synagogue constituted scripture for most Jews. This performed scripture differed in significant ways from the canonical Tanakh.

The corpus of performed torah was significantly smaller than the canonical Tanakh. Since most Jews encountered scriptural texts only in their lectionary mode, it is likely that most Jews never encountered the extensive swathes of canonical material that were not performed in the synagogue. This may even have been true for a large percentage of the literate minority. It is clear from the rabbinic literature that the minority of literate Jews who participated in the most advanced levels of rabbinic education were familiar with texts from across the Tanakh corpus. However, most literate Jews probably did not advance to this level of education (Hezser 1997: 93–110). The majority of literate Jews would have received a more basic scriptural training which probably consisted largely of instruction in the reading and recitation of pentateuchal texts (Hezser 2001: 69–72). Jews whose synagogue lectionaries resembled those preserved in the medieval lectionary lists, may nevber have encountered most of the texts of the Deuteronomic history, the entire books of Job, Daniel, Proverbs, Chronicles, and Ezra Nehemiah as well as large sections of the canonical prophets. Since these texts were not recited communally, it is likely that most Jews would not even know that some of them existed. This is not to say that the content of those texts would have necessarily been absent from the cultural experience of non-literate Jews. They might have heard stories about the heroes inscribed in the book of Judges or the exploits of Israel's early kings. However, they would not have encountered the scriptural texts in which these stories are inscribed. Thus, the content of the scripture, when identified as performed torah is, in this aspect, far more limited than that of the Hebrew Bible/Tanakh.

The order of material in the performed torah also differed from that of the canonical Tanakh. For contemporary literate readers/hearers with ready access to biblical texts, there is always an implicit canonical context for any scriptural performance. If the weekly lection is excerpted from the book of Isaiah, the literate hearer instinctively visualizes that lection as part of the larger text of Isaiah and may even make connections between the lection and other Isaianic texts. Particularly diligent auditors might even open bibles and read the texts that surround the lection in its canonical context. In contrast, most Jews in late antiquity probably had little or no access to biblical texts that were not performed in the synagogue. For these auditors, the lectionary was scripture and the lectionary context was the context for the performed text (Stern: 16–26). For example, according to the earliest medieval evidence, the parashah/haftarah pairing for the beginning of the pentateuch consists of Genesis 1:1–6:8 and Isaiah 42:5–43:19. For most of us, the primary context for Genesis 1:1–6:8 is the book of Genesis. In this canonical context, Genesis 1:1–6:8 is part of the primeval history—the part of the pentateuch that deals with humanity as a whole, before the narrative spotlight closes in on the people of Israel and its ancestors. For pre-modern Jews who experienced the parashah/haftarah pairing attested to in the medieval material, the primary context for this text would be alongside Isaiah 42:5–43:19, a text that connects Israel's privileged status with the very act of creation:

For Jews whose scripture was the performed scripture, the election of Israel described in Isaiah 42:5 is joined to the account of creation. For these readers, election is invoked on day one. In the Jewish performed scripture, there is no scriptural story before the election of Israel.

Finally, unlike the canonical Tanakh, performed scripture was also essentially multiform. Because prophetic lections were not fixed in the rabbinic period and varied from community to community as late as the middle ages, the contents of the scripture experienced by Jews in different communities would have differed. This scriptural diversity is intensified when we consider the place of the Aramaic translation (targum) in the ritual of the performed scripture. As I noted above, the Mishnah mandates that the performance of scripture be a bilingual one. During the performance of the parashah, the torah reader recites a verse of the Hebrew text from the scroll and then pauses while a translator recites an Aramaic translation of the verse. They continue in this manner for the entire parashah. The performance of the haftarah has the same format, but the reader can read as many as three verses before waiting for a translation. While the recitations of the Hebrew scripture and the Aramaic translation were interwoven, there were also measures in place to keep them distinct and to communicate the subordinate and dependent status of the targum (Smelik 199; 250). According to the Jerusalem Talmud, they must be performed by two different people (y. Meg. 4:1) and while the torah reciter must recite from a scroll, the translator is forbidden to do so (y. Meg. 4:1). In addition, whereas the translation is described and legislated in the Mishnah, a discussion in the Jerusalem Talmud concludes that the translation is not necessary for the performance of the religious obligation; nevertheless, it is still important for the communication of the proper meaning of scripture (y. Meg. 4:1).

If we consider the likely experience of a typical Jew witnessing the torah performance, however, a different picture emerges. While there is significant debate over degrees of Hebrew fluency in late antique Judaism, all agree that few, if any Jews, spoke Hebrew as their vernacular (Hezser 2001: 228–30; 240–42; Smelik 2001). The educated elite probably were fluent in Hebrew, and for them the recitation of the Hebrew text of scripture would have conveyed the content of the performance. However, for the majority of listeners who were not fluent in Hebrew, the Aramaic recitation would have been the performance's primary vehicle for the transmission of content. While these auditors might have identified the scroll inscribed with the Hebrew text as the material instantiation of torah, they would have accessed its content, or at least the fullest comprehension of it, through the Aramaic translation.

This linguistic fact has significant implications for our functional understanding of Jewish scripture in the rabbinic period. For many Jews, the content of torah was determined and articulated by the Aramaic translation. Consequently, from a functional perspective, the Jewish scripture of late antiquity was not only pluriform, it was also irretrievable. Because the translation was, by rabbinic mandate, oral, it is impossible to determine precisely the content of any given targum performance from late antiquity. There are extant Aramaic translations whose content probably dates back to the rabbinic period. But there is considerable debate among scholars regarding the relationship of these extant targums to performances of targum in the late antique synagogue (Alexander 2004: 238–41; Safrai 2006: 251–52). We do not know whether the synagogue translators memorized received translations or whether they were translating extemporaneously. If they were reciting translation texts from memory, we still do not know which, if any, of the extant Aramaic translations served as their scripts. This gap in turn affects our understanding of Jewish scripture as a historical phenomenon. Because the consonantal text of the Hebrew Bible has been largely stable since the rabbinic period, most Jews and scholars of Judaism assume that Jews throughout history have had the same Bible, even if interpretations of it have varied widely over the centuries. But if we take seriously the fact that late antique Jews received the content of scripture through performed Aramaic translations, and if we acknowledge that we cannot determine the precise contents of the performed translations, this presumption of scriptural continuity is profoundly challenged. Since we don't know exactly what scripture “text” late antique Jews heard and comprehended, we can't know whether it is the same as ours. In addition, the possibility that performed translations differed from place to place reinforces the reality of the diversity of the performed scripture within the rabbinic period itself.

Between Written and Performed Scripture

Thus far, I have considered scripture as it would have been experienced by the majority of Jews in late antiquity and discussed some major differences between the content of written and performed scripture. Written scripture consisted of the Hebrew texts of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible/Tanakh. Performed scripture consisted of the more restricted and multiform contents of the lectionary, performed in bilingual and partly irretrievable renditions. In what follows, I will turn to the experience of literate Jews and demonstrate how divergences between written and performed scripture would have shaped the experience of literate Jews and how these differences resonate within rabbinic attitudes toward the written text itself.

The peculiarities of Hebrew textual production would have shaped the scriptural experience of both literate Jews and those illiterate Jews who received scripture through performance. As I mentioned above, written texts of scripture from late antiquity were unpunctuated, semi-vocalic Hebrew texts. Even for the literate, Hebrew-speaking minority, the lack of vowels meant that the reader needed to be familiar with the content of the text to understand it. As is the case with texts in modern Hebrew or Arabic that are also unvocalized, a combination of literacy, linguistic fluency and adequate familiarity with the content would allow a reader to understand much of the text. However, he would still have needed a teacher to provide guidance regarding the full vocalization and punctuation of more arcane content.

These peculiarities of late antique Hebrew textuality create a paradoxical relationship between even the educated “reader” and the written text. On the one hand, the text is accessible and meaningful. A competent reader could open up the scroll and, through a process that combined decoding, rote memorization and reliance on broader contextual knowledge, could ascribe a meaning to the text. However, even as the reader articulated a particular “reading” of the text he would have been aware of the ways in which the text itself is fundamentally ambiguous. An English language example will illustrate the point: For the purposes of the example, I will leave only one word unvocalized: The hunter chased the br through the forest. From context, it is likely that the unvocalized word (br) is either boar or bear. A reader of this text would choose one of these two options based on a variety of factors including context, prior familiarity with the content and the relative frequency or rarity of bear/boar sightings in his lived or textual experience. To make sense of the text, the reader would need to pick one of these two options, thereby transforming the sentence from an ambiguous text with at least two possible meanings into a comprehensible text with a single meaning. Having made his choice, he would still, on some level, have been aware of the other possible readings that he did not choose.

A set of rabbinic texts address the potential for multiple meanings generated by the semi-vocalic text. These texts explore whether vocalizations of texts that diverge from the received performance tradition can serve as bases for either le gal or non-legal interpretation. For example, b. Sanh. 4b cites an opinion, attributed to R. Johanan b. Dahabai on behalf of R. Judah b. Tema, which states that blind people are exempt from the (by then obsolete) obligation to make thrice yearly pilgrimages to the Jerusalem temple. He bases this opinion on a vocalization of Exodus 23:17 that differed from the received performance tradition. The performance tradition vocalized the consonantal cluster yod-resh-aleph-heh as the passive form of the root to see. According to this vocalization, the verse means three times a year all your males shall be seen before the Lord, YHWH. R. Johanan b. Dahabi's exemption is based on a different vocalization which renders the cluster as the active form of the verb. According to this vocalization, the relevant clause reads all your males will see (before) the face of the Lord, YHWH. According to this reading, the commandment is to see (before) the face of God or, in a midrashic interpretation of the verse, to be seen as God, Godself sees. According to these readings then, those who are unable to see are unable to fulfill the commandment. The Talmud goes on to explore whether or not the sage's opinion is really based on this alternate vocalization or whether there is another way to explain it. This debate and others like it are generated by the rabbinic awareness of the potential multivocality inherent in a consonantal text. While their willingness to take advantage of this multivocality varies over time, tradent and context, the presence of these debates attests both to the rabbis’ own awareness that the written and performed scriptures are not identical and to their reflections on the hermeneutical possibilities and risks generated by this gap (Naeh 420–24).

Whereas the written scripture is accessible only to the literate minority and is experienced by them as essentially ambiguous, the performed torah, especially when performed with translation, is at once both more accessible and less ambiguous. First, when recited with translation, the performed torah is intelligible to its entire audience. All members of the audience, regardless of their degree of literacy or Hebrew knowledge, receive material whose plain sense meaning would be intelligible. At the same time, the audience of any given performance did not experience any ambiguities regarding wording or syntax. The performer could perform only one vocalization or one punctuation at a time. Whereas the educated man who had access to the written torah experienced the distinction between the ambiguous and multivocal consonantal text and the authoritative interpretation passed on to him, the vast majority of Jews would not have experienced that distinction. Rather, the torah they received would have been the torah whose meaning was “pre-determined” by the vocalization and punctuation that were constituent parts of the torah they received aurally.

These differences with regard to both accessibility and ambiguity have implications for our description of the Jewish scriptures. If we were to identify the consonantal framework of the Masoretic text as Jewish scripture, we could legitimately say that the texts of scripture were written by ancient Israelite authors, and were, for the rabbis, deeply and fruitfully ambiguous and multivocal. In addition, we could accurately say that access to these texts would have been restricted to the literate population, but once one had access to these texts, there was an atmosphere of hermeneutical freedom in which “readers” had license to interpret many aspects of the fundamentally ambiguous and multivocalic text. If the topic of our inquiry is the performed torah, however, then we would tell another story: one in which the “text” of the performed torah is co-authored by the ancient Israelite authors of the consonantal text and the generations of tradents who transmitted and determined the vocalic content and punctuation. This co-authored text was more democratic than its written relative—in that a much wider range of Jews had access to it. At the same time, its meaning is necessarily already circumscribed by authoritative educated elites who transmit their versions of torah to the wider audiences.

The rabbis were not only aware of the differences between written and spoken Hebrew discourse in general; they were also aware of differences between specific written scriptural texts and their oral counterparts. By the time of the Talmuds, it is clear that the rabbis understood there to be an authoritative version of performed scripture. In some cases, the authoritative written version of scripture that they possessed diverged from this received performance tradition. Masekhet Soferim, which is a compilation of rabbinic dicta dating from around the 8^th century ce, contains the earliest comprehensive list of documented divergences between the written scripture and the received performed scripture. In some of these cases the written tradition has a word that is absent in the performed tradition or vice versa. In other cases, the written tradition has the negative particle lo’ (spelled lamed aleph), while the performed tradition has the homonym lo which is the third person singular possessive pronoun (spelled lamed vav) or vice versa. In another set of cases the divergence occurs where one tradition has the letter vav (or a sound it represents) where as the other has the similar looking letter yod (or the sound it represents). In some of these cases, the written and performed traditions may represent equally authentic, alternative traditions. However, in some cases, it is clear that the written version contains an error that detracts from the sense of the discourse. Despite the fact that the written tradition contains what is, from a semantic perspective, an error, the rabbinic authors of tractate Soferim and the later Masoretic text critics worked to document and preserve the integrity of the (flawed) written version. The rabbis’ insistence on the preservation of the divergent versions bears witness to their conviction that the written text was not merely a script for oral performance. Nor did they see the performed torah as the vocal reproduction of the written text. Rather, the preservation of divergent traditions of written and performed scripture testifies to a more subtle understanding of written and oral scriptures as two related but ultimately distinct entities.

This understanding of the distinctiveness of the written and performed scripture is further manifested in texts in which the rabbis ascribe, or attempt to ascribe meaning to purely graphic elements of the scriptural text. For example, a discussion in b. Men. 29b explains the calligraphic ornament on the top of the letter het as follows. Het is the first letter in the utterance he lives. The ornament on the top of the letter indicates that God (He) lives on high. Similarly, b. Meg. 16b explains the peculiar typographical arrangement of the list of Haman's sons in Esther 9:7–10 by saying that the layout of the text visually represents the destiny desired for them: “that they shall never rise again.” This interpretation, playful though it may be, demonstrates that, for the rabbis, the writtenness of written scripture is not accidental or purely instrumental. Rather, through this sort of interpretation they transform graphic, non-semantic features of written discourse into elements of the text's meanings. Like the preservation of the divergences of between the written and performed traditions, this sort of exegesis testifies to the rabbinic awareness of the distinction between the two scriptural modalities.