The Closed Book - by Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg

About the Book

"Judaism is often described as the religion of the book par excellence-a religious movement built around the study of and commentary on the Hebrew Bible and steeped in a culture of bookishness that evolved from an unrelenting focus on a canonical text. Standard works of modern scholarship reinforce this view--that the Jewish tradition has always embraced the Bible as a blueprint for the religious life. In this monograph, Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg argues that this depiction of the tradition does not hold for much if its existence--and more specifically, not for the first thousand years after the Bible was first canonized. Prior to the modern era, late antique and early medieval rabbinic authorities were deeply ambivalent about the Hebrew Bible (aka Old Testament, aka Torah). The Bible can be a really unsettling book because of its repeated depictions of impiety, taboo behavior of all sorts, and unapologetic expressions of doubt and skepticism. It's no accident, then, that Jews--including their rabbis--seldom opened a Bible during this long period. But how can you avoid Bible reading while being part of a community in which that same Bible is supposed to be a central pillar of communal identity? The rabbis met this challenge by instituting two workarounds. On the one hand, they incorporated ritualized readings of biblical passages into liturgical gatherings, so that the text was 'read' (or chanted) in a rote, formulaic way--a way that did not lend itself to deep musing about meaning. In such gatherings, the Torah scroll was treated as an entity that manifests sacred powers in its own right (hence the development of rituals governing the handling of the scrolls, including the practices of binding, unrolling, and rolling them). On the other hand, the rabbis constructed a vast edifice of interpretation of Scripture that came to be known in the tradition as the 'Oral Torah', including rabbinic stories, commentary, and laws (and associated with terms such as midrash and Talmud). Both of these workarounds, argues Wollenberg, served to marginalize the written text of the Hebrew Bible as a source of cultural transmission and knowledge"--

Book Synopsis

A groundbreaking reinterpretation of early Judaism, during the millennium before the study of the Bible took center stage

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. 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. 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.

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. 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. In this "third Torah," memorized spoken formulas of the biblical tradition came to be envisioned as a distinct version of the biblical revelation. 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 way, early rabbinic authorities were able to leverage the idea of biblical revelation while quarantining the biblical text itself from communal life.

The result is a revealing reinterpretation of "the people of the book" before they became people of the book.

Review Quotes

"A sophisticated and significant contribution."---Mika Ahuvia, The Catholic Bible Quarterly

"Wollenberg . . . deserves praise for highlighting rabbinic views that are often glossed over and for her novel readings of various Talmudic narratives that suggest the rabbis viewed written scripture as flawed."-- "Choice"

About the Author

Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg is assistant professor of Judaic studies at the University of Michigan.