The Closed Book

Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg’s The Closed Book: How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible takes its title from rabbinic texts that compare the physical presence of the Torah scroll to a woman’s body. Like a woman’s body, the Torah scroll was thought to be more powerful when it was covered and therefore unreadable (219). The book explores rabbinic attitudes toward the text of the Torah that shows how early rabbinic leaders from 200-650 CE held ambivalent views about the written biblical text, especially in comparison with both the oral Torah and what Wollenberg calls “Spoken Scripture,” a tradition of oral recitation of memorized biblical passages.

Against the standard view in scholarship of a binary between a written and oral Torah, Wollenberg theorizes that “the scriptural tradition itself would be bifurcated into two qualitatively distinct categories of scriptural witness to the biblical revelation, which would ultimately be designated mikra (the vocalized oral formula) and masoret (the tradition of textual inscription)” (164-5). It is this first category of mikra that Wollenberg designates as Spoken Scripture. According to Wollenberg, the shift after 1000 CE toward a more textual and detailed way of dealing with the biblical text has obscured the earlier rabbinic views of written Torah. Wollenberg’s monograph on rabbinic views of the biblical text is therefore an exciting and useful tool for parsing attitudes about textuality in post-biblical Judaism. 

Many of the passages Wollenberg analyzes point to general attitudes toward the biblical text, but still resist easy interpretation. For example, a passage from Sifrei Numbers 16 that advises to burn any book of the minim, or heretical groups, could be interpreted as a command to burn Christian Bibles, but what the category of minim is meant to encompass here is not clear (64-65). Nor is it clear how closely these texts of the minim resembled biblical texts maintained by rabbis. For the purposes of Wollenberg’s study, however, the essential point is that rabbis in this period were less concerned with how texts were used as records of thought than as objects embedded in ritual and social contexts.

Wollenberg organizes each of her chapters around different perspectives toward biblical texts visible in rabbinic sources. In the first chapter, she looks at various ways rabbis doubted the stability and reliability of the biblical text. She begins by looking at stories about the biblical scribe Ezra. Texts like 4 Ezra allege that the text of the Hebrew Bible was lost after the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 587, and that Ezra, as the leader of the exiles who returned to Israel in the late 6^th century, “provided a replacement copy of the work” (29). The story about Ezra’s rewriting of the biblical text is alluded to in various rabbinic sources as well. Wollenberg surveys a wide range of evidence that rabbis were aware of how biblical texts had changed and been adapted to different cultural, linguistic, and material realities. She also discusses traditions involving different human agents transmitting and physically producing these texts over time. In some of the passages Wollenberg discusses, however, it is hard to know how to detect evidence of anxiety or even views of instability regarding biblical texts, beyond the cold facts of a text being lost and then miraculously reproduced, as in the stories about Ezra. It is possible that rabbis viewed some of these textual reproductions as faithful to the originals.

In chapter 2, she explores the idea that biblical texts possess potentially dangerous forces that must be treated with caution. One example of this is the imperative to burn the books of the minim discussed above. Another example shows that even orthodox texts can be dangerous. In a story from the Jerusalem Talmud (Shekalim 6:1), a priest in the Jerusalem temple notices that the floor of the wood storage chamber “was different from the rest.” As he begins to tell the other priests “his soul left his body [and he died]. So they knew by that sign that the ark was hidden away in that place” (81-2). As with the texts of the minim, the specifics of what is written on the scrolls within the ark is unimportant compared to the power the text has in the world.

The next few chapters provide more concrete evidence for specific rabbinic ideas about biblical textuality. Chapter 3 looks at the distinction rabbis made between reading for information and recitation reading. The former is related to what moderns would consider studying an unfamiliar text, while the latter involves the recitation of a text already memorized, with or without a textual aid. Recitation reading is connected to the idea of Spoken Scripture discussed above and first introduced in chapter 5, while informational reading is something done with written biblical texts. Chapter 4 situates her study in a broader context of reading and education in late antiquity and develops her theory that students of the Bible memorized biblical “oral formula” that were thought to be “the more stable and familiar form of the biblical tradition for the reader” than the written form of the biblical text (162).

Chapter 6 discusses rabbinic views of the biblical text in ritual and apotropaic contexts, as well as surveys places where the Torah scroll is conceived of as a human, often female, body. The conclusion connects these peculiar attitudes about the biblical text to later developments in Judaism. Against previous arguments that linked the shift to biblical commentaries to changes in book technology like the invention of the codex, Wollenberg contends that there was instead a shift in Jewish attitudes that now saw the bible as a book like other books, equally worthy of commentary and textual analysis.

However this shift is conceived or explained, further research could also be done connecting, or possibly contrasting, the perspectives on the biblical text outlined by Wollenberg, and the perspective of the scribes who developed and maintained the Masoretic text. Many of her interpretations are both insightful and persuasive, but even if a reader does not agree with all of her readings, her collection of rabbinic sources on the nature of the biblical text is an indispensable work of scholarship. Subsequent scholarship interested in rabbinic views on biblical texts can utilize this extensive survey of sometimes overlooked or misunderstood primary sources. Her insightful concept of Spoken Scripture allows for a variety of new understandings of both rabbinic literature and the development of the biblical text. 

Walker Rhea is a PhD student in religious studies at the University of California, Davis.

Walker Rhea

Date Of Review:

January 26, 2024