The Book That Unwrote Itself: Tales of the Second Tablets
as a Poor Second Edition
Other
classical rabbinic traditions suggest that it was not an accident of history
that the inherited biblical text was a contingent and reworked product. As
Sifre Deuteronomy elevates these occurrences to an abstract principle: “The
Torah is destined to change” (Sifre Deuteronomy 160). Early rabbinic stories
that unflatteringly contrast the first and second version of the tablets of the
law (Exod 31-34), for instance, can be read as a form of narrative theorizing that
elevates the contingent and secondary nature of the extant biblical text to a fundamental
principle. This hermeneutic locates the roots of the historical vicissitudes of
the biblical text in the deeper dictates of mythical time.
As the
first instance of written revelation in the Hebrew Bible, the story of the two
tablets (Exod 31-34) served as a natural locus for early rabbinic reflection on
the nature of written revelation more generally. These biblical chapters took
on even broader implications in a religious imaginary in which the tablets of
the law were frequently as a metonymy for the Pentateuch as a whole. (See, for
instance, tBerakhot 6:2, yShekalim 6;1 [49c], and ySotah 8:3 [22b]) Read in
light of these traditions, Exodus 31-34 was often refigured in early rabbinic traditions
as the story of two biblical revelations—a first, lost, revelation written by
God in a moment of hope and a second, extant, revelation written by Moses
during a period of human failing. From its inception, these inception written
by Moses during a period of human failing. From its inception, these traditions
suggest, the text of the Torah that was ultimately given to the world was a
second edition, which had already been shaped by human inadequacies and marked
by the compromises inherent to written communication. This initial deficiency,
in turn, would echo through the text’s reception history. As bEruvin 54a puts
it, “If the first tablets hadn’t been broken, the Torah would never have been
forgotten in Israel” (אלמלי לא נשתברו לוחות הראשונות לא נשתכחה תורה מישראל).”
Many traditions
concerning the first tablets suggest that this more perfect version of the
written revelation could never have entered historical time. Several traditions
in this vein express doubts, for instance, that the materiality of the written
medium was capable for capturing divine revelation. There was a widespread notion,
for instance, that the first tablets represented a “miraculous product” (מעשה נסים)
that defied the laws of nature. As Songs of Songs Rabbah 5:14 variously
pictures the impossible nature of the writing surface prepared for the first
perfect form of the written revelation:
Rabbi
Yehoshua bar Nehemiah said, “They were made of [hard] blue gemstone but they
could be rolled up [like a scroll].” While Rabbi Menahma said in the name of R.
Abun, “They were carved out of the orb of the sun.”
Since the
original writing surface is identified with multiple (and irreconcilable) metaphorical
vehicles, the particular substance of these images cannot be what interested the
formulator of this tradition so much as their shared conceptual theme: the conviction
that any material upon which the divine will was successfully inscribed must
have been a substance that defied the laws of nature as we know them.
YShekalim
(6:1) (49d) maintains that not only the writing surface but the writing materials
for this first revelation took a dramatic and impossible form:
The Torah
that the Holy One, blessed be he, gave to Moses [the first time] was given to
him as white fire carved on black fire. [The Torah] was fire. It was combined
with fire. It was cut with fire. And it was given from fire. As it is written, “At
his right hand the fire of knowledge” (Deut 33:2).
In traditions
like this one, the gesture toward a more abstract principle is achieved through
a repetition of the key image in different registers. Repeated variations on
the claim that the first revelation consisted entirely of fire emphasize that
the first (and fullest) attempt at a tangible revelation of the divine will was
never captured or confined in the mundane materials of historical writing—stone
and chisel, parchment and ink. Instead, it was manifest only in the most
intangible and otherworldly of the material forces: fire.
The conviction
that nothing short of a miracle could allow a fully divine revelation to be
contained in the cold and limiting medium of written words on stone is given a
more narrative form of expression in classical rabbinic traditions about the collection
of sacred objects God established in the twilight before the first Sabbath—a period
of paradox when the laws of nature were temporarily undermined and when each o
the instances when God would countermand the natural order and shake the
created world were set for all of history. While the other objects in the list
vary from one tradition to another, (Alternative lists appear, for instance, in
Sifre Deuteronomy 355 and bPesahim 54a and parallels. Consider, similarly, traditions
that list the first tablets among the five miracles of God’s hand, along with
events such as Noah’s ark and the plagues on Egypt [Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer
18:1]) but the writing on the first tablets and the writing materials that
allowed the first inscription of divine revelation in writing are always
counted among the miraculous and impossible objects. According to mAvot 5:6,
for instance:
Ten things
were created in the interstitial hour [at twilight between the six days of
creation and the first Sabbath]: the mouth of the well that watered the Israelites
in the desert], the mouth of the furnace [that failed to consume Abraham], the
rainbow [after the flood], the manna [that sustained Israel in the desert], the
staff [of Aaron and Moses that performed miracles in Egypt], the shamir [the
worm that miraculously carved stones for the Temple without metal-cutting instruments],
the writing [on the first tablets], the writing implements ]with which the
first ablets were written], and the [first] tablets (הכתב והמכתב והלוחות).
To the
authors of such traditions, the notion that divine revelation would be
successfully reduced to writing was just as uncanny and miraculous as a staff
that could turn rivers of water into blood or a worm that cut through boulders
of stone. (Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg, The Closed Book: How the Rabbis
Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible [Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2023], 44-46)
