Saturday, May 27, 2023

Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg on Rabbinic Traditions Concerning the Superiority of the First Edition of the Law over the Second (Exodus 31-34)

  

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)

 

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