| Summary: | This dissertation argues that, contrary to popular conceptions and the current scholarly consensus, rabbinic Jewry did not become a people of the book, or even the people of the Book, until the high middle ages. For in the classical rabbinic period, many rabbinic authorities appear to have been suspicious of reading as a source of information and ambivalent about the written text of the Hebrew Bible, a document that had proven a problematic manifestation of God's covenant when it made possible the growth of a rival biblical religion in Christianity. In place of this promiscuous and easily misunderstood written record of the covenant, a less threatening iteration of the biblical tradition took on the mantle of revelation in many early rabbinic circles, a memorized oral formula of the Hebrew Bible---to which intangible object rabbinic thinkers attributed all the qualities of transcendence, comprehensiveness, and multiplicity that they associated with the divine and found lacking in the bald written transcript of revelation.
Chapter 1 examines early rabbinic descriptions of late antique literacy practices and concludes that many rabbinic authorities viewed sight reading for information as an alien mode of engaging with written signs practiced by non-Jews and heretics. Rabbinic practitioners, in contrast, 'read' the Bible by reciting memorized oral formulas from memory with (or more often without) reference to a written text. This mode of engaging with the biblical text required two distinct transcripts of the biblical tradition to circulate in classical rabbinic circles: a memorized oral formula and a written consonantal transcript. Chapter 2 argues that classical rabbinic thinkers came to conceive of these two transcripts as independent, and even conflicting, witnesses to the biblical revelation. This chapter suggests that many early rabbinic authorities came to see the memorized oral transcript of the Hebrew Bible as a more authentic record of the biblical revelation than the written consonantal text. Chapters 3 and 4 compare rabbinic descriptions of childhood literacy education with narrative and material evidence concerning late antique reading education in the Greek and Roman Mediterranean. These chapters argue that rabbinic practitioners were taught to engage with the written text of the Bible using a cross-cultural pedagogical system that cultivated a combination of highly circumscribed phonetic literacy and extensive literary memorization. Chapters 5 and 6 track the growth of classical rabbinic ambivalence towards the biblical text as a reaction to Christian claims on that document.
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