A Precariously Fragile Torah

This piece is based on one part of a larger academic paper first presented at a conference, on “Jewish Law and the Modern State,” Yale University Law School, New Haven, CT, March 5, 2017. It has been adapted for TheTorah.com by the TABS editors.  

For a detailed analysis of the of Moses’s failed petition in Sifre Deuteronomy, see S. D. Fraade, “Sifre Deuteronomy 26 (ad Deut. 3:23): How Conscious the Composition?” Hebrew Union College Annual 54 (1983): 245-301.

I have treated this passage previously, although in different detail and for different purpose, in From Tradition to Commentary, 119-20, with notes. The Sifre to Deuteronomy is an anthology of tannaitic (70-220 CE Palestine) exegetical traditions, redacted in the mid- to late third century CE. For a brief critical introduction, see Menahem Kahana, “Sifrei, ”Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 2nd ed., 22 vols. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), 18:562-64.

For the combination of seeing and hearing of revelation, see Exod 20:15 (18), as rabbinically (and Philonically) interpreted, as discussed in my article, “Hearing and Seeing at Sinai: Interpretive Trajectories,” in The Significance of Sinai: Traditions about Sinai and Divine Revelation in Judaism and Christianity, ed. George J. Brooke, Hindy Najman, and Loren T. Stuckenbruck, Themes in Biblical Narrative 12 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 247-68 (=Legal Fictions, 501-22).  For the visual aspects of rabbinic textuality, see Rachel Neis, The Sense of Sight in Rabbinic Culture: Jewish Ways of Seeing in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

The phrase “words of Torah” does not appear in the first half of the verse (46a), but is imported from the second half of the verse (46b: “all the words of this Torah”) to the first (46a: “all the words”). 

For the later expression “the Torah,” see Neh 8:18; 2 Chr 34:14.

On the rabbinic phrase “words of Torah” denoting both biblical and rabbinic oral Torah, see Fraade, From Tradition to Commentary, 258 n. 219.  See especially Sifre Deut 306 (ed. Finkelstein, 339): “So too words of Torah are all one, but they comprise miqrāʾ (Scripture) and mišnâ (oral teaching): midrāš (exegesis), hălākôt (laws), and haggādôt (narratives).”  For treatment, see Fraade, From Tradition to Commentary, 97.

Deut 17:19; 27:3; 27:8, 26; 28:58; 29:28; 31:12, 24; 32:46. 

Josh 8:34; 2 Kings 23:24; Neh 8:9, 13; 2 Chr 34:19. 2 Kings 22:11 has a similar expression, “the words of this scroll of torah” (דברי ספר התורה).

See the excellent discussion by Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, “Mountains Hanging by a Strand? Re-Reading Mishnah Ḥagigah 1:8,” Journal of Ancient Judaism 4 (2013): 235-56; eadem, ”לפשר הביטוי ‘כהררים התלויים בשערה’ (משנה, חגיגה א, ח)”, Leshonenu 76.1-2 (5774/2004): 137-148, who argues for replacing the word “mountains” (hararim) in this Mishnah with one that denotes “dry desert bushes” (ḥararim).

This is a fear frequently expressed in tannaitic texts, including in Sifre Deuteronomy. See Shlomo Naeh, ”אומנות הזיכרון: מבנים של זיכרון ותבניות של טכסט בספרות חז”ל”L, in Meḥqerei Talmud III: Talmudic Studies Dedicated to the Memory of Professor Ephraim E. Urbach, ed. Yaakov Sussmann and David Rosenthal (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2005), 543-89; Fraade, From Tradition to Commentary, 105-119 (on Sifre Deut §48); Marc Hirshman, The Stabilization of Rabbinic Culture 100 C.E. – 350 C.E.: Texts on Education and Their Late Antique Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 31-48 (“Sifre Deuteronomy: The Precariousness of Oral Torah”).  For the view that the fear here is one of loss of memory, especially of the Oral Torah, see the commentary to the Sifre by David Pardo (1719-1792).

Literally, “I would give you credit.”  Compare m. ʾAbot 2:8.  For “be grateful,” see Marcus Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumin, the Talmud Bavli and Jerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (New York: Verlag Choreb, 1926), 444b.

The Hebrew verb employed here, lishmor, is commonly used biblically for keeping commandments or fulfilling obligations.  See, for example, Exod 12:17; 23:15; Deut 5:1, 12; 29:8.  In rabbinic Hebrew, it gains as well the sense of preserving (leqayyem) teachings in one’s memory.  See Fraade,From Tradition to Commentary, 258 n. 222.

^[14] Note the emphasis on transmission to both one’s children and children’s children (grand-children).  For a similar emphasis, see Deut 4:9; 31:13; Exod 10:2.  Since Deut 34:9 states that the present generation of Israelites “heeded him [Moses], doing as the Lord had commanded Moses,” it might be assumed that Moses’s was more worried about the next generation, not yet part of  his audience, than the present generation.

Compare Joshua according to Num 27:12-23; Deut 31:2-8; and 34:8-9; or Ezra according to Neh 8:1-8.

For the intellectual/pedagogical preoccupation of Deuteronomy see Tigay, The JPS Torah Commentary: Deuteronomy, xvii-xviii.  For other examples, see Deut 1:5; 4:1, 5, 9; 5:1; 6:7, 20-25; 11:19; 17:18-19; 31:11-13.

Subtle as the change is, the verb lishmor (observe) in the biblical text is replaced by leqayyem (to maintain, which rabbinically denotes as well study and memorization) in the midrash.

These are not otherwise known to have been students of Rabbi Judah the Patriarch.  See Ofra Meir, Rabbi Judah the Patriarch: Palestinian and Babylonian Portrait of a Leader (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameucḥad, 1999), 137-38 (Hebrew). For variant names, see Finkelstein’s critical apparatus.

What follows are not the “words” of Rabbi Judah HaNasi, but of the anonymous midrashist.

See Sifre Deut §34 (ed. Finkelstein, 61) to Deut 6:7:  “‘Impress them upon your children’ (וְשִׁנַּנְתָּם לְבָנֶיךָ): These are your students.  Similarly, you find that in every place students are called children.” 

For the dialectical tension between the two, see Yair Furstenberg, “The Agon with Moses and Homer: Rabbinic Midrash and the Second Sophistic,” in Homer and the Bible in the Eyes of Ancient Interpreters, ed. Maren R. Niehoff, Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture 16 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 299-328.

Their being two students allows Rabbi Judah HaNasi to employ the same second-person plural forms as does Moses.

Free choice, but with sharp covenantal consequences either way, is a central theme running through the book of Deuteronomy, but see, in particular, Deut 11:26-28; 30:15-30.

The shift to the more local, intimate, and individualized didactic relation of Judah HaNasi to his students, might reflect the social reality of the rabbinic “movement” of the time of the Sifre’s composition and redaction (second-third century CE), comprised as it was of small master-disciple study circles. See, for example, Shaye J. D. Cohen, “The Rabbi in Second-Century Jewish Society,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 3, The Early Roman Period, ed. W. Horbury, W.D. Davies, and J. Sturdy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 922-90.

I am indebted to Ishay Rosen-Zvi for these suggestions. For Rabbi Judah the Patriarch (and his successors) receiving the salutation (salutatio) due to a patron, see Aharon Oppenheimer, Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi (Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center, 2007), 52-53. For patronage salutations and gifts in early rabbinic literature, see Mekhilta of R. Shimʿon bar Yoḥai to Exod 22:24 (ed. Epstein-Melamed, 212).  

Compare the expression אינו שוה כלום (“it is not worth a thing”), appearing three times in the Sifra, four times in the Babylonian Talmud, and eleven times in the aggadic midrashim.

I approximately follow Louis Finkelstein’s edition (385), at which see his note (“the copyists corrupted the whole saying”) and critical apparatus ad loc. R. David Pardo (gloss on Sifre, ad loc.) similarly says that “the language here is very unclear (megumgam),” and paraphrases it much in line with Finkelstein’s rendering and my translation, as does the Gaon R. Elijah of Vilna (1720-1797) in his “emendations.” Much the same understanding of our text (and the expressed need to emend it) can be found in the eighteenth-century commentary to the Sifre, Zeraʿ ʾavrahamby R. Abraham Yequtiʾel Zalman Lichtstein. MS London 341 (MS Vatican 32 is not extant here), is very close to the text as presented here, except for the last three sentences, which are difficult to understand:

אילו אין משה גדול הוא ואילו אחר וקיבלנו תורתו ולא הייתה תורתו שוה על אחת כמה (שהיו רצין) וכמה לכך נאמר אשר תצוום

“If Moses had not been great, and (or) if another (had given the Torah), and we had received his Torah, his Torah would not have been worth (anything).  How much more (was its worth with the great Moses himself having given it).  Therefore, it says, ‘enjoin them upon your children’.”

This is similar to the understanding of our passage by R. Moses David Abraham Treves Ashkenazy (1780-1856) in his commentary to the Sifre,Toledot ʾadam. Ishay Rosen-Zvi has suggested translating rhetorically, “would not his Torah have been worth so much more?” In other words, the value of the Torah is in itself and in “our” receiving and maintaining it, and not in its having originated with Moses, and its value is all the greater (“how much more so”) for having been passed down from generation to generation regardless of its originator. For additional readings and suggested meanings, see Herbert W. Basser, Midrashic Interpretations of the Song of Moses (New York, Frankfort on the Main, Berne: Peter Lang, 1984), 263-65; idem, In the Margins of Midrash: Sifre Ha’azinu Texts, Commentaries, and Reflections (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990), 157, 181. All of these renderings and understandings are lacking in one way or another. We are clearly dealing with a defective text.

The word אנו (“for us”) is provided by Finkelstein (see above, n. 37) to make sense of the sentence, but is missing in all manuscripts. R. Elijah of Vilna makes the same emendation to the Sifre’s text (“How much more is this the case for us!”). This expression (including “for us”) appears thirty-four times in classical rabbinic literature, twenty-seven of which are in the aggadic midrashim, but this is its only occurrence in the tannaitic corpora.

For this exegesis in Sifre Deut, see §33 (ed. Finkelstein, 59), to Deut 6:6; §41 (ed. Finkelstein, 86), to Deut 11:13; §58 (ed. Finkelstein, 124), to Deut 32:11; §153 (ed. Finkelstein, 206-207), to Deut 17:9; §345 (ed. Finkelstein, 402), to Deut 29:9.  See Fraade, From Tradition to Commentary, 256 n. 196.

For consideration of this question, pursued with respect to another section of the Sifre Deuteronomy commentary, see my article, “Sifre Deuteronomy 26 (ad Deut. 3:23):  How Conscious the Composition? ”Hebrew Union College Annual 54 (1983): 245-301.