Oral Culture and Human Books AND ProofTexts As Hooks

Part 2 in a series of 5 blog posts answering the question,
“How did the ancient Rabbis invent Web 2.0 before its time?”

Jewish culture has not always been based on written texts. Stories, family genealogies, law codes, poems, songs, and laments have been memorized and then recited aloud by people who served as “human books,” similar to the outlaw characters in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

But this kind of oral culture cannot be sustained in exile. When people are uprooted from their land, subjugated by a host culture, or stripped of their stabilizing institutions, they can end up losing their identity and way of life.

When the Second Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by Rome in 70 C.E., sending most of the Jewish population into slavery and exile, millions of Jews assimilated into the Roman Empire and vanished. What remained was only a remnant of Judaism.

What the ancient Rabbis did at this critical moment in Jewish history was nothing short of revolutionary. Retreating to a small academy in Yavneh, a village off the coast of Israel, they proceeded to reinvent Judaism for a community in Diaspora. They understood that an oral culture, once set adrift, was doomed to extinction. They realized that the exiled Jews would now need legislators and teachers, not prophets and rebels who constantly challenged authority. Most of all, they knew that a people without a country, without a king, without a Temple, without a center, could only stay together if they shared a common code of laws and ethics—and that this code needed to be scripture, that is, written down.

So these early Rabbis gathered together 39 separate texts circulating in ancient Israel and organized them into 24 books. They called this anthology the Mikra, from the Hebrew word “to read.” It was only later that Christians began to call this work Scripture, from the Latin word “to write.” In time, it came to be known as the Bible, from the Greek word biblion, meaning “paper” or “book.”

The Rabbis then declared themselves the new curators of divine revelation. They claimed that God’s word was to be found not only in the Written Law, but also in their own interpretations of the Bible, which they called the Oral Law. This other Torah, they explained, had also been handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai.

How did the Rabbis convince the Jewish people to transfer royal, priestly, and prophetic authority to them? The answer lies in one of their most original innovations, the prooftext: a passage from the Bible, usually taken out of context, presented as conclusive evidence to prove a point. These prooftexts became the building blocks of the Talmud that over the centuries has connected Jewish ideas and values to the Written Law.

Today, people like to point out how the ancient rabbis employed these prooftexts as proto-hyperlinks to content and ideas. In the next blog post in this series we’ll look at how the Mishnah and Talmud mimicked the evolution of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 dynamics.