The Closed Book: How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible by Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg (review)

Reviewed by: The Closed Book: How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible by Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg Jonathan Kaplan Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg. The Closed Book: How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023. 272 pp. As Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg observes in the introduction to her recent monograph, modern scholars (exemplified by James L. Kugel) perpetuate the myth that premodern readers of the Bible understand the Bible in essentially the same way: as perfect, utterly devoid of contradictions or mistakes, and divinely authored. As Wollenberg demonstrates, this approach mischaracterizes the actual nature of End Page 211 late antique rabbinic approaches to the Bible. In contrast to medieval rabbinic understandings of the Bible, which viewed it as God's perfect monograph, early rabbinic traditions, she argues, portrayed the biblical text as less than perfect and "as a potentially deadly form of revelation" (2). Throughout the volume, Wollenberg advances her argument through close readings of classical rabbinic literature, both synchronically and diachronically, and with careful attention to comparative material from Greek, Roman, Christian, Sasanian, and Islamic sources. In the first three chapters, Wollenberg seeks to upend the notion that the early rabbis valorized the Pentateuch and other parts of the Hebrew Bible "as perfect transcripts of the divine will" (17). In chapter 1, she analyzes descriptions of "scribal heroes," such as Ezra, who are characterized as having rescued the Bible from textual loss and erasure, and narratives that position the Bible's physical text as an incomplete and imperfect reflection of revelation. In chapter 2, she shows how early rabbinic literature portrays the Bible not as a life-giving text, as it is described in rabbinic liturgy through Proverbs 3:18, but as a potentially deadly and destructive work, through thematic association with "heresy, covenantal adultery, communal rivalry, and sectarian biblical exegesis" (97). In chapter 3, she examines how quotidian access to the biblical text was restricted in rabbinic literature through strategies that discouraged "informational reading," regulated the times and days of its reading, and placed limits on "the circulation of vernacular copies of biblical texts" (18). Next, Wollenberg seeks to account for the seeming paradox between rabbinic ambivalence toward the Bible's physical text and its elevation to the heart of rabbinic discourse. She contends that the rabbinic focus on textual memorization diminished the status of the written text of the Bible to a secondary position in daily life. In chapter 4, she explores the practices of Bible reading described in rabbinic literature that contribute to this diminished position for the Bible's written text, such as memorized ritual recitation loosely connected to the written biblical text and early rabbinic literary pedagogies. In chapter 5, she argues provocatively that the living recitation of the reading tradition of the Bible constituted a third, more authentic expression of divine revelation, a third Torah, preserved "at the interstices between the Oral and Written Torah" (20). Unclear to me, however, is the degree to which this "category of mikra, or Spoken Scripture" is distinct from the Oral Torah and should truly be classed as a "third" Torah (192). In chapter 6, Wollenberg turns to examine how Torah scrolls functioned in classical rabbinic society, where they were supplanted as mediators of divine revelation by the living recitation of the reading tradition. She argues based on several early rabbinic traditions that the Torah scroll functions instead as a physical "avatar" (200) that mediates between divine and human as the "intangible soul of Spoken Scripture" (222). These three chapters advance the case that the early rabbis maintained the preeminent status of the Pentateuch in rabbinic society while viewing the Written Torah as "a female body" (213), "as a form of biological body" (220), a "revelation personified" (200), whose role as a communicative medium had been displaced by the reading tradition. Wollenberg concludes by examining how the earlier rabbinic perspective of the Bible as a "multilayered biblical composition" was reinterpreted in light of End Page 212 medieval perspectives on single-authored works. In a densely footnoted discussion, she argues that this broad-ranging approach to the Bible led to an understanding of Scripture "that reinstated God as the...