Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg's The Closed Book麗貝卡·沙巴赫·沃倫伯格的《封閉的書》They read Talmud only.

 They read Talmud only.

這是對早期猶太教的一次開創性的重新詮釋，發生在聖經研究成為主流之前的一千年。 麗貝卡·沙巴赫·沃倫伯格的《封閉的書》現已推出平裝本。了解更多：https://hubs.ly/Q03L1QBf0 早期猶太教常被描述為典型的書籍宗教──一場以聖經研究為基礎的運動，其根基深厚，源自於對正典文本的執著追求，並由此發展出一種神聖的書籍文化。但在《封閉的書》中，麗貝卡·沙巴赫·沃倫伯格認為，直到聖經首次被列為正典近千年後，猶太人才真正接受聖經文本。她講述了在這幾個世紀中，即使是拉比也很少打開聖經，許多拉比權威人士對聖經文本作為神聖知識來源的看法仍然十分矛盾。 華倫伯格指出，早期猶太思想家信奉一種如今已基本從實踐中消失的聖經啟示形式，以取代聖經文本。介於聖經成文妥拉的固定抄本和拉比口傳妥拉的流動性傳統之間，這些拉比思想家們構思了第三種啟示類型。在這「第三妥拉」中，聖經傳統的口述公式被設想為聖經啟示的獨特版本。人們相信，這種由人口傳承下來的鮮活誦讀傳統，不受書寫文本的束縛，為西乃山的聖經啟示提供了更全面、更真實的見證。透過這種方式，早期拉比權威們能夠利用聖經啟示的概念，同時將聖經文本本身與社區生活隔離。 結果是，在「有經人」成為有經人之前，對他們進行了一次富有啟發性的重新解讀。

A groundbreaking reinterpretation of early Judaism, during the millennium before the study of the Bible took center stage.

Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg's The Closed Book is now available in #paperback. Learn more: https://hubs.ly/Q03L1QBf0

Early Judaism is often described as the religion of the book par excellence—a movement built around the study of the Bible and steeped in a culture of sacred bookishness that evolved from an unrelenting focus on a canonical text. But in The Closed Book, Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg argues that Jews didn’t truly embrace the biblical text until nearly a thousand years after the Bible was first canonized. She tells the story of the intervening centuries during which even rabbis seldom opened a Bible and many rabbinic authorities remained deeply ambivalent about the biblical text as a source of sacred knowledge.

Wollenberg shows that, in place of the biblical text, early Jewish thinkers embraced a form of biblical revelation that has now largely disappeared from practice. Somewhere between the fixed transcripts of the biblical Written Torah and the fluid traditions of the rabbinic Oral Torah, a third category of revelation was imagined by these rabbinic thinkers. In this “third Torah,” memorized spoken formulas of the biblical tradition came to be envisioned as a distinct version of the biblical revelation. And it was believed that this living tradition of recitation passed down by human mouths, unbound by the limitations of written text, provided a fuller and more authentic witness to the scriptural revelation at Sinai. In this way, early rabbinic authorities were able to leverage the idea of biblical revelation while quarantining the biblical text itself from communal life.

The result is a revealing reinterpretation of “the people of the book” before they became people of the book.