The End of the Beginning (2)
For Ezra had set his heart to seek the law of YHWH, and to do it, and to teach in Israel statutes and ordinances Ezra 7:10 JPS 1917
To seek – Ezra changed forever the way we interact with God. Now we read instead of listen. That wasn’t the only result of this monumental shift. Now the text had to be secured. After all, as Rabbi Ishmael wrote, “A single text can have many meanings.”[1] Since any written text can be interpreted in more than one way, two important consequences follow. First, textual interpretation becomes a matter of prior assumptions, theological paradigms, and consonantal manipulation. Rabbi Ishmael’s school taught, “Reverse the text and interpret it.” Words and letters are just word and letters. To know what they mean, and how they should be read, is to solve a great puzzle. Do whatever you must to get the right answer.
Of course, Rabbi Akiva took a different approach to the same words and letters. “Rabbi Akiva declared that the traditional oral reading of the scriptural text is authoritative, while Rabbi Ishmael declared that the written text is authoritative. It is true that we find that the Ishmaelian school used the principle al tikri—‘read not thus, but thus,’ which based a homily on an alternative vocalization of the consonants of the Hebrew scriptural text.”[2] This is the logical explosion of qere ketiv (remember?). Read one way; write another. Which is correct? Ah, it depends. Heschel remarks, “But there is a great difference between such exegesis and interpretations of the school of Rabbi Akiva, which derived mounds and mounds of halakhot from each tittle on the letters. Al tikri presents an alternative, it is true, but it is one that is still tied to the extant letters.”[3]
An invasion occurred without anyone recognizing the enemy. “The dualism of surface and deep meanings that is evident here is of a piece with the thoroughly dualistic nature of Philo’s thought, in which body and soul, for example, are quite distinct. The body/soul distinction thus forms a strict analogy to the point he makes here about meanings.”[4] Where do you suppose Philo got that distinction? Plato, of course! Here we discover that Platonic dualism makes inroads into Jewish rabbinic thought. We are no longer in the world of the prophet. We are in the world of the philosopher—and we’ve been there ever since. It isn’t surprising to me that there was considerable debate about the canonicity of the book of Ezra. Something tragic occurred when the scribe became the mouthpiece of God. Inevitably the canon followed, along with doctrines and dogmas about inspiration, inerrancy, and heresy. Heschel’s comment serves as a warning, “The Zohar took as a basic principle that all the Torah is hidden and revealed at the same time. The divine name is a paradigm of this. Just as it is written one way and pronounced another, so the Torah (which is regarded also as a name of God) has one truth on the level of naïve understanding, with secret meanings hidden behind every word.”[5]
Do you think it is possible to recover? I often hear people complain that they just want a first century believer’s community, but by the first century Judaism was thoroughly infected with Hellenistic Platonism. The believing community of the disciples was an oral community based on the teachings of a prophet. Once men began to write it down, the ground shifted—and Ezra opened the floodgates for a new world of interpretation. There is no better example of the enormity of this shift than the fact that the very name of God is written YHVH but never spoken that way, something Abraham and David would have considered sheer nonsense.
You and I are Alexander’s step-children. Unfortunately, so is everyone born after the second century B.C.E. But at least now you know who you are.
Topical Index: Philo, Platonism, qere ketiv, dualism, interpretation, Akiva, Ezra 7:10
[1] R. Ishmael, Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 34a.
[2] Abraham Heschel, Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations, p. 255.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Gordon Tucker, in Abraham Heschel, Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations (ed. and trans. by Gordon Tucker, Continuum International Publishing Group, New York, 2007), p. 256, fn. 53.
[5] Abraham Heschel, op. cit, p. 257.
