Torah in the Mouth

"In this new study of rabbinic oral tradition, or "Torah in the Mouth," Martin S. Jaffee offers a fresh account of the social, cultural, and historical settings that shaped the conviction that the substance of rabbinic culture had been disclosed to Moses at Sinai. Taking advantage of a generation of fresh scholarship on the nature of oral traditional societies, the role of writing in cultures of the manuscript, and the manifold relationships of orally composed and performed texts to written versions and exemplars, Jaffee explores the role of written texts and writing in the shaping of rabbinic oral tradition. Building upon a growing body of studies of Second Temple-period Judaism and the role of scribal cultural within it, he explores the degree to which the Jewish communities of this period, including the Pharisees, may have been committed to the preservation of exclusively oral texts not entrusted to written documents.