Chapter 16
Ritualizing Iconic Jewish Texts
The topic of “ritual and worship in the Bible” should take into account that bibles and parts of bibles are themselves used as ritual objects in Jewish and Christian worship. Their display and manipulation, oral performance, and semantic interpretation have been ritualized by synagogues and churches since antiquity. The origins of these practices are rooted in the Bible itself. Their influence has shaped every Jewish and Christian tradition, and reaches beyond them to Muslims, Manicheans, and other religious communities.
For example, a Torah scroll is more than just the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. Its scroll shape distinguishes it from almost all other books, including Christian bibles. Its image is a widely recognized symbol of Judaism. A Torah scroll is also a ritual object, the subject of ritual display and manipulation in Jewish liturgies since antiquity. In other words, a Torah scroll is an iconic book (van der Toorn 1997).
Comparison of how religious communities use written texts shows that they ritualize scriptures in three different dimensions (Watts 2006). They ritualize the semantic dimension through interpretation in preaching, teaching, commentary, and private study. They ritualize the performative dimension through oral readings and recitations, and often by theatrical reenactment and artistic illustration as well. They ritualize a scripture’s iconic dimension by displaying the book, decorating it, and manipulating it in public and private rituals. This chapter and its companions in this volume on Christianity and Islam focus mostly on how the iconic dimension of scriptures gets ritualized, because the iconic dimension has received less scholarly attention than the ritualization of scripture’s oral performance, artistic illustration, and semantic interpretation.
Iconic Books
Iconic books are texts revered as objects of authority, inspiration, and legitimizing power rather than just as words of instruction, information, or insight (Parmenter 2006). People ritualize iconic books by carrying them, displaying them, waving them, touching them, and kissing them, as well as by reading them aloud in public and studying them in private. Religious congregations frequently treat some iconic books as sacred objects. As a result, the material forms and images of iconic books identify and shape ritual experiences.
Historians of religion and scholars of scripture have usually paid little attention to the iconicity of sacred texts. Traditional religious scholarship vests authority in semantic interpretation of scriptures, and modern academic research has followed suit. The oral and theatrical performance of scriptures has gained increasing attention in the past fifty years. But only in the past decade has attention turned to the iconic dimension of sacred texts. Now, a growing number of scholars are studying and comparing the iconic ritualization of texts in various cultures and time periods (see the essays collected in Watts 2013).
Religious scriptures such as the Christian Gospels and Bible, the Muslim Qur’an, the Buddhist Lotus Sutra and Golden Heart Sutra, and the Sikh Guru Grant Sahib are exemplary iconic books. In a wide variety of ways, congregations ritualize their production, use, preservation, and even their destruction (Myrvold 2010). Jewish Torah scrolls clearly belong in this category as well.
Study of the Torah’s iconic dimension reveals aspects of iconic ritualization that may not be so evident in later scriptures, because the Torah was the first scripture of the Western religious traditions. It reflects traditions of textual ritualization practiced in other ancient Near Eastern cultures. The Pentateuch’s laws and instructions require that the Torah’s iconic dimension be ritualized in specific ways. Contrary to what one might expect, then, iconic ritualization of the Torah did not just develop gradually as an after-effect of its scriptural status. Iconic ritualization preceded the Torah’s scripturalization and was instrumental in bringing it about in the first place.
Ancient Iconic Texts
Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures ritualized the iconic dimension of written texts in at least four ways (Watts 2010). Monumental inscriptions exhibited the power and wealth of kings and temples to people who were mostly illiterate. Those who could read or who listened when others read the inscriptions discovered that their rhetoric matched their looks: inscriptions legitimized the positions of rulers and priests and their claims upon the loyalty and offerings of everyone else (Liverani 1995). Portraiture provided another means of ritualizing iconic texts. Portraits of scribes, or of other people posed as scribes, ritualized textual images in the hands of their sponsors. In Egyptian and Greco-Roman cultures, such poses in mortuary art depicted the dead as learned scholars.
Monumental inscriptions play only a small role in the Hebrew Bible. Joshua writes the Torah on an altar as Moses instructed (Josh. 8:32; Deut. 27:2–8). But no royal or temple inscriptions have been discovered among the physical remains of first millennium Israel and Judah, nor have scribal portraits. Two other ways of ritualizing texts in the iconic dimension play a much larger part in the biblical tradition.
Figure 16.1 Scribe holding scroll over sarcophagus in a model of a funerary boat from the tomb of Djehuty, ca. 1962–1786 bce. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photograph by James W. Watts.
Ritual texts were displayed and manipulated in many ancient rituals (Watts 2005). Some temple rituals included the display and reading of ritual texts. A special class of Egyptian priests read aloud from ritual scrolls during the processions of divine statues and during mortuary rituals (Lorton 1999, 149). Mortuary art frequently shows them holding an open scroll while others attend the sarcophagus (Figure 16.1). Priests or kings could use old ritual texts to revive rituals that had fallen into disuse. For example, the Roman historian, Livy, tells of a Samnite priest who in 300 bce used “an old linen scroll” to justify an oath ritual committing the Samnites to war against the Romans (Livy 1912, 10.38). Cultures throughout the region deposited tablets and inscriptions in temples to validate laws, treaties, and ritual procedures. These texts could be wielded as evidence in disputes, such as in the Assyrian Tukulti-Ninurta Epic (13th century bce), which depicts Tukulti-Ninurta indicting his rival before the gods: “I raise aloft, therefore, the tablet of oath between us, and call upon the Lord of Heaven” (lines 150–151 translated by Foster 1995, 185–187).
Ancient cultures also used myth to ritualize iconic texts in religious imagination. Egyptian sources increasingly credited the authorship of ritual texts to the gods. Successful passage to the afterlife depended on carrying a letter written by the god, Thoth (Schott 1972). Stories abound in ancient sources from many cultures about heavenly texts that determine human fates (Parmenter 2009). Mesopotamian myths tell of the gods gathering to decide the future and recording their decisions on “tablets of destiny.” Controlling these tablets conveyed irresistible power to rule in heaven and on earth. The king of the gods wore the tablets of destiny like amulets, and his rivals tried to take them away (so especially in the Anzu epic, and also in Enuma Elish). Thus heavenly texts, which might or might not be accessible to humans, played a large role in ancient religious imaginations.
Iconic Texts in the Pentateuch
The manipulation of ritual texts, some of them ascribed to YHWH, the god of Israel, also plays a major role in the Pentateuch’s plot. The most prominent iconic text in the Bible is the Decalogue. The commandments are written on two stone tablets “by the finger of God” (Exod. 31:18; 32:16; Deut. 9:10). Moses breaks them in anger, and also to indicate that Israel has broken the covenant with YHWH by worshipping the golden calf (Exod. 32:19; Deut. 9:17). Moses then carves new tablets and YHWH writes on them again (Exod. 34:1; Deut. 10:1–5; though Exod. 34:27–28 leaves ambiguous who does the writing).
A curious feature of the tablets of the commandments is that no one ever reads them in the stories in the Hebrew Bible. The first mention of the tablets indicates that instruction is their purpose (Exod. 24:12). In the following chapters, however, YHWH commands only that they be deposited in the Ark of the Covenant, which is built for this purpose (Exod. 25:16, 21; Deut. 10:2–3), and that is what Moses does with them (Exod. 40:20; Deut. 10:5). The Pentateuch thus portrays the tablets as a relic text, a document that is neither read nor interpreted but cherished as the physical evidence (‘ēdût “testimony” Exod. 31:18; 32:15) of the covenant with God. Relic texts are valued for being unique and unreproducible objects, like the bodily relics of saints (Watts 2012). And, like bodily relics, they frequently get stored in reliquaries whose elaborate decorations display the worth of the relic text while hiding it from view. The tablets of the commandments receive such a reliquary in the form of the Ark of the Covenant. The grandeur of its gilded elaboration by the P source as the holiest object enshrined in the Tabernacle sanctuary (Exod. 25:10–22; 37:1–9) rivals any medieval or baroque reliquary that Christian kings could devise.
Communities ritualize relic texts only in their iconic dimension, because they usually possess non-relic copies of the same text to read and interpret. In the Pentateuch, the non-relic copy is the Torah scroll written by Moses (Exod. 24:4; Deut. 31:9, 24). This scroll is also an iconic text, preserved next to the Ark of the Covenant in the sanctuary by the Levites where it, too, serves as “testimony” (Deut. 31:26). But the Torah is read aloud to the people (Exod. 24:7; Deut. 31:10–13), and Moses requires the Israelites to remember and recite its provisions (Deut. 6:6–7). The Pentateuch’s rhetoric makes it clear that the Israelites are expected to understand and obey its stipulations. The Torah scroll must therefore be ritualized in the performative and semantic as well as in the iconic dimensions, a distinguishing characteristic of texts that we now recognize as “scriptures” (Watts 2006).
The Pentateuch thus presents iconic ritualization as one of the purposes motivating the creation of Torah scrolls as well as the Decalogue tablets and their reliquary, the Ark of the Covenant. Its alternating focus on scroll and tablets identifies these documents and their religious status as equivalent. Moses’ Torah scroll eventually became identified with the Pentateuch itself. It seems to me that the Pentateuch has been deliberately shaped for this purpose (Watts 2016). The Ark’s disappearance since at least 587 bce means that the Pentateuch’s text provides the only access to the divinely written tablets. In the context of the preceding four books, Deuteronomy’s instructions for reading and preserving both tablets and scroll establish the status of the Pentateuch as the Torah. The Pentateuch’s pages have become the reliquary that both preserves and reveals “testimony” to the covenant and to the Torah of Moses.
Ritualizing Torah Scrolls
The Hebrew Bible attests to the irregular ritualization of the Torah in Israel’s ancient history. It tells of Joshua, Moses’ successor, faithfully fulfilling the command to read the Torah and write it on a monumental altar inside the land of Canaan (Josh. 8:31–35). But then the scroll drops out of the biblical histories of the settlement of the land and of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Despite an occasional reference to it by the narrator (2 Kgs. 14:6) or a character (1 Kgs 2:3), it plays no role in the stories. That changes only six hundred years after Joshua, when priests renovate the Jerusalem temple and discover the Torah scroll inside. This discovery prompts King Josiah to purge Judah’s rituals of inappropriate objects and practices, and to revive celebration of Passover as the Torah dictates (2 Kings 22–23). According to the Deuteronomistic Historian, however, this reform came too late to save the kingdom of Judah from God’s punishment for abandoning the covenant (2 Kgs 23:26–27). Within three decades, the kingdom was destroyed and its leaders exiled to Babylon. Two centuries later, the Torah scroll reappears in biblical history in the hands of the priest and scribe, Ezra, who apparently brings it with him from Babylon to Jerusalem (Ezra 7). There he read it aloud to the people of Jerusalem and Judea over a period of seven days, leading the people to revive the celebration of the festival of Sukkot (Booths) and to recommit themselves to the Torah (Nehemiah 8). The Hebrew Bible’s juxtaposition of the Pentateuch with the Deuteronomistic History and Ezra-Nehemiah thus creates the impression of an overarching story about the Torah itself. Moses commanded the ritualizing of the Torah scroll before Israel’s settlement in the land, but was obeyed by only a few religious heroes at turning points in Israel’s history—near the beginning and end of the settlement in the land, and soon after its resettlement.
Ezra’s reading (Ezra 8:2–8) ritualizes the Torah in all three textual dimensions. He ritualizes its iconic dimension by its display, staging, and liturgy. He stands on a raised platform where everyone can see him unroll the scroll. He is flanked on each side by Jerusalem’s leaders. The people stand up when he unrolls the scroll. He precedes the reading with a blessing to which the people respond “Amen” and by bowing to the ground. Ezra ritualizes the Torah’s performative dimension by reading it publicly to all the people—men, women, and children old enough to understand (8:3)—on every day of the seven-day festival (8:18). The Levites and the people together ritualize its semantic dimension through interpretation. The Levites interpret the readings to the people (8:7–8), which may mean they translated the Hebrew laws into Aramaic. It is clear that both the people and their leaders are interested in understanding and implementing the Torah’s regulations, most immediately by celebrating Sukkot according to its instructions (8:13–17). Such ritualization of the Torah’s semantic dimension is at most implicit in previous stories of Torah readings. For the first time in the biblical story line, Ezra’s reading exhibits clearly the ritualization in all three textual dimensions that will later distinguish scriptures from other kinds of texts (Watts 2006).
Beginning in the time of Ezra in the fifth or early 4th century bce, the Torah seems to have been increasingly ritualized in these three dimensions as a scripture. Chronicles as well as Ezra-Nehemiah describes its semantic interpretation (2 Chr. 17:7–9) which becomes a preoccupation in many late Second Temple texts (e.g. the Letter of Aristeas, Jubilees, the Theodotian inscription, the Qumran Temple Scroll, and 4QMMT). Ritualization of the performative dimension leaves less evidence in the literary tradition, but still appears in the public readings of the Septuagint translation at the end of the Letter of Aristeas (308, 312), in the Qumran rules for its regular reading (1QS VI 7–8, 4Q266 5 II 1–3, etc.), and in references by Philo (Dreams 2:127; Hypothetica 7:12–13; Prob. 81–82), Josephus (Ant. 16:43; Ag. Ap. 2:175), and the writer of Luke-Acts (Luke 4:16–17; Acts 13:13–15).
Ritualization of the Torah’s iconic dimension appears again in the 2nd century bce Letter of Aristeas, which rhapsodizes over the beautiful lettering and materials of the Torah scrolls sent to Egypt for translation. The letter claims that the Egyptian king was so impressed that he bowed to the ground seven times after seeing the scroll (Let. Aris. 177). Reports of Judah’s military turmoil in the 2nd century also mention the iconic veneration and abuse of Torah scrolls. Seleucid soldiers sought them out for destruction, while the Maccabees carried Torah scrolls with them into battle (1 Macc. 1:56–57; 2 Macc. 8:23). The iconic status of the Torah at Qumran is evident both from the large number of manuscripts of Pentateuchal books among the Dead Sea Scrolls and from the paleo-Hebrew script used to copy some of them. Qumran scribes used Paleo-Hebrew letters frequently for the divine name, but wrote only Pentateuchal books and Job entirely in Paleo-Hebrew (Tov 2012, 64–65). Tefillin boxes and their contents were also found at Qumran, showing that the amuletic use of Pentateuchal texts bound to arm and forehead in prayer was already a devotional practice two thousand years ago (Cohn 2008).
Jews in the Second Temple period increasingly believed that God wrote the Torah first in heaven before revealing it to Moses. In that case, Torah scrolls are copies of a heavenly original. This belief is first expressed in extant sources by Jesus ben Sira, who described Israel’s Torah as the physical incarnation of divine wisdom (Sir 24:1–23). The books of Jubilees and 1 Enoch claim that, before Moses, the heavenly Torah was revealed to figures such as Enoch, Abraham, Jacob, and Levi (García Martínez 1997; Najman 1999). By the 1st century ce, belief in a pre-existent heavenly Torah seems to have been widespread (1 Bar 3:35–4:1; Acts 7:53). A century later, early rabbinic texts speculated that God wrote the Torah before or immediately after creating the world (‘Abot 3:14, 5:6).
The rabbinic literature of late antiquity reveals a deep investment in interpreting Torah, as well as other biblical literature. Such ritualization of the Torah’s semantic dimension gradually earned the rabbis sufficient authority to dictate the normative shape of subsequent Judaism. Reading Torah aloud was already customary in synagogue services, and the rabbis regulated how ritual performance should take place. Their regulations also governed how the Torah’s iconic dimension should be ritualized by the scribes who copy it (Green 1999). For example, Torah scrolls must be written by hand in Hebrew with Aramaic square script on parchment from clean animals (b. Meg. 19a). They cannot be embellished by illustrations, notes, or vowel points, though seven letters should carry decorative tagin “crowns” (b. Men. 29b). Up to three copying mistakes can be corrected on a page, but four or more require that the page be buried and recopied on new parchment (b. Meg. 29b). Later legal codes add that scribes must purify themselves before copying a Torah scroll.
This ritual attention to the copying of scrolls led to fascination with the shapes of the letters (Elitzur 2010). For example, the Talmud states, “R. Ashi said, I have observed that scribes who are most punctilious add a vertical stroke to the roof of the letter ‘heth’ . . . signifying thereby that He lives in the heights of the world” (b. Men. 30a). Here the Hebrew letters themselves have become images conveying divine meaning and spiritual connection (Figure 16.2, Figure 16.3).
Figure 16.2 Relief of wheeled ark, ca. 3rd century ce. In the ruins of the synagogue at Kefer‐Nahum/Capernaum, Israel. Photograph by James W. Watts.
Figure 16.3 Gold glass bowl from Rome, ca. 300–350 ce, showing an open Torah ark with scrolls on its shelves. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photograph by James W. Watts.
The rabbis regarded Torah scrolls as the most sacred objects. Their presence in synagogues lends sanctity to the structure (m. Meg. 3:1). Talmudic references show that Torah scrolls were already being wrapped in covers in antiquity (Goldstein 1997). They were also being stored in a cabinet called an ʾaron “ark” on analogy with the biblical Ark of the Covenant (y. Meg. 73d; y. Šabb. 17c; and in the Dura Europos synagogue; Figure 16.2). These torah shrines were originally portable chests that were carried into synagogues for worship services, but arks became permanent installations after the 3rd century ce (Meyers 1999). By the 12th century, a standardized liturgy had evolved that surrounded synagogue Torah readings with prescribed processions and blessings (Langer 1998). Today, Torah scrolls remain a central focus of synagogue rituals (Schleicher 2009). As a result, the Torah scroll is now one of the most widely recognized symbols of Judaism in popular culture.
Ritualizing Other Jewish Texts
Jews did not adopt the codex form for books until well into the Middle Ages, probably resisting its association with Christian scriptures (Stern 2008). The synagogue’s ritualized iconic text, the Torah, still takes the form of a manuscript scroll today. However, codices are easier to use for study and scholarship than scrolls. Starting in the 8th century, these advantages led to the production of codices of the Pentateuch, called a Chumash, of other sets of biblical books, and of the entire canonical set of Jewish Bibles, called a Tanak. Since codices were not subject to the Talmudic rules for producing Torah scrolls, they could include vowel points, accents, illustrations, and marginal notes called the masorah. The texts of two of these Masoretic Bibles from the 9th and 10th centuries, the Leningrad Codex and the Aleppo Codex, continue to be used as the models for printed Hebrew bibles today and as the textual basis for biblical translations. That tradition is rooted in the 11th century, when the influential Jewish philosopher, Maimonides, used the Aleppo Codex as the exemplar for codifying the rules for writing Torah scrolls. Masoretic bibles thus came to constitute the authoritative textual tradition that legitimizes the accuracy of new Torah scrolls and other copies of biblical books.
The invention and spread of printing in the 16th and 17th centuries established the glossed “rabbinic bible” (Mikraot Gedolot) as another iconic form of Jewish scripture. Daniel Bomberg’s editions of 1517 and 1525 established the form and content that has been reproduced with little variation ever since. Rabbinic bibles shaped the semantic dimension of Jewish scriptures by popularizing the medieval commentators, especially Rashi, as the authorities for biblical interpretation. They shaped its iconic dimension by establishing the image of its pages—Hebrew biblical text surrounded by Aramaic targums and commentators—as a symbol of the combination of Jewish scripture and interpretive tradition.
Among other books of Jewish scripture outside the Pentateuch, the Psalms have played a particularly important role. Of course, psalms lend themselves to oral performance, and Jewish history has been accompanied by their ritualized singing both inside and outside the official liturgies of temples and synagogues. Their popularity is reflected in iconic ritualization as well. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, collections of Psalms appear in thirty-nine different manuscripts (Flint 1997, 27). In late antiquity, the belief that reciting psalms had apotropaic power to ensure a good after-life encouraged the custom of giving newly-weds a copy of the Psalms as a wedding gift. The development of Jewish prayer books (a siddur) contextualized the Psalms in the synagogue’s standardized liturgies (Schleicher 2009, 56). Siddurs are also regarded as sacred books, since they contain verses of scripture, including the holy name of God (YHWH) written in full. More susceptible than siddurs to creative expansion and artistic illustration have been haggadahs, manuals for celebrating Passover at home as required by Exodus 12–13. Several illuminated haggadah manuscripts, such as the Sarajevo Haggadah and the Golden Haggadah, preserve some of the best extant examples of late medieval Jewish figurative art.
Besides the Torah, one biblical book still closely associated with the scroll form is Esther. The book of Esther is one of the Bible’s five megillot “little scrolls” traditionally read at Jewish festivals. Esther tells the foundation story of the festival of Purim. The Mishnah mandates that it be read aloud twice during the holiday, and a popular custom since the Middle Ages has been to enact the story theatrically as well. Since at least the 16th century, Esther scrolls have often been decorated and elaborately illustrated (Sabar 2008).
As in many other religious traditions, textual amulets have been used by many Jews since antiquity (Sabar 2009). They usually incorporate verses of Torah or Tanak. Though Jewish amulets take many forms, tifilin and mezuzahs are particularly iconic for Jewish tradition. They are rooted in biblical mandates and have a documented history of use since antiquity. They contain Pentateuchal verses (usually Exod. 13:1–10, 11–16; Deut. 6:4–9; 11:13–21), but are not intended to be read. Tifillin are made to worn while saying daily prayers, and mezuzahs are touched when entering and leaving rooms and buildings. While the use of tifillin today varies among Jewish denominations, mezuzahs are nearly ubiquitous on the doorframes of Jewish homes and buildings. When people touch them many times each day on entering or leaving, they index their Jewish identity by physical connection to these Pentateuchal verses written by hand on scraps of parchment hidden inside boxes—that is, to Judaism’s iconic scripture, the Torah.
Legitimation from Ritualizing Iconic Jewish Texts
Ritualizing each of the three dimensions of texts has discernibly different effects. Rituals of semantic interpretation convey authority to the text and to its expert interpreters. Oral performances inspire audiences and often the performers themselves, as do theatrical reenactments and artistic illustrations. Ritualizing the iconic dimension conveys legitimacy—to the texts themselves and also to the people who own them or, at least, hold them, touch them, or even just participate in ceremonies that display them. Because religious communities ritualize all three dimensions of scriptures, these effects merge and reinforce each other. Distinguishing them does, however, help explain the social power of scriptures. Their combined influence also explains the resilience of scriptures in the face of internal dissent and external attacks upon them and on the communities that cherish them.
Ritualizing the iconic dimension legitimizes those who control the scriptures. The scripturalization of the Torah in the Second Temple period accompanied the rise to power of dynasties of Aaronide priests. Though the early history of this priesthood is obscure, it seems that two families controlled the high priesthood for most of the period (VanderKam 2004). The Oniads were high priests, apparently starting with Joshua ben Jehozadak who led the return from exile (Ezra 3:2). It was during the post-exilic period from the sixth to the 4th century that the Torah began to be ritualized regularly in all three dimensions as a scripture. The Pentateuch grants the sons of Aaron a monopoly on the priesthood, on mediating the temple offerings, and also on teaching and interpreting the Torah (Lev. 10:9–11). So the Torah’s semantic dimension seems to have established the authority of the Aaronides while its iconic dimension provided physical evidence legitimizing the temple’s rituals and priesthood. The Torah’s oral publication could also be used to criticize the priests, as Ezra apparently did in pressuring the Jerusalemites to break off their marriages to foreign women (Ezra 9–10). However, neither Ezra, who was himself an Aaronide priest, nor the Persian-appointed governor Nehemiah, nor even the books carrying their names and celebrating their deeds, seem to have disrupted the Oniads’ control of the high priesthood and of the Jerusalem temple. According to Josephus, the same family also served as high priests of the Samaritan temple (Ant. xi.302–303, 321–324).
The Hasmoneans were another Aaronide family who seized the high priesthood for themselves in the early 2nd century. Their ascension coincided with the increasing influence of some books of history, prophets, and the Psalms. The Hasmoneans may have used the histories of the Israelite and Judean kingdoms and the prophets’ preaching against foreign alliances to justify their wars for independence and to enculturate a sense of being Judean in the regional aristocracy (Carr 2005). What is clear is that the Pentateuch, with its legitimation of Aaronide hierarchy whether Oniad or Hasmonean, became ever more dominant in the last centuries of the Second Temple period, as reflected in almost all of the Jewish literature written at the time.
That trend continued in Late Antiquity. Despite the destruction of the Jerusalem temple and the gradual eclipse of Aaronide religious leadership by the authority of scholarly rabbis, the Torah remained pre-eminent. In the absence of a Temple and its furnishings, Torah scrolls became the holiest objects in Judaism. As we have seen, synagogue liturgies ritualized them iconically and performatively. Rabbinic literature, especially commentaries, midrashim, and the Talmuds, shaped the Pentateuch’s semantic dimension to reflect the rabbis’ expertise and authority. Thus the Torah’s unique status grew even when its endorsement of Aaronide hierarchy was replaced by the interpretive authority of the rabbis.
Christians, too, displaced Aaronide priests with a priesthood of Christ and his apostles, but they elevated the Gospels in place of the Pentateuch as the central focus of scriptural ritualization. Thus, by the end of Late Antiquity, the Jewish Talmuds and the Christian New Testament each contextualized the Pentateuch’s meaning to legitimize the rise of non-Aaronide hierarchies. But in contrast to church liturgies, synagogues continue to celebrate the Torah as the holiest scripture. By contrast with both Jews and Christians, the Samaritans continue to cherish the Torah alone as scripture and also to recognize the pre-eminent religious authority of Aaronide priests to this day. Comparisons of the histories of the three religions show clearly the connection between scripturalization and priesthood.
Ritualizing scripture’s iconic dimension, however, usually legitimizes more than just its interpreters. The physical text can be manipulated by anyone who can get their hands on it, and its appearance can be venerated by anyone who can see it. The performative dimension also tends to encourage broader participation in scripture’s ritualization, such as by lay readers. Even children participate in its performance by wearing costumes to enact the story of Esther at Purim and by studying their torah portions to read them for their bar and bat mitzvahs. But ritualizing the iconic dimension requires no linguistic skills at all. People who are illiterate or do not know Hebrew may still touch a Torah scroll with their prayer shawls for a blessing, may feel honored to carry it, and may donate money for copying a new one. Because the iconic dimension empowers them to participate in venerating scripture, they may be more concerned than most to avoid accidentally defiling it.
Figure 16.4 Torah scrolls in the ark of the Vilna Shul (synagogue) in Boston, Massachusetts, built in 1919. Photograph by James W. Watts.
Ritualizing the iconic dimension conveys legitimacy, so it can be an important factor in the religious identity of individuals, congregations, religious traditions, and other groups and institutions associated with them, such as nations. Because the broadest range of people can participate in iconic ritualization, public display and manipulation of iconic books has potent influence on group identity (Figure 16.4). Of course, the same factors make scripture’s iconic dimension the most susceptible to intentional desecration. Those seeking to discredit an individual may charge them with desecrating scripture. Those seeking to challenge the legitimacy of a community and its religious traditions may publicly desecrate their scriptures (Watts 2009).
Therefore the topic of ritualizing Jewish iconic texts must also include their ritual desecration. The earliest documented attacks on Jewish scriptures date from the 2nd century bce. Soldiers of the Seleucid empire attempted to suppress a Jewish revolt by, among other things, seeking out and destroying Torah scrolls (1 Macc. 1:56–57). Josephus reports that Roman authorities in the following centuries attempted to discipline soldiers who desecrated Jewish scrolls (Ant. 16.164; 20.115), but rabbinic literature remembers that the Romans martyred rabbis and burned them together with their Torah scrolls (b. Avodah Zarah 18a). Christian oppression of Jews has often included desecrating and destroying Torah scrolls, as remembered in the stories of both communities. In the Middle Ages, the textual targets of Christian attacks expanded to include Talmuds (Hoenig 1991). Desecration and destruction of Jewish books, especially Torah scrolls, remains a characteristic feature of modern anti-Semitism: news media in Europe and America report several such attacks every year (Watts 2009).
This long history of assaults on Torahs and Talmuds has turned copies of these books into symbols of the Jewish people’s survival. For example, particular copies that survived the European Shoah/Holocaust in the 20th century are now cherished as “holocaust scrolls.” They have become relic texts. So has the Aleppo Codex because of its 20th-century history. The Aleppo synagogue that owned it was fire-bombed in 1948, damaging the Codex which lost most of its Pentateuch pages. The rest of the Codex was smuggled into Israel, and is now on prominent display in the Israel Museum’s Shrine of the Book along with the Dead Sea Scrolls. So the Aleppo Codex has become a relic text for modern Israel, commemorating its violent birth and survival while indexing the nation’s Jewish identity.
Holocaust scrolls and the Aleppo Codex also illustrate the fact that relic texts are susceptible to controversy and conflict, just like bodily relics in other religious traditions. The trade in relics has often been subject to fraud, and bitter conflicts have been fought over the ownership of relics (Geary 1986). So also with Jewish iconic texts. The market for holocaust scrolls led one dealer in New Jersey to fabricate stories of finding scrolls that had been hidden in Europe during the Holocaust. His exposure led to being jailed for fraud and being required to pay nearly one million dollars in compensation (Washington Post 2012). Conflicts over the ownership of relic texts often involve much more than economic interests, because people may believe that, like other relics, the relic texts have supernatural powers. For example, some members of the Aleppo Jewish community kept fragments of the Aleppo Codex for themselves as amulets. A Brooklyn businessman wore a charm containing a fragment of the Codex for six decades. He resisted all attempts by an Israeli museum to buy it and reunite it with the rest of the Codex, which finally happened only after his death in 2005 (Haaretz 2007).
These stories illustrate the legitimizing power of iconic texts for individuals, congregations, and even nations. Old books appear to speak from the past. Their preservation represents the preservation of a connection to the past. The Pentateuch deliberately promotes itself as connecting readers and listeners to the Israelites who heard God speak at Sinai. By venerating Torah scrolls, Jews identify themselves with Israel at Sinai. By cherishing holocaust scrolls, they also place themselves in solidarity with the millions of Jews who were murdered in Europe in the 1940s. By preserving and displaying the Aleppo Codex, the state of Israel connects its own founding in 1948 with the fate of this fabled copy of the Tanak that survived fire in that same year. By wearing a fragment of the Codex as a talisman, a few individuals claim the power of this relic text for themselves, just as many others index their connection to the Torah by manipulating tefillin and mezuzahs. For all of them, the physical text connects the present to the past. Seeing it and touching it actualizes and legitimizes their Jewish identity.
Iconic Jewish Texts
The forms of Jewish books and rituals have, of course, changed over time. The read-aloud scrolls together with stone tablets in their ark as depicted in the Pentateuch became studied codices of Tanaks along with displayed and read-aloud Torah scrolls in their arks in second millennium ce Jewish synagogues. The iconic status of Jewish books still brings business to traditional scribes, but it has also fueled Jewish publishing businesses from the Renaissance to the present day (Stolow 2010).
Nevertheless, ritualization of the Torah’s iconic dimension has remained more consistent over time than has ritualization of its other dimensions. Public readings of the entire Torah were replaced early on by sequential reading over one or more years, and increasing literacy has made private reading and study widespread devotional practices. Semantic interpretation has been revolutionized successively by ancient rabbis, by medieval commentators, and by modern historical critics. But Torah scrolls still get produced in much the same way as they did two thousand years ago. They still get unrolled before congregations that stand in their honor. They still get touched and paraded to give the congregation access to this most holy object. Hand-lettered Hebrew script still conveys an image of holiness, and mezuzahs still connect Jews daily with Torah as a defining element of their identity.
All this suggests that the Torah’s iconic ritualization has remained a constant feature of its use from its origins until today. There is no reason to distinguish between biblical composition and reception at the iconic level. Iconic ritualization took place throughout the history of this text. It must be taken into account in order to understand scripture’s composition, its scripturalization, and its enduring influence.