Crowns on the Letters - Sources

The "Dual Torah" - Written & Oral

1. From the essay Talmud by Robert Goldenberg in Back to the Sources, edited by Barry Holtz (1984), pp. 129-130.

For the ancient rabbis..."Torah" meant far more than the five books attributed to Moses that Jews customarily call by that name. For them, Torah was the Divine Wisdom which had existed before the world came into being (see Proverbs 8:22-31), indeed, the blueprint according to which Creation had followed its proper course. Torah included all possible knowledge of God's will, of the life the Creator intended for the Chosen People to live. All things, from the most trivial to the most sublime, were within its realm.

Basing this notion on certain hints in the text of Scripture, ancient rabbis taught that the revelation granted to Moses had been delivered in two forms, a smaller revelation in writing and the larger one kept oral. This "Oral Torah" had been transmitted faithfully by the leaders of each generation to their successors, by Moses to Joshua, and then to the elders, then to the prophets, to the men of the Great Assembly, to the leaders of the Pharisees, and finally to the earliest rabbis. Thus only these rabbis knew the whole Torah--written and oral--and only such knowledge could qualify anyone for legitimate leadership over the people of Israel.

2. From Introduction to Rabbinic Literature by Jacob Neusner (1994), p. xx

Rabbinic literature forms the canon of the Judaism of the dual Torah as that corpus reached conclusion by the end of late antiquity. "The dual Torah" refers to revelation through two media: writing, on the one side; oral formulation and oral transmission through memory, on the other. The myth of the dual Torah maintains that when God revealed the Torah at Sinai, God transmitted the Torah in two media. The one in writing is now contained in the written Torah (which the Christian world calls "the Old Testament"). The other medium by which the Torah reached Israel was through memory, that is, the other Torah was transmitted orally and memorized by the great prophets, then sages, down to the time of the masters who appear in the Mishnah.

This conception of another, orally formulated and orally transmitted Torah--this memorized Torah--characterizes this Judaism and no other. In accord with the myth that accounts for rabbinic literature, we find the substance of the memorized Torah, that is to say, the oral Torah, in the writings of the ancient rabbis of late antiquity. While placing themselves into an oral tradition that began at Sinai, these rabbis wrote their books from ca. 200 to 600. It follows that a generative, indeed defining, theological and hermeneutical problem of this Judaism derives from teh task of showing the relationship between the two parts of the one whole Torah of Sinai.