The Words of the Righteous: The Death of Text and the Eternity of Stone

Abstract:This essay examines examples of the Oral Torah as a concrete, material phenomenon in late ancient rabbinic sources. The oral nature of oral Torah, both as an ideology and as a description of rabbinic textual practices, can elide some of the more evocative discussions of the nature of oral Torah. Previous discussions, such as Wollenberg (2019), have shown that the nature of the written Torah was often understood as unstable, changing, and mutable. This essay explores the other side of that equation, exploring discussions of oral Text as concrete, enduring, and unchanging. Two main examples are studied: the first from a passage in the Palestinian Talmud, and the second in a passage from the Babylonian Talmud. The Palestinian Talmud draws a dense network of connections between Torah scrolls, oral teachings, rabbinic sages, and the imagery of death and memorialization. The Babylonian Talmud similarly extends the value of rabbinic oral teaching into the World to Come, showing that while the associations between teaching, death, and eternal life manifest differently, they are still present in different rabbinic contexts. Taken together, these inscriptions of a concrete and material Oral Torah are fully realized in the body of the rabbinic sage. Other scholars have also shown that rabbinic sages become an embodiment of Torah: this essay examines the nature of rabbinic Torah, as discussed in rabbinic literature, to understand how that embodiment comes about.