| dc.description | Three converging factors make the early Rabbinic midrashim (scriptural commentaries) an appropriate place to begin an examination of the complex interplay of oral and textual registers of tradition and its transmission, so much the focus of recent study of other traditional cultures and so much the character of Rabbinic culture from antiquity to the present. First of all, recent scholarship of Rabbinic midrash has tended to vacillate between viewing it as the product of popular oral transmission and sophisticated literary composition. Second, it is in our earliest (so-called "halakhic" or "Tannaitic") midrashic collections that we find the first Rabbinic expressions of what will subsequently be more fully enunciated: the idea of a twofold revelation of Torah at Sinai and a twofold repertoire of its continuous performance and study: written and oral. Lastly, midrashic commentary, by its very structure and rhetoric, provides a glimpse of how Written and Oral Torahs are dialogically combined in a single performative, didactic medium. I shall address each of these in turn, with greatest attention to the second. | eng |
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