“כי תקנה עבד עברי. To the unprejudiced mind, nothing can show so strikingly the
truth of the traditional oral-law as the first two paragraphs [of Shemot 21],
V. 2-6 and 7-11, with which this “Mosaic Lawgiving” starts. The civil and
criminal laws of the Nation are to be given, the fundamental basis and the
ordinances of justice and humanness are to be laid down, which are to govern
the relationship and behavior of man to his fellow-man in the state; the first
matter to be dealt with, quite naturally deals with the rights of man, and this
starts with the sentences: “When a man sells another man,” and “when a man
sells his daughter!” What an unthinkable enormity if actually this “written
word” of the “book of Law of the Jewish Nation” should really be the one and
only sole source of the Jewish conception of “Rights.” What a mass of laws and
principles of jurisprudence must have already been said and fixed, considered,
laid down and explained, before the Book of Law could reach these, or even
speak of these, which, after all, are only quite exceptional cases. And it is
with these sentences, the contents of which deny and limit the very holiest
personal right of man, the right to personal freedom, that the Law begins.
But it is quite a different matter if the written word, the “Book” is not
the real source of the Jewish conception of Rights, if this source is the
traditional law, which was entrusted to the living word to which this “book” is
only to be an aid to memory and reference, when doubts arise…
“The תורה שבכתב is to be to the תורה שבעל פה in the relation of
short notes on a full and extensive lecture on any scientific subject. For the
student who has heard the whole lecture, short notes are quite sufficient to
bring back afresh to his mind at any time the whole subject of the lecture. For
him, a word, an added mark of interrogation, or exclamation, a dot, the
underlining of a word etc. etc. is often quite sufficient to recall to his mind
a whole series of thoughts, a remark etc. For those who had not heard the
lecture of the Master, such notes would be completely useless. If they were to
try to reconstruct the scientific contents of the lecture literally from such
notes they would of necessity make many errors. Words, marks, etc., which serve
those scholars who had heard the lecture as instructive guiding stars to the
wisdom that had been taught and learnt, stare at the uninitiated as unmeaning
sphinxes. The wisdom, the truths, which the initiated reproduce from them (but
do not produce out of them) are sneered at by the uninitiated, as being merely
clever or witty play of words and empty dreams without any real foundation.”
R. Samson Raphael Hirsch, Commentary of the Torah (trans.
Isaac Levy), Shemot 21:2
“It seems to me, indeed, that in order to understand the
works of the philosophers of antiquity we must take account of all the concrete
conditions in which they were wrote, all the constraints that weighed upon
them: the framework of the school, the very nature of philosophia,
literary genres, rhetorical rules, dogmatic imperatives, and traditional modes
of reasoning…I do want to stress the fact that written works in the period we
study are never completely free of the constraints imposed by oral
transmission. In fact, it is an exaggeration to assert, as has still been done
recently, that Greco-Roman civilization early on became a civilization of
writing and that one can thus treat, methodologically, the philosophical works
of antiquity like any other written work.
“For the written works of this period remain closely tied to
oral conduct. Often they were dictated to a scribe. And they were intended to
be read aloud, either by a slave reading to his master or by the reader
himself, since in antiquity reading customarily meant reading aloud,
emphasizing the rhythm of the phrase and the sound of the words, which the
author himself has already experienced when he dictated his work. The ancients
were extremely sensitive to these effects of sound…
“This relationship between the written and the spoken word
thus explains certain aspects of the works of antiquity. Quite often the work
proceeds by the associations of ideas, without systematic rigor. The work
retains the starts and stops, the hesitations, and the repetitions of spoken
discourse. Or else, after re-reading what he has written, the author introduces
a somewhat forced systematization by adding transitions, introductions, or
conclusions to different parts of the work…
“More than other literature, philosophical works are linked
to oral transmission because ancient philosophy itself is above all oral in
character. Doubtless there are occasions when someone was converted by reading
a book, but one would then hasten to the philosopher to hear him speak,
question him, and carry on discussions with him and other disciples in a
community that always serves as a place of discussion. In matters of
philosophical teaching, writing is only an aid to memory, a last resort that
will never replace the living word.”
Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a way of life (ed. Arnold I.
Davidson), pp. 62-63
