Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Zalman Romanoff <flintflintflintflint AT gmail.com>]

An anecdotal observation: a year ago I've become our shul’s Torah Reader. Since I didn't know the tropes (cantillation/chanting marks), I got away for several months with reading it in with regular speech inflections. The experience has been an eye opener. The text just rolls off the mouth and has a rhythm that becomes apparent only when you read it out loud in public (without the obfuscating tropes), particularly the “Law” parts (especially Deuteronomy). When you understand what you read out loud, the text’s content and structure or rhetoric devices or some secret ingredient in it compels you to give the reading a dramatic _expression_ to communicate the underlying tone. Deuteronomy in particular has a desperate quality as if calling out to a recalcitrant or uncooperative/incredulous or even obtuse audience. Its repetitions go from cajoling to threatening, from pleading to commanding and it all falls into place when you read it out loud trying to impress the content upon an audience.  Even genealogical lists come out with some kind of rhythm when read that way. Poetry doesn't work that way, though, something is missing (it was probably originally chanted with a lot of repetitions.)

Noam Eitan,

Brooklyn, NY 

On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 10:51 AM, Norman Cohn <normanncohn AT yahoo.com.br> wrote:

Hi Karl,

 

James W. Watts made some very interesting studies on the subject of the audience of the Pentateuch Law. (Reading Law, 1999; Ritual and Rhetoric in Leviticus, 2007). I wouldn't be able to say how "Reading Law" is regarded by scholars today, but the work seems to have enjoyed a good reception when it was published. I think Watts would say that the Pentateuch Law was directed towards a mixed audience composed of people with different and at times even conficting visions about the subject being presented to them. He goes as far as saying that the text of the Law is fraught with rethoric devices which suggest it was meant to be read aloud in public, including to the common and ordinary folk. 

 

His conclusions, however, and I can be wrong on this, seem to apply mainly to the legal parts of the Pentateuch. Do you know of a good study which tackles the intended audience of the rest of the Pentateuch?

 

There are indeed some scholars who maintain that the Pentateuch wasn't composed to be read by an audience, large or small, but mainly for reasons of preservation (e.g. Jean Louis Ska's essay in Persia and Torah: The Theory of Imperial Authorisation of the Pentateuch, 2001, Society of Bilical Literature).   

 

Best regards,

 

Norman Cohn

São Paulo - Brazil.

 

 

  

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