“He Unrolled the Scroll…and He Rolled Up the Scroll and Gave It Back”

Abstract

“He Unrolled the Scroll…and He Rolled Up the Scroll and Gave It Back” Samuel E. Balentine Perhaps the most commonplace contemporary portrait of Judaism is the picture of devout Jews standing at the Western Wall of the remains of the Temple in Jerusalem reading a Torah scroll. The central components of this familiar image are a building and a book. Their association with one another is so conventional that the ironies and contradictions of their filiation can easily go unnoticed. Although they share common values and concerns, the building and the book exhibit divergent traits. The building is fixed; the book is portable. The book is read outside the building; its recitation parallels the rites practiced within. The book describes the rituals inside the building but is not part of them. The building requires lineage; the book demands literacy…the complex relationships between the building and the book—the Temple and the Torah—constitute the foundation of Judaism.1 This quote introduces William Scott Green’s article on “Levitical Religion.” His objective is to show that the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE “was not the end of Israel’s Temple‐centered religion of cult and sacrifice.” It was not the end, because during the exile Israel’s priestly leadership gathered and edited the community’s national traditions—narratives about its origins and destiny along with a set of behavioral principles and practices that defined its life in relationship to God and the world—into a text, which Judaism now recognizes as the Torah. The Torah was not a replacement for a lost religion; it was a compensation, an interim strategy for obedience to God in a world where politics and power had destroyed the very symbols that had once secured and nourished life in God’s presence. Green observes that although the Torah preserved a collective memory, it also modified, and more importantly transformed it. Now, the promulgation of a text, not a temple or an altar, serves as a guide to religious practice. In short, “Reading the Torah becomes a means for the Jews to relate to God.”2 A second citation from Green sharpens the point: Through the Torah, the Israelites in exile could relate to the Temple’s religion of cult and sacrifice by reading about it, by hearing about it, by thinking about it, but not by actually performing it. Mary Douglas envisions this as follows: “There is no tabernacle, the faithful are not moving around in it, all the movement is in the book they are reading, or hearing through their ears. Learning the book becomes a way of internalizing the tabernacle…” The Torah evoked a religion that Israel could not directly experience. In the religion it constitutes, the Torah becomes in itself what is described in the text, a portable point of contact between God and Israel, a textual Tabernacle.3 Green’s image of the complex relationship between “the building and the book” in Judaism set me to thinking. What would be the analog for Christianity? Several possibilities come to mind. We might think, for example, of one of the Protestant reformers (in this context, John Calvin, of course) reading Holy Writ from a grand church pulpit in Europe; of the Pope reading scripture at Saint Peter’s; or—and I apologize for this abrupt segue—of a Billy Graham crusade in Candlestick Park, of William Sloan Coffin preaching at Riverside Church in New York, of Robert Schuller preaching in the Crystal Cathedral, even Jerry Falwell, holding forth in Lynchburg, VA, with surround sound and video streaming, of course, to people and places far beyond. These and other images surely contribute to a portrait of the complex relationship between the Bible and the Church in contemporary Christianity. I have chosen to look elsewhere, however. The Gospel of Luke offers the following description of Jesus reading scripture in Nazareth. Whether or not it has contemporary significance is, I suggest, a question that lies at the heart of the issue we have met to consider. When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He...