She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Closed Book: How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible, and reported the following:
I certainly hope the page 99 text isn’t a completely accurate snapshot of The Closed Book! This excerpt from a literature review on page ninety-nine sounds so…specialized (read: nerdy):Learn more about The Closed Book at the Princeton University Press website.Yet the circulation and consumption of biblical text in that period was also not completely unrestricted. In the process of demonstrating that “there was no outright ban” on vernacular Bible reading in the Catholic world, these researchers have simultaneously nuanced the portrait of what restriction or censorship of Bible reading looks like…This chapter will therefore likewise analyze a series of early rabbinic practices that limited quotidian engagement with biblical text. How often any individual limitation was put into practice is unclear. Indeed, some of the scenes analyzed in this chapter border on the fantastic to the eye of the modern reader. But I would maintain that it does not matter. We may still analyze these early rabbinic accounts of restrictions placed on Bible reading using a method originally advocated by Daniel Boyarin in which studying fictional “scenes of reading” can produce an “ethnography of reading.” As Annette Yoshiko Reed recently argued, the success of this method “is not predicated on the historical accuracy of the events described, inasmuch as it culls the verisimilitude of the narratives themselves, also with an eye to semantic fields of the specific terms therein used.” Verisimilitude is, of course, in the eyes of the beholder. But working with Second Temple texts, Reed applies the terminology “scenes of reading” to scenarios as fanciful as angelic dictation.Unlike this page, the book as a whole mostly analyzes primary sources—early rabbinic stories about killer Bibles that zap their unsuspecting readers with lightning or tales of ancient priests who accidentally lost (and subsequently rediscovered) the Torah. So I hope it’s an easier read than this excerpt suggests!
On the other hand, this page does capture some of the central themes of The Closed Book. The book certainly explores what it means for the Bible to be a “closed book” in different communities (that is, a book that is made inaccessible, unreadable, or simply censored). It also explores the ways in which making the Bible inaccessible as an informational document opens up other means of relating to the biblical tradition within a community—as a source of ritual power, an oral tradition, or a material locus for God’s presence.
The fact this page begins with a study of medieval Catholic censorship practices might seem a little misleading. The book is, after all, a discussion of early Jewish thought about the Bible. But early Christian thought and practice are sprinkled heavily through the book. Late antique Jews and Christians had a lot more in common when it came to the Bible and how they thought it should be used than we often assume, in this period. So it is interesting that page ninety-nine also highlights that hidden theme of Jewish-Christian relations.
--Marshal Zeringue
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