Detextualizing and Retextualizing the Torah

The book of Deuteronomy develops a remarkable interplay between the oral and the written, the ritual and the textual. Already in the earliest reception of the book, the inner-biblical reference to the discovery of the »book of the law« by Josiah in 2 Kgs 22, we find a similar interplay between a written text and the public performance of reading. In the Exagoge of Ezekiel Tragicus, this idea is taken to its fullest articulation, and the story of the Exodus, seen through the lens of Deuteronomy, is performatively enacted on the stage. Though Deuteronomy was itself an important step in the advent of »book religion« and the increasing importance of textual authority, the biblical book and the textual responses it inspired continued to detextualize the written word, even as they textualized religious authority in the first place.

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