The Tablets of Stone and the invention of literacy

This week's Torah reading deals with the episode of the Golden Calf and Moses' breaking of the two tablets of stone on which were carved the Ten Commandments. This event is not discussed at all in Pirkei Avot, but there is a reference to the tablets of stone and their literary content.

While Avot is famously described as a mishnaic tractate that deals with ethics and moral chastisement, some of its content seems quite remote from that objective. One of the many teachings in the earlier part of the fifth chapter that ostensibly has nothing to do with the perfection (or at least the improvement) of human behaviour is Avot 5:8, which opens with a list of ten things that are said to have been created at twilight on the Sixth Day of Creation, just before the onset of the world's first Sabbath. This list of ten reads as follows:

The mouth of the earth [that swallowed Korach]; the mouth of [Miriam's] well; the mouth of [Balaam's] donkey; the rainbow; the manna; [Moses'] staff; the shamir [worm]; writing script, the manner of writing and the tablets [of the Ten Commandments]. 

Most commentaries on Avot are content to discuss them as they are, but do not look beyond them for any profound moral message. R. Travis Herford (Ethics of the Talmud) acknowledges this when he writes:

"It is not impossible that beneath this list of unique creations ... there is concealed some attempt at the solution of a philosophical problem; but I am unable to define what it was".

Leaving aside the question left open by Reverend Herford, it is pertinent here to consider the tablets and what they contain.

The final three eve-of-Sabbath creations of the ten listed in this mishnah are concerned with the writing and recording of God’s word, and that of man. The precise meaning of the mishnah is however unclear and there is some scope for flexibility in understanding it since the consonants of the Hebrew word for “the manner of writing” ( מִּכתְבָּ , michtav) can also be read as mechatev, meaning “stylus” or “writing implement" (both the commentary ascribed to Rashi and the Machzor Vitry take the word to be mechatev though most modern editions of Avot have michtav).  Ultimately, though, these three items are still all about literacy, and the universal benefits of literacy are so far beyond challenge that to record them here would be otiose. Their inclusion here may have been particularly dear to Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi (who redacted the Mishnah) and those like-minded scholars who reached the conclusion that the time had come to organize the Oral Law and set it down in written format as the six Orders of the Mishnah that we have today. 

While we take it for granted today that the entire Torah shebe’al peh (the Oral Torah tradition) is available in convenient printed and online versions, we should remember that it was at one time a punishable offence to commit the Oral Torah to writing (see Temurah 14b, per Rabbi Abba bar Chiyya in the name of Rabbi Yochanan; also discussion at Gittin 60b).

The significance of putting things into writing is manifold. This gift of God underlines the impermanence of human memory and the value of creating a transmissible record of things that should never be forgotten. In the Torah, God not only provides an authentic text of the Ten Commandments but ensures that Moses makes a verbatim copy of it, not a paraphrase. He also commands the Children of Israel to inscribe the words of the Torah on large stones covered with plaster before crossing the River Jordan and entering Israel, this being a statement to the seventy nations of the World of what it was that the Jewish people stood for (see Devarim 27:1-8 and Rashi there). Writing is thus shown to be both God’s way of making a statement and our own. If you say something and are serious about it, putting it in writing even today is the usual manner of acknowledging that this is so.