Ritual Legitimacy and Scriptural Authority

Western culture has traditionally drawn a dichotomy between rituals and texts, usually favoring texts over rituals. We tend to associate this bias particularly with Protestant polemics aimed at Catholic rituals, but it was already quite strong in the Middle Ages, as Phillipe Buc has shown.1 The elevation of text over ritual has served to distinguish "true" religion from ritualized "magic" throughout much of Western history. Contemporary scholarship has given new attention to ritual to reverse this traditional privileging of text. Theorists of ritual have tried to understand rituals for their own sake. Ronald Grimes, for example, declared, "Ritual studies, unlike liturgies, does not begin with a consideration of traditions and texts. It begins by attending to gesture and posture, the actual comportment of the body in interaction."2 Ritual studies has therefore grown into its own subdiscipline within the study of religion. The academic dichotomy between text and ritual remains entrenched, however, as witnessed by the different (sub)disciplines and their associated journals dedicated to each subject even within a given religious tradition. In this essay, rather than playing down either ritual or text in favor of the other, I want to point out and explain the interdependence of texts and rituals. That interdependence is readily apparent in contemporary religious liturgies and governmental ceremonies that highlight the reading and manipulation of texts. For example, processions with Torah scrolls and Gospel books utilize texts as ritual objects, as do many political and judicial oath ceremonies. William Scott Green explored the historical origin of these practices and observed that scripture took the place of the lost temple in rabbinic Judaism. It was therefore sanctified as a religious object more than as a text.3 Building on Green's work, Thomas Driver concluded: The point is not that scripture took the place of ritual, as some might imagine, but that ritual was modified so as to embrace the Torah texts and exalt them as sacred.... Ritual guides hermeneutics. In Judaism and in many other religions, certain rituals conceptualize the text and secure its place within the ordered world. . . . Among Protestants also, the scriptures are defined by the protocols (mostly unwritten and passed along by tradition) concerning their use. It is these protocols, not the scriptural words per se, that order Protestant life and give it the character that it has.4 Though Driver understates the role that some of the contents of scripture play in Protestant (and Jewish) life, his point is nevertheless well taken. The influence of ritual on beliefs about scriptures has received far too little attention in research. The observations of Green and Driver leave open, however, the question of how texts and rituals came to be associated in the first place. What ritual benefit accrued from using texts in this way? I will argue that old texts were used in antiquity to validate the forms of important rituals. The rituals in turn lent their cultural influence to the texts that prescribed them. The textual authority of Western scriptures had ritual origins. I. Scriptural Authority The problem of how some texts acquired such a high degree of religious authority in ancient Judaism is complicated by the fact that interpreters tend to make a number of unexamined-and unjustified-assumptions about scriptural authority. The first is simply to take scriptural authority as a matter of course and not realize that the Jewish (and later Christian, Manichean, Muslim, Sikh, etc.) reverence for an authoritative book was unusual in the context of ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean religions. The second assumption is that scriptural authority is an outgrowth of the text's status as "law." Because the first Jewish scripture, the Torah/Pentateuch, contains several codes of civil law and religious instructions, people easily conclude that the Bible gained its status by virtue of its legal authority. …