90 Meira Polliack
explained the Jews’ extended exile, loss of sovereignty, and humiliation
among the nations.
Th e following excerpt from Yefet ben ‘Eli’s allegorical commentary on
Zecheriah 5:5 – 8 exemplifi es this viewpoint:12
And in the end of the time of the exile those books which the people
claim to have been [derived] from Moses will become obsolete, and no
one will follow them. Th ey will go back, instead, to the written Torah,
as it is said (Deuteronomy 30:8): “And you shall again obey the voice of
the Lord,” . . . and no one will turn to the Mishnah nor to the Talmud for
they will know they are “a commandment of men learned by rote” (Isaiah
29:13). . . . He said (vs. 8): “Th is is the wicked one” — and he named her a
wicked woman in order to demonstrate that they are sinners before God,
since they composed these [talmudic] books and compelled the nation to
believe in them and to act according to them and condemned to death
those who disagreed with them. Th ey did not say: so we reason, and so
it occurred to us, and do search yourselves O Israel as we have searched.
Had they done so, they would have been saved from the condemnation
of the Lord of the Universe. . . . And so all the Karaite scholars used this
method and established what appeared to them as the truth and encour-
aged people to search (themselves), so much that a man is entitled to dis-
agree with his father and the father will not say to him, “why have you
disagreed with me?”, and a student with his Rabbi. . . . And his saying (vs.
8) “and he thrust her back into the container, and thrust down the leaden
weight upon its mouth” — means that they sealed the Mishnah and Talmud
and did not leave a path for those who came aft er them to establish not
even a single letter.Th e Karaites’ conception of the innate falsity of Oral Law as expressed in
this passage is inextricable from their historical-philosophical attempt to
explain what they saw as the regrettable political state of the Jewish people.
Th e rejection of Oral Law as a mistaken interpretive tradition would en-
able the spiritual lift ing of the perpetual state of sin in which the Jews had
existed since Exile. It was perceived as a necessary step in rectifying their
national predicament.
Th e time required, however, to reinterpret all of Scripture meant that
the Karaites could not replace oral traditions at a satisfactory pace. With
regard to the legal corpus of the Bible, this presented an existential problem
which left them in limbo: not beholden to the accepted norms yet at the