Q&A: Were the Prophets Torah Scholars?
Were the Prophets Torah Scholars?
Question
What Torah did the prophets who lived before the giving of the Torah study?
And the prophets who came after the giving of the Torah, such as Daniel, Elijah, various judges, and so on—were they Torah scholars? And if not, were they chosen only on the basis of various spiritual or psychological qualities?
And another question on the same topic: what Torah did people study before the period when the Mishnah and the Talmud were written? After all, much of the Mishnah is “Rabbi Meir says such-and-such and Rabbi Yehuda says such-and-such,” and so on—so what was there before those tannaim lived and said those various things?
Suppose, theoretically, that something happened and all the books of the Oral Torah vanished from the world, but somehow there were a few people who still knew it and would teach it to whoever wanted to learn—what would they teach?
Thank you!
Answer
As for the prophets, I have no idea. I don’t think anyone does.
As for tannaitic or amoraic sayings, I didn’t understand the problem. Sometimes they transmit an earlier tradition, and sometimes they express their own opinion. In the second case, before they said it, it didn’t exist.
If the entire Oral Torah were to vanish (and we also wouldn’t remember any of it), apparently we would go back to the Written Torah.