Within the few hundred years after the closing of the Biblical canon and the flowering of rabbinic Judaism, the process of interpretation within Judaic systems transformed. As the locus of religious power shifted from diviners and priests to teachers, the divinatory search matured into outright textual research, midrash. As the corpus of hermeneutic experimentation expanded, the digitization that had been applied to single letters and names transformed into a practice of referencing whole sentences and stories.

For the ancient rabbis whose debates are recorded in the Talmud, the true study of Torah could only take place in the context of a plurality of debating friends and loved ones. The heart of their hermeneutics involved a method of enquiry that today should be characterized as a form of sampling. The image below, for example, of the story of the oven of Aknai – from one of the oldest manuscipts of the talmudic tractate Baba Metzia (59b) – is a sample, coming at you through a series of technological processes: memorization, writing, copying, transcription, printing, scanning, cutting/pasting (Figure 7.1).

In his intriguing book The Talmud and the Internet, Jonathan Rosen (2000) compares the modern technology of the Internet with the ancient technology of the Talmud. He argues that the Talmud – which was often described as an endless sea (ימ – on which one could surf?), and where the word for “tractate” (masechet, מסכת) literally means “webbing” – anticipated the digital and hypertextual nature of the Internet.