Ray Harder wrote:Stephen Hughes wrote:However, my question, albiet poorly worded, was I thought testing the possible orality of the Biblical tradition. I was wondering if "scripture" had been passed down by word-of-mouth before it had been written down?
Wow, you do know how to ask the hard questions!
The question seemed straightforward enough.
Ray Harder wrote:The question of the orality of any tradition is complicated mostly by the simple fact that speech leaves no physical trace in the record. It is virtually impossible to make evidence based statements about orality. So what can be said about the biblical stories and on what basis?
Kirk Lowery wrote:As for BCE vs BC, that's ... outside our forum's parameters.
Just for argument's sake we presume that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. He lived around about 1500 BC (or BCE - if there are academic parameters on the forum here). The things described in Genesis had all transpired before Moses' birth. Because he was not an eye-witness, Moses couldn't have written them without learning about them. If we accept, for argument's sake, that there were an Adam and Eve, their story had to get to the person who wrote it down, and that means that the story must have been kept alive for a very long time. I presumed that that was an indisputable example of orality.
Ray Harder wrote:It is important to recognize that the early Hebrew bible could very well have developed from not only an oral tradition, but from multiple oral traditions. ... They assumed different writers/editors, but these features could just as easily be explained as being two different oral traditions that were edited together by a later author/editor.
It is logical that in the construction of a written record that has both a permanence - in that it could both outlive the one who tells the story onto the papyrus, that it could become a single record for a community, to take as many variations and as much information as possible into the record. Logic may or may nto apply here.
Ray Harder wrote:Since those passages generally acknowledged among secular scholars and even some religious ones as the oldest tend to be “poetic,” is that evidence of orality/oral tradition? I would argue yes, but that is not a universal or even consensus view. It is still even widely debated whether there was/is “meter” in Hebrew poetry. (Which is often seen in written texts from oral cultures because stories with meter are easier to remember.)
My original question about case-endings in Hebrew was because I had read many, many years ago that adding case-endings improved the way the Psalms fit the meter.
Ray Harder wrote:There seems to be evidence (even in the Bible itself) that large parts of the “historical” books” were part of a state sponsored effort to record “history.” This implies that some of the OT was written “on spec” of the king/government. These would probably be written at the time of composition.
From the "corrected" accounts of eye-witnesses, who probably gave their information orally. But that would be a different type of textualisation of an oral account, because it hadn't been transmitted before it was textualised.
Ray Harder wrote:The bible itself teaches that Moses WROTE the Torah. However, most secular scholars frankly discount these stories as very late in the biblical tradition when written texts were more common. Both religious and secular scholars accept the prophetic traditions in the Hebrew Bible as falling between the traditions (historical or not) of Moses and the exilic and post-exilic activity on the Hebrew Bible --whatever that was (creation/editing/transcribing from oral tradition, or....?).
Is there a noticable difference in the language from the Torah "Law" (is that the book of Leviticus - the rules for the priests? or Levitucus and Deutero
nomy - the second giving of the Law? or is that the whole Pentateuch?).
Ray Harder wrote:The most influential study of orality in the ancient world is Albert Lord’s 1960 classic “The Singer of Tales.” He studied modern oral traditions among Serbo-Croatians and largely applied his findings to Homer and not the Bible, but his methods and conclusions should be carefully studied by any who approach any question of ancient oral traditions. It is more of a sociological than textual study, but his methods and conclusions should not be ignored by any serious student of this question in any culture.
Are their langauge and text features - as described by Lord's study - that suggest that the Hebrew Bible had been oral at one time?