Ray Harder wrote:A gross oversimplification of this question (but evidence supported statement) would be to say why would the Hebrews write their literature when virtually no one in society could read it? Widespread literacy is a modern phenomenon. Unless you argue that the ancient Israelites were different from all other ancient cultures. There is no evidence of exceptional literacy among the ancient Israelites.
I have to object at this point. Whether or not a society was literate had more to do with the value a society put on literacy, and the difficulty in learning the writing system, not the era in which they lived.
The evidence I’ve seen indicates that the Scandinavians were literate, almost totally, from about 2000 years ago. The runes were easy to learn and apply to spoken language.
Even though Jesus was just a carpenter, we see in his visit to his home synagog that he was expected to be able to read. That suggests universal education 2000 years ago in Judea. If it was expected then, when reading was done in a cognate language to what they spoke, why assume that 1500 years earlier that the majority of people were illiterate in their own language?
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. This could explain for instance the two separate Adam and Eve stories that seem to co-exist in the first few chapters of Genesis. Did God create the couple at the same time and after the animals as Gen. 1:25-27 seems to imply? Or did he create Adam and then later Eve from his rib and before the animals as Gen. 2:18-22 seems to imply? Differences like this were explained in the 19th century by the Documentary Hypothesis (variations of which are universally prevalent in secular scholarship today). 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.
This interpretation goes against what we know about Biblical Hebrew language.
Biblical Hebrew conjugations did NOT conjugate for tense. Just because something is mentioned later, doesn’t mean that it happened later. There are reasons that some events are mentioned out of sequence. Whereas English can indicate the order of events mentioned out of sequence by its conjugations, Biblical Hebrew lacked that ability.
The first chapter gives a sequential list of events, the second chapter focuses on what the man did.
Ray Harder wrote:The only thing that can be said fairly definitively is that oral traditions are are almost universal in societies ancient and modern. It can be deduced that Israel was no different.
While all societies have oral traditions, some societies are also literate.
Ray Harder wrote:In the Bible we have traditions of David singing before Saul and then later traditions that David’s songs were among among the oral traditions that became the Psalms.
Not all the psalms by a long shot were written by David. And in the written record, there’s no indication that the songs that David sang before Saul were songs that ended up among the psalms.
Ray Harder wrote:But the Psalms are “songs” and not “literature” you say? Is Homer’s writing literature or songs? What about the Hebrew (and foreign e.g. Balaam) prophets giving “oracles?” What about the passages that secular scholars fairly universally recognize as the oldest traditions in the Hebrew bible that seem to be songs or oracles or poems (indicating a poetic (and therefore oral?) tradition?) (E.g. the “Song of Moses” in Exodus 15, the “Song of Deborah” in Judges 5, the “Blessings” of Jacob and Moses in Genesis 49 and Deuteronomy 33 respectively, the “Oracles of Balaam” in Numbers 23 & 24, the “Poems of Moses” in Deuteronomy 32, Psalm 68, etc.)
If we allow that Genesis was written compiling older documents, we find a literary tradition that posits that Genesis 1:1–2:4 is the oldest section. The next oldest is Genesis 2:5 – 5:2, the next Genesis 5:3 – 6:9. And so forth.
“Secular scholars” are not that secular, rather they have a religion based on evolution, and it’s based on that religion that they speculate on the ages of those songs. They have no evidence other than their religion that their speculations are correct.
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.)
Meter is a different subject, but I think there was meter in those songs.
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.
It looks as if both the books of Kings and Chronicles were condensations based on those official records.
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Ray Harder wrote:Jeremiah’s message was repeatedly characterized as being given orally. (E.g. Jer. 26:7 etc.) However a reoccurring character in Jeremiah is his personal scribe Baruch (E.g. “Then Jeremiah called Baruch the son of Neriah; and Baruch wrote from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the LORD, which He had spoken unto him, upon a roll of a book.” עַל-מְגִלַּת-סֵפֶר Jer. 36:4) This may imply that Jeremiah couldn’t write himself, but depended on a professional scribe. (So why did he feel the need to write at all? And why was this remarkable? Could this imply a newness of the concept of written religious proclamations?) Jeremiah also records a tradition that the prophet Micah prophesied orally (Jer. 26:18). There are repeated statements of written texts like letters which had to be read to the hearers --even kings and princes (Jer. 36:21) (Implying perhaps that even the royal class couldn’t read or write.) This situation reflected in Jeremiah is exactly what we would expect in a primarily oral culture transitioning into a written one --at least at the governmental level. (As it does in most cultures, bureaucrats long before commoners.) Widespread written literacy as a social value is very much a modern phenomenon.
That doesn’t take into account the widespread practice in literate societies before the invention of word processors, that people were hired as scribes because of their beautiful handwriting to do the actual writing. This practice lasted even through the typewriter era.
In Jeremiah 51:60 after Jeremiah was kidnapped to Egypt and Baruch was in captivity in Babylon, Jeremiah himself wrote documents that he sent to Babylon.
Ray Harder wrote:The archaeological record of a written tradition in Israel is complicated by simple issues like climate and choices of available materials. Jeremiah clearly implies writing on perishable materials that can be cut with a knife and burned in a fireplace (probably parchment or papyri). (Jer. 36:23)
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I suspect that the Hebrew bible stories progressed in Israel in the same manner as in other cultures. They started out largely as oral traditions which became the foundation for religious beliefs and practices and were codified when religious, social, and political forces converged to make it necessary.
Like the Bible, the epic poems of Homer have subject matter from the mid 2nd millennium BC and a written tradition that dates from much later. Homer is almost universally recognized as originating in an oral form. Reducing these texts to writing seems to have widely begun in the 5-6th centuries BC though the extant manuscript tradition is largely from medieval times. Though no scholar to my knowledge argues for any direct connection between the early Homeric and Biblical textual traditions, I think the parallels are striking.
How long a period was there between when the events Homer sung about, and Homer? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was no more than one or two generations. One clue is the number of generations between Odin and his ancestor who was a son-in-law to King Priem — they add up to about 800 years, give or take about a century. There are other clues from other sources that point to about the same time.
Yet the speculation concerning a supposed oral tradition for the Torah is much longer. Given the recorded widespread apostasy even among the priests, it’s unlikely that such a complex history as recorded in Torah would have survived more than one or two generations without being written down.
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.
The written record is that Moses wrote Torah — Genesis compiled from older documents, and the rest original to him. There’s no indication of an oral tradition later written down, as with Homer. There’s no reason to assume that Jews in Moses’ time were illiterate as a people, seeing as the alphabetic writing was known long before the Exodus. Therefore, it seems that it is stronger to say that Moses wrote Torah, than that there was a period of oral tradition that lasted centuries.
Karl W. Randolph.