The Bible as an Oral-Written Book - Episode 167

Carey Griffel: Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel and last week we talked about oral tradition and how oral tradition can be trustworthy and can actually form a set of evidence for us of the past. But I also said I was gonna get into cautions about that and reasons why we might suspect oral tradition as a historical record.

[00:00:40] There are frequently some guardrails that are built into the very idea and the very practice of oral tradition that makes it something that we really can use as actual evidence of the past, but it also is subject to particular pitfalls and problems and things that we're going to want to correct in it as we look at it and as we use it for actual quote unquote historical research.

[00:01:11] Of course when we use the word history, we've got a couple of different ways we actually use that term. A lot of times when we use the word history, we're talking about all of the things that have happened in the past. But really the word history talks about writing. History is what we have recorded in writing. So talking about oral history and talking about history in general, as if it is everything that is literally and actually happened in the past, that's not really how we should use the word history. But we have to kind of talk about that some way. So we're going to insert just a little bit of flexibility into this term, and we'll talk about recorded history, either in written form or in the form of oral tradition or oral stories.

[00:02:09] Because it is pretty fair that if somebody is telling you about their past, that could be a form of history, especially because sometimes they're telling it to you so that it can be written down. So anyway, I just wanna make sure that we're really clear on this term history and how we might be using it at times in these episodes. Apologies from the get go, if I end up using the terms in more of a fuzzy way than I really intend to. The way that we talk about things tends to be a little bit more casual than technical.

[00:02:47] But at any rate, I said that we were going to get into the cautions about oral tradition. And we are going to do that. But there is something I have to talk about today first. As I was looking into oral tradition and the more I think about it, the more I think in the back of my mind that a lot of the stuff that I'm talking about does not just apply to oral tradition. A lot of this stuff also applies to things that are written down. Now why would that be?

[00:03:21] I wrestled with that for a while this week and I did more research. And I think I came across a really intriguing answer. So instead of getting directly into the cautionary episode that I'm gonna talk about probably next time, and then I will tell you why I'm getting into all of this. But before I do that, I want to talk a little bit more about oral tradition. And I want to talk about how that applies to our study and our understanding of Scripture. Even though the very word "Scripture" means writing.

[00:04:00] So today I'm gonna talk to you about two books that I think are very related and that if you read them together or side by side, then you might see some really fascinating things. The first book is widely available. In fact, if you just go look it up online, you might just be able to find yourself a copy of it.

[00:04:24] It is called Oral Tradition as History. It is by Jan Vansina. So that's the book I'm gonna be talking about mostly today. It is a book about, well, oral tradition as history. We're gonna be spending most of our time in this book today because it's a really fascinating study and I feel like more people should understand this stuff. Oral tradition really does make up a good portion of the things that we know in life.

[00:04:58] I talked a little bit about that last week, so I'm not gonna put a whole lot of pressure on that point today, but I really think this is often either not studied well. Or just ignored, frankly, because when we're studying the Bible, we're studying a text, so why should we think too much about oral tradition?

[00:05:19] Now of course, some people do think that a lot of the Bible came from oral tradition, and so that might be part of why we would want to study this and understand it if that is our position. But there is a good bit of intersection of Scripture and oral tradition than I think a lot of people realize.

[00:05:39] And so we aren't just going to talk about this book from Jan Vansina. We are also gonna talk about the book, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart, Origins of Scripture and Literature. This is a book by David M. Carr. Carr with two Rs at the end, and it's a little bit more of an expensive book, but you can maybe find it used or something like that.

[00:06:06] Carr's point is to discuss how Scripture and oral tradition are much more interrelated than we often realize. And let me tell you what the data he brings out is absolutely fascinating. We're gonna be talking about oral tradition as well as Scripture today, because if we understand Scripture as being not just a written tradition, but an oral- written tradition, as Carr argues in his book, and I think he's very persuasive in this, then really we need to understand oral tradition a whole lot better than we do now. That is going to seat our understanding and our study of Scripture in a way that is going to help us go beyond a really cartoonish idea of the transmission and preservation of Scripture.

[00:07:04] I know that that sounds a little bit offensive to say that we have a cartoonish vision of that, but frankly, we really do. We struggle with the idea that is very apparent in the New Testament, that there were multiple textual traditions of Scripture that the New Testament authors were drawing upon and using.

[00:07:25] This is simply obvious when you understand how they're quoting things in the New Testament. And what are we supposed to do with that kind of information when we believe that the Bible is inspired and the Bible is inerrant and the Bible is unchangeable through time. So what do we do with these quotes from the New Testament authors that indicate a lot more fuzziness to the textual transmission of Scripture? That just doesn't make sense to us.

[00:07:57] What do we do with the fact that in the Dead Sea Scrolls, they preserved multiple types of manuscripts? Sometimes books were shorter or longer, sometimes they have different words. Sometimes there's a little bit of variation in them. We don't understand how that could be and why that would be. And I think the reason we don't understand that is because we don't understand what David Carr is saying about this Bible being an oral- written book.

[00:08:28] So let's dig a little bit into this book, Oral Tradition as History by Jan Vansina. At the beginning of his book, Vansina says, quote, " No one in oral societies doubts that memories can be faithful repositories which contain the sum total of past human experience and explain the how and why of present day conditions." End quote.

[00:08:57] So a couple of points here that he is trying to bring out. Number one, oral tradition can be faithful in telling us about the past. But not only that, and very importantly, the purpose of that is to tell us why things are the way they are today. So within the idea of oral tradition, this includes the ideas both of past as well as the present.

[00:09:25] Vansina goes on to say, quote, " Whether memory changes or not, culture is reproduced by remembrance put into words and deeds." End quote.

[00:09:38] What he's saying there is that oral tradition and memory and eyewitness accounts all include a level of interpretation and meaning in order to make sense of what they're saying. I mean, sure it's possible to report some fact that is just a bare fact, but why is somebody reporting that fact? They have a reason for doing it and their memory is calling it up from the past. And when our memories do something like that, we are doing a form of interpretive work where we're selecting elements to record or transmit to somebody else and this is just naturally a selective process.

[00:10:22] Vansina tells us that there is a difference between oral history and oral tradition. Oral history is something that somebody is telling you that is in their own recollection, like they're telling you their own memories. So oral history is something that can only last within a generation or lifetime.

[00:10:47] But oral history will transfer over to the world of oral tradition when it gets passed between generations. So oral history is somebody telling you their direct experience. Oral tradition is when that experience and those recollections get transmitted through generations and through time.

[00:11:11] So that's a really helpful distinction because there's going to be a difference between someone telling you their story and giving you all of the facts that they recall in the order that they recall them, but then when somebody goes and retells that story, they are also going to go through a selective process.

[00:11:32] Now, this doesn't have to change anything in the story, but people are going to choose to emphasize different points. They will include or leave out points. And as I talked last week about condensing things, this is just the natural process of that.

[00:11:50] So here's another couple of points to make a distinction between. The first is the idea of news, and then there's the idea of interpretation. News is information that is recent and that was previously unknown to an audience. And it's usually along the lines of something that's sensational or it connects to something sensational. This news can include things like eyewitnesses and people telling you about things that they remember from their past.

[00:12:25] News then is going to be interpreted. It is going to be described in a way that's going to fit into what you are dealing with at the moment. News is going to fit into a particular vantage point, and it's going to be told from that particular vantage point.

[00:12:43] Vansina says, quote, "Mediation of perception by memory and emotional state shapes an account. Memory typically selects certain features from the successive perceptions and interprets them according to expectation, previous knowledge, or the logic of what must have happened. And it fills the gaps in perception." End quote.

[00:13:13] So here is our problem with the idea of reliability. If by "reliability" we mean it has to be perfect, has to give us all of the information that we have, it has to tell us exactly what happened in the past, and it can't be interpreted. Well, that just simply cannot happen, especially not in oral history and oral tradition. If validity is about accuracy and you can't have any interpretive spin on it, we simply fail immediately.

[00:13:49] Let's talk about a few different types of news. First of all, we have hearsay. This is rumor. It's got built-in sensationalism, and frankly, most accounts are based on this. Vansina says, quote, "Rumor is the process by which a collective historical consciousness is built." end quote.

[00:14:15] And even if you have the oral history of an eyewitness account, once it passes into oral tradition, it is by necessity, hearsay. And it will grow and it will develop and it will accumulate details or it will lose details. This is simply the process that we go through.

[00:14:36] Another thing we might have are visions or dreams or hallucinations. This is news from the supernatural. And of course, when we have news from the supernatural, we are going to interpret that through our own experience in our own culture. We might have some sort of explanation that is coming from the supernatural source, but usually we really don't.

[00:15:04] We also have things like personal remembrances, etiologies, or stories of why something is the way that it is. We have folk etymology and a whole host of other ideas. And these are often reflexive and they form the wellsprings of the culture.

[00:15:26] Now, once you move past the idea of news, we get the concept of commentaries and explanations. These will draw upon the news, but really they are newly created messages. And sometimes they're ad hoc. Sometimes you have a situation where somebody is just making up an explanation and it really has nothing to do with the original history.

[00:15:55] And this is necessary as we go through the process of oral tradition, because eventually we'll get things that are anachronistic. We get things within the account that people no longer understand. Old customs and old phrases. And those at least can testify that the tradition is old because it needs to be explained.

[00:16:20] What about fiction? One of our concerns when we're looking at oral tradition is the idea that things are made up. While it is certainly possible for people to be very creative and to make up a whole lot of stuff, usually what happens is that, well, let me go ahead and have Vansina explain this. He says, quote, " Improvisation on an existing stock of images and forms is the hallmark of fictional narrative of all sorts. Such tales develop during performance. ... Fictional narratives never are invented from scratch, but develop as various bits of older tales are combined, sequences altered or improvised, descriptions of characters shifted, and settings placed in other locales." End quote.

[00:17:14] That will go along really well with what David Carr says about oral and written tradition. When somebody is telling us a tale, that tale or story or narrative or account might actually change through time, especially if you have a really good performer who gets a great idea in the middle of the story or who combines different stories together or so on.

[00:17:42] Let's talk a little bit about the categories of oral tradition. First of all, the one that we probably think about the most, which might happen least, is the idea of memorized speech. You usually will have some sort of formal structure and institution within the society. Perhaps the culture will value the idea of a father passing on particular stories to his son and so on, and they are to memorize these speeches and the wording is not supposed to change. At least that is the idea. But the reality is that's usually not how things can happen.

[00:18:27] We can have phrases and ideas and whole concepts that are easily passed on, but an entire narrative is really rare to pass on in memorized form. That's not to say that it doesn't happen.

[00:18:43] This is gonna get a little bit into what we're gonna talk about with David Carr in his book. There is a e written tradition and oral tradition in the form of memorization, and that happens a whole lot better once something is written down. Even though you can have people memorizing a whole epic, in order to pass that information down from generation to generation, if you want it to complete, it really needs to have a written form that people can draw upon.

[00:19:14] But here's another category of oral tradition, and this one is really important. Vansina calls these "accounts." An account is going to have a stabilized form. And perhaps it could harmonize multiple accounts.

[00:19:31] And there are different kinds of accounts. One of them is historical gossip. This is information that survives generationally. It can survive them even going to a different place. It can survive different events happening. And there's a certain robustness to historical gossip because it is a collective form of remembering. Now, it can also change. There's many ways it can change through time still. But when it is embedded collectively, that forms a particular type of knowledge that is transmitted in particular ways.

[00:20:10] Another kind of account is a personal tradition. Usually these are not of great importance to the culture and they're frequently lost quickly. That would often be in the form of an oral history that might get transmitted only one or two generations, but not beyond that.

[00:20:30] Then we have a group account. This is an account about a village, about a kingdom. It has to do with group identity involving land, resources, women, the types of offices and institutions that a culture has. It is basically the property of the group.

[00:20:51] Vansina does not stop at just generalities. He actually gives particular instances of this that we have recorded . There's one story he tells of the Hopi tribe and the Navajo, and an interaction that they had. I won't go into this story because you can go read about that in his book. But it's really interesting how we can see how the story changes through time. It becomes more simplified, but also important details are added that explain why and who and what, because it is a group identity account that preserves why somebody is a leader and why the boundaries between people exist.

[00:21:36] Another category of oral tradition are traditions of origins and genesis. Not talking about the book of Genesis, although that is one of these types of accounts, but just the beginnings of things. Often these are what we would call a myth. And when I use the word myth, I'm not talking about untrue.

[00:21:59] A myth is not an untrue story. It is simply a tradition of origin of worlds, and man and it involves supernatural elements. And the myth will explain why the society and the culture is the way that it is. It tells the people who they are and where they came from.

[00:22:21] That is related to a group account, but a myth is usually something that isn't really technically rooted in any kind of oral history because it's so far in the past that we don't know exactly who recorded this. We don't know the names of the people who witnessed it necessarily. We know the people and the beings who were involved in the story, but quite frequently we have no authorship of an origin myth. So that is different than a group account. A group account has a historical memory that backs it up.

[00:22:57] Again, we're not getting into truth claims here. We're just talking about different categories of oral tradition. But there are reasons why origin myths will often look very alike because they do tend to use pre-existing material of the same nature. Which makes sense because they're borrowing on ancient memory. So this isn't like some flaw in what's going on here.

[00:23:26] Now is what they're borrowing or they're using accurate? They might not even have any idea of how to judge that. It is what it is.

[00:23:38] Another type of category of oral tradition is a genealogy., And Vama explains that a genealogy is a cosmology. A genealogy is not simply the list of people in the past who have always lived. They do not know absolutely every individual that ever lived in their past. That would be fairly ridiculous if they did. So genealogies are cosmologies because they again, tell something about the past of the group. They are collapsed. They have gaps. Sometimes they use people groups as people, or they're really just referencing a patriarch of a group and that patriarch might not even be the first one of that people. They often call upon culture heroes.

[00:24:32] So within a genealogy, we have to grapple with a lot of really hard things here. There's a logical construction to them because they're chronological. They are cosmological representations of the people in the past, but they also do draw upon historical accounts.

[00:24:53] Then Vansina tells us that when you look at the whole body of the accounts of a people and all of the different types of accounts, there is a really interesting three-tiered structure to them. First of all, we have the accounts that are more recent, and those usually have more information. They're more detailed, and that detail tapers off back through time.

[00:25:22] And then Vansina talks about a floating gap. There's a gap in the record. So the information in the recent past gets less and less until we reach a point where there is some sort of really big gap or fuzziness. And there's an explanation in the story for it. But he calls it a floating gap because as the people move forward in time, that gap changes because their memory is going to change.

[00:25:52] The amount of information they can possibly process and pass on is frankly limited. So it has to be this way to some degree. It's gonna taper off. Then there's going to be a period of time where they don't have a whole lot of information. Usually there is again, a reason for that.

[00:26:13] But earlier in time, before that floating gap, there is another batch of wealth of information here. That is usually their origin stories or something that connects to their origin stories.

[00:26:27] Vansina says, quote, " The gap is not often very evident to people in the communities involved, but it is usually unmistakable to researchers. Sometimes, especially in genealogies, the recent past and origins are run together as a succession of a single generation." End quote.

[00:26:51] Vansina goes on to say, quote, "The gap is best explained by reference to the capacity of different social structures to reference time. Beyond a certain time depth, which is different for different people, chronology can no longer be kept. Accounts fuse and are thrown back into the period of origin, typically under a culture hero, or are forgotten." End quote.

[00:27:20] Again, it is a floating gap because time reckoning is limited with the passing of generations. And of course we start getting more and more compression. We get more chunks. We get more cliches and tropes. And these eventually are described via commentary that may or may not include added information to set the story for current use.

[00:27:46] And I say sometimes there's not added information because people get so used to the stories that they don't realize the logical disconnects. They don't realize it until somebody points it out. And sometimes they get mad when people point them out too. So when you see some sort of logical disconnect or a gap, you need to have an explanation for that.

[00:28:10] And frankly, this is really interesting and fascinating when it comes to looking at Scripture, looking at the Old Testament to the New Testament, and then even looking at the New Testament into the church age. Because we do have these really strange things that go on where we wonder why things suddenly changed. We presume that the Bible talks all about heaven, right? Well, it just doesn't. But the church does. And we think that, surely, the Old Testament talks about demons all over the place. But it doesn't.

[00:28:45] As Vansina says, quote, "Historical consciousness works on only two registers, time of origin and recent time." End quote.

[00:28:58] Because of the floating gap, recent times is going to change by definition according to what the society handles and their technology and capability. Obviously, once we have writing, then that does change things. We have a record that could potentially be lost maybe, and it often is. But sometimes it's not lost. But eventually it has to be explained and re described because a lot of the meaning of that story is lost.

[00:29:30] Okay. So going back to the idea of these accounts. We've talked about historical gossip, personal tradition, group accounts, traditions of origin, and cumulative accounts like lists and genealogies. Those are going to be updated as people move forward.

[00:29:50] We also have things like epics, which is its own category. An epic is subject to special linguistic rules and form. It uses a lot of stock phrases. The story can be a little bit flexible, but the form is not. You cannot change the form of the epic. Epics are often historical and based on events and real people, but they could be highly stylized.

[00:30:19] And finally, Vansina groups together the ideas of tales, proverbs, and sayings into one distinctive category. The difference between an account and a tale is that innovation is appreciated in a tale. It is a little bit more like fiction, although it can still be very seated within history.

[00:30:43] There is usually no original tale, but it can morph and change through time. They're often used for entertainment. These are gonna be the stories that we're gonna look at to really dig into a culture's value structure and morality. And we're gonna see them wrestling with a lot of things.

[00:31:05] Proverbs and sayings are very like tales because they're going to be developed through time. If somebody improves the punchline, then that improved proverb is going to be what is perpetuated through time. And they're going to evolve like a metaphor. There's plenty of proverbs and sayings that really sound old, but they're not.

[00:31:30] So to sum all of this up a little bit, things can and do and will change by necessity in oral tradition. The question is to what degree, especially when we get external pressure. We get problems, we get added things and subtracted things. We have war, we have environmental things that go on. We have all kinds of things that will affect this through time.

[00:32:00] Now, what about oral tradition as genuinely a source of history? Well, we have to be a little bit careful here because the mere transmission of knowledge doesn't make something into oral tradition. Oral tradition has to be widely known through the culture. It has to be something that the majority of people at least will accept as being part of who they are. More than likely, there is a single authoritative version that is tied to some sort of rulership or institution.

[00:32:35] Oral tradition is going to be told by many people to other many people. This is why the idea of historical gossip and rumor is really crucial. Now, this is where we can kind of get that telephone game idea, even. But when many people are telling the tale, it can solidify, it can self-correct, although there is always a danger it will wander and an incorrect version gets solidified instead of the correct one because who knows? The incorrect version is simply more interesting. It's easier to tell. It's easier to remember.

[00:33:15] Because it's not written, there is no original to an oral tradition. We might have some information about the source of it, which is that oral history again.

[00:33:27] It can also be the case that written records can serve as a source for oral tradition, especially in a world where not everybody is literate. So we can have the written record and it gets told and it gets taught and then that can become the source of something that slightly adjusts and solidifies through time.

[00:33:49] Now, importantly, as Vansina says, quote, " Only the performance makes the tradition perceptible, and at the same time only performance is the source of the ensuing text." End quote.

[00:34:05] Here he's talking about people who record the oral traditions of people. Now, there's problems with that because when you are the recorder, then you are a foreign element to the performance. Quite often people will over explain in a way that they would not explain to somebody else in their own group. And in addition, the person who's recording the story might ask questions to clarify. They might lead with information that is going to influence the person telling the story and so on.

[00:34:41] Some of this goes into what I was talking about last time, where we have things like ritual and authority and cues and structure and mnemonics, and all of these things that are going to help solidify that through time. And the longer period of time that a story will go through, the more it will tend to solidify and become a cohesive thing that is really easy for people to remember.

[00:35:09] Now, here is a problem with oral tradition when you are investigating it from the outside. Because you're not in that culture, you're not in that context, and it can be genuinely difficult to get the message. Quite often there is a literal meaning of the words, and there is an intended meaning of the words. A lot of times those are the same thing, but they don't have to be. The intended meaning is obvious to an insider, but it might not be to an outsider.

[00:35:43] And here we kind of have this echo of why Scripture fits into some of this information with us, because we're not in the culture of the Bible at this moment. We are missing a lot of that context.

[00:35:57] An interesting thing that Vansina talks about is the idea of genre and how within a culture, they actually know their own genres. And those are bound to that culture. They do not have to translate to another culture. So our idea of fiction is not another culture's idea of fiction. Those are different things. Even if another culture has a kind of story that looks like our fiction, usually there's going to be constraints and particular aspects of it that have nothing to do with our idea of fiction.

[00:36:35] The message of a story or an oral tradition is a social product. It is meaningful to the people who are telling it or else it wouldn't be communicated at all. And so we should ask what are the influences? There are a whole lot of different social uses of communication. It could have something to do with the institution, and the institution could frame that message.

[00:37:02] It could have something to do with esoteric knowledge and the social control of that information. We can have a difference between official tradition and various types of private tradition.

[00:37:17] That's basically what we have today. While we might kind of see our society and our culture as a cohesive whole, it's really not. We have a whole bunch of different groups and they have their own traditions. They have their own interpretations, they have their own spins on things. It gets messy really, really fast.

[00:37:40] If you're gonna communicate some sort of information of whatever type, then the message you're giving is a type of a tool. It has a function. It can be weaponized, either by yourself towards somebody else, or it can be weaponized and twisted by somebody else outside your group. It can have an idealized form. It can connect to ideology. And group consciousness.

[00:38:06] it's funny because we talk about how we should understand history so we don't repeat the past, but the only way we can understand history is through particular lenses, through particular forces. It doesn't just come to us on a plate with no bias.

[00:38:24] Whose past is the history? Are we talking about the mainstream idea that goes along with the institution and the things that the institution would really like everyone to believe? Or are we talking about a tradition that is rebellious to that or just forms something that challenges it or parallels it in some way.

[00:38:48] Now that's not to say that we cannot have a generalized idea of a culture and what people agree upon. Now that's not gonna be everybody. It's never gonna be everybody, but Vansina says, quote, " The importance accorded to events is a matter of general consensus in a community. It is tied to the social impact of such an event." End quote.

[00:39:13] If something loses significance, it's gonna be lost. Nobody's gonna talk about it anymore. And so a really important question that we need to ask is what is the relationship of the tradition with the society? Because it's really easy to overly simplify this picture, and we really should not do that.

[00:39:36] Not everything in a society needs to be established through oral tradition or something like that. And not everyone has to agree. And a lot of times it's hard to know how much disagreement there might be. We don't always know what factions there have been in the past. It is a flaw to think that societies are exactly like organisms, even though they often act like organisms.

[00:40:03] Within a single person, we can have a lot of contradictions, can't we? So within a whole society, that just gets multiplied.

[00:40:12] And it's not true that all traditions stems from the current society's organization, but the oral tradition that is being given is the thing that is trying to do that. It's trying to structure the culture in a particular way to be cohesive and understandable.

[00:40:32] So in a way, the message is going to express the culture, but it's going to be a bit of an idealized culture. As in all of time, everywhere, in oral societies, things are caused by individuals, and those things are perpetuated through time by many individuals, and we can't say that things do not get newly created and that new things appear or that things can't be changed by people.

[00:41:03] But quite often when we're talking about a culture or a society, we talk about a worldview. Vansina defines a worldview. He says, quote, "Worldview is a representation of ultimate reality in all its aspects, visible and invisible. It includes views about the creation of the world, about the kinds of beings that are in it, and their taxonomies, on its layout, and on its functioning." End quote.

[00:41:36] And importantly, contradictions are going to be inherent to that. It is not going to be a perfect complete picture with no contradictions in it. If it is, and if it looks like that, then we are simply overexplaining it. A worldview is obvious and unexplained, but it's difficult for outsiders to discover the impact and the reality of that worldview.

[00:42:04] Now, that's not to say it's impossible, and Vansina gives quite a few little ideas of how we might do that. This is really interesting, the things that he says.

[00:42:15] Number one, relationships of invisible entities. But they don't have to be explained. It's just that they are there and they are in relation to either people or each other.

[00:42:29] Number two, we need to study the traditions of the origin and explanations of origins of things. But Vansina says it is hard to know whether the people "take them seriously" or not. Like do they really think this is quote unquote literal, or is this just the story that they tell?

[00:42:52] Number three, taxonomies. This is a kind of folk science, he calls it. Taxonomies are rarely conscious, but they're also pretty visible.

[00:43:04] However, when we're talking about the commentaries and the explanations of things, it can be really hard to know if that actually corresponds to the worldview of the community or if it's simply an explanation that an individual is giving. And I think that's an excellent caution for all of us, personally.

[00:43:26] Now, there are dangers here. There is potential confusion of symbol and reality or literalism. And again, favored or gifted informants or commentarians or explainers can create a much more systematic and broad worldview over time.

[00:43:45] And that makes it more idiosyncratic and not really the culture's worldview per se. If you are explaining it in a way because you're trying to overcome what you see as logical inconsistencies, but the people in the original culture would never have explained it that way, then you are going past their worldview and doing something different.

[00:44:12] Eventually, Vansina does talk about how it's really helpful to understand the broader context of the culture, perhaps even understanding the literature that surrounds them or perhaps the stories that surround them.

[00:44:27] When we ask how we show that a given interpretation reveals the intended implicit meaning within the worldview, this is what he brings up, is comparing this message with other accounts, and that is either within the same culture or outside of it, potentially, if they have near neighbors. So if you have an interpretation that matches the narrative accounts and that matches the tales, and that matches the historical gossip, and that matches the epics, well, you have a pretty solid interpretation, then.

[00:45:05] We also have to ask about the core images. How are they expanded? What is the plot? Is this a stereotype that shows up through time? If it's not a stereotype, then that thing might be the implicit meaning, but if it is a stereotype, then we have to ask what else is it revealing to us? We look at the imagery and the cliches or the tropes and where those particular things show up. And again, how do those compare to other things within the body of literature or oral tradition.

[00:45:43] Sometimes we can see alterations through time if we have different recordings of the same interaction by the same type of people.

[00:45:52] But again, there is an internal logic that does exist within a worldview and within an oral tradition. That logic does not have to be your logic. And that's something that I think we often struggle with, especially today.

[00:46:09] So I hope you can see how what I'm talking about here is really, really applicable to understanding Scripture, to the idea of biblical theology and understanding each individual author in his own context.

[00:46:25] It's absolutely fascinating how so much of this material maps onto our understanding and study of Scripture. And why is that? Well, let's talk just at least briefly about these ideas from David Carr in the book Writing on the Tablet of the Heart where he is combining the ideas of the oral world and the written world and saying that they are much closer in the past at least, than we realize.

[00:46:56] And here is a fascinating quote from Carr. He says, quote, " Many ancient texts were not written in such a way that they could be read easily by someone who did not already know them well." End quote.

[00:47:14] I mean, think about it. The writing of the ancient world, it usually didn't have spaces between words. If you're looking at a page of ancient writing, the page is just covered in letters. There's no breaks to it. And even if you know the language, it can be really hard to know where a word stops and where a word starts. And you wonder how on earth did that happen?

[00:47:40] Carr does a really good job of describing how a scribe would actually learn to do his job and that that job was not simply to write a text that would be referenced by just anybody. Instead, the text forms a permanent reference for oral recitation. It kind of functions like a musical score. And the idea here is that there is a focus on transmitting mind to mind, not simply writing the words on the paper. So it is both writing, but it's also about memory and oral recitation.

[00:48:24] The center of the text is not the text itself, but the mind who is writing it.

[00:48:31] This goes beyond the ideas of the people who study oral tradition, because a lot of times people study oral tradition and they compare that to a written tradition, and they think that both can't exist at the same time. But if it's actually the case that we have oral tradition and written tradition that live together in the same world, well that's a very different picture for both the person interested in oral tradition as well as the person interested in the tradition of writing.

[00:49:03] Once we get writing, certain things happen. Suddenly we have a heightened concern about transmission. It increases the use of formulas, and we are now aware that something that we wrote down could last through time, and this is going to have an impact itself on memory and recitation.

[00:49:29] So Carr tells us that scribes were taught to read and to reproduce, obviously, but they were also taught to memorize and perform.

[00:49:40] Now, a while back I talked about Mesopotamian magic. And a lot of times what they would do in these magical rituals that are going to exorcize evil demons, right? One of the things that they would sometimes would be to write on something. So texts were seen as having a kind of innate power, kind of a bit of a mystical thing going on here, probably because most people couldn't write and couldn't read, and writing would be a kind of way to separate the elite from the non-elite.

[00:50:18] So for the ancient world, literacy was not just about being able to read words on a page and to write words on a page, but it was an oral- written mastery of a body of text. That is what literacy was. And Carr's argument is that Mesopotamian scribal education is what gets transmitted through the ancient Near East. So this is why we have texts and lists that are spread throughout the area. It's not really necessarily that everybody loved the Epic of Gilgamesh, but it was a text that students used to learn their trade.

[00:51:05] Gilgamesh, in fact, is one of the most common texts that we find, along with a few other stories like Athasis, the Code of Hammurabi, eventually the Enum Elish. But more than those things were king lists and other types of lists as well.

[00:51:26] So even within Mesopotamia, we have the writing of the Sumerians, right? Then we have the writing of Akkadian. And quite frequently we have texts that have both. Is that because people are using both? It is obviously possible, but Carr suggests that there was a veneration of older language in older texts, just like we have today.

[00:51:54] So the Mesopotamians would be recording the ancient Sumerian texts because they revered them. They perhaps found them powerful and things like that, but they would write them in Akkadian as well. And then what do we see in places like Ugarit? Well, we have the same thing going on. Suddenly we do have the development of an alphabet instead of cuneiform. Cuneiform is like that. wedge- shaped writing that people would stick a little sharp styus into the clay to write, as opposed to an alphabetic script like what we use in English. Well, in Ugarit, they're not speaking ancient Sumerian, okay? But they will still use multiple forms of a text for their scribal students.

[00:52:46] Now, Ugarit did not just get this directly from Mesopotamia. They got it through intermediaries themselves. So that just shows that there is this spread and because they're still using cuneiform, and they're still learning cuneiform in addition to their own alphabet, and they really don't have to because these are old languages, but they're doing it anyway because they find it of value and it probably is part of the whole package of education.

[00:53:20] An interesting point that we see is that they are mastering texts that are about deities that nobody worships anymore. They're deities from the past. They're deities from even other areas.

[00:53:35] And so again, there's this idea of ancient knowledge that is going to put you above everybody else, right? This is part of that dynamic of the elite and the commoner.

[00:53:49] There's texts in Mesopotamia where the scribes are depicted as the descendants of the apkallu. So writing is seen as from the divine from long ago, and there is a power that is going to last through time, and that again goes along with the education.

[00:54:09] And interestingly, when you go into ancient Egypt, they are even more writing heavy than Mesopotamia was. Only isolated kings claimed to be able to read, but there is far more evidence that Pharaohs as well as all officials went through the scrible process. Even if they themselves didn't write anything. If their job wasn't about writing, they still went through this process because that was part of being the elite.

[00:54:40] Writing was seen to overcome the faults of memory and also to be a tool from the gods.

[00:54:47] We don't have quite as much evidence of Egyptian influence in Canaan and for Israel as we do for Mesopotamia, although we actually have examples of Egyptian educational exercises in Canaan, and some of the Proverbs pretty obviously stem from Egypt, as well. I don't have time to go into all of the amazing information that Carr lays out in this book. It is so interesting, you guys. So interesting.

[00:55:17] And I'm not gonna go into all of my thoughts and all of the things that I think this implies for our understanding of Scripture here and our understanding of textual criticism and things like this.

[00:55:29] We don't have a whole lot of direct evidence of how Israelites scribes worked originally. But it seems pretty clear from everything that Carr is laying out in his book that the methodology and study of being a scribe was something that was very common and that the education came along with the ability to write.

[00:55:53] And there were a whole lot of associated ideas along with that, including veneration of writing and seeing that writing was a very important task.

[00:56:04] And again, to tie this back into the idea of orality, the title of the book, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart, comes not just from biblical passages where it's described that something is written on the heart of the person, but we also see that described in Mesopotamia. We see it in Egypt. And so the idea is not just that somebody is writing something and that they're an ancient stenographer or something, but really the idea of wisdom is going to go along with these things.

[00:56:38] Learning and memorizing things means that they didn't have to consult Scripture and go to such and such a passage and such and such a verse. This intertextuality that we see in Scripture and that we see just broadly in the ancient Near Eastern world. The scribes internalization of the text would simply lead to that.

[00:57:02] Now I know that a lot of us think of the ancient world and think of the Israelite culture in general as a whole bunch of people who already do this. Like it's not just the scribes who do it, but it's everybody. Everybody is memorizing Scripture.

[00:57:19] Now, by the time of the New Testament, that was very much the case, at least for males. Males who went to synagogue would undergo an education where they would do a whole bunch of memorizing. They would internalize all of this, right? And so that's probably also the case early on, right? Because not everybody's literate. Most people are not.

[00:57:45] But also the evidence in the text itself and the stories we have suggests that this wasn't always widespread. I don't think we could claim that everyone in ancient Israel understood their Scriptures the way that a typical male Jew in a synagogue in the first century would understand his Scripture. I don't think we can presuppose that.

[00:58:11] There is a ton of evidence in Scripture and in archeology and just history in general that suggests it's really kind of a late process where we get all of the components together. And the text as a whole to the point where that could even happen amongst the general population.

[00:58:31] And the pressures that cause that to happen with the trauma of the exile, with the forming of identity, but also the selection of texts and the selection of people who are going to be the authoritative deciders of those texts. That happens through time, and it happens right before and right after the exile. And I think that's pretty solid that we can understand it that way.

[00:58:59] That does not mean that the texts all originate from the exile. Doesn't mean that at all. But what it means is that the whole body of the text, the canon we might call it , really only happens a little bit later. Even when we talk about things like the law and the Torah, there's a suggestion of development that happened there.

[00:59:26] I'm not trying to say that Moses couldn't have written the Torah or anything like that. But a lot of times when people are referencing the law, it seems like they're referencing something that happens after Sinai.

[00:59:39] So all of the five books of Moses don't have to be the Torah through all time. It comes to be understood in time. Again, I don't think we should have a problem really with understanding that these things progress and happen.

[00:59:57] We're not talking about a bunch of golden plates that are buried in a hill somewhere or that drop from heaven. That's just not how we should understand the development, the preservation, and the writing of our Scriptures. There was a process that was shaped through historical happenings.

[01:00:16] That shouldn't be a threat to the inspiration of Scripture. It shouldn't be a threat to the idea of inerrancy if you wanna go that route either. Like we tend to think of the text of the Bible in some pristine original form that never existed before that. An author just sat down, wrote the text, and then it was preserved through time. And maybe sometimes that original was changed a little bit, adjusted, or whatever.

[01:00:50] This is what I call the cartoonish idea of the transmission of Scripture and textual tradition. I don't think that's how it happened, and I don't think that's how we should think about it happening, because that's just not the way people work.

[01:01:06] It's not the way history works. That's not even the way God works. He doesn't just come down from heaven and hand somebody a set of plates. He does not just zap somebody into a trance so that they write Scripture. I'm not saying that can't happen, but it is a little bit naive because we're not looking at the full body of evidence here.

[01:01:29] We simply should understand that there was a process and that God was in that process and that he caused that canon to form. And that it took time for it to happen. So there's no suggestion that we can't have older texts. There's no suggestion we can't have ancient writings. But again, last week I was talking about that tablet hypothesis, which itself is a bit silly because we simply don't have any ancient Hebrew writing on tablets that Mesopotamia were using. So if they were using parchment, if they were using papyrus, those things don't last so well over time. That's why we don't have a lot of ancient texts.

[01:02:14] And even though those would be easier to carry around than a clay tablet, it's still a little bit silly to picture the patriarchs carrying around a satchel of ancient texts when we have a whole bunch of other ways that this could have happened that are still in the realm of inspiration and providence and all of these ideas that we should have about understanding our Scripture as a sacred text.

[01:02:42] I need to wrap up for today, but there is a whole bunch of information in these books that, again, if you read them together, I think that you'll really find it fascinating. I will land on a final thought here that is really interesting.

[01:02:57] if we understand the development and education of a scribe in the way that David Carr describes it, then it's very possible that the things we have in our Scriptures that are paralleling other cultures, it's not that they are borrowed, it's just that this is the natural process of what they did, and that influence from other cultures was not always sinister.

[01:03:24] It wasn't always bad, it wasn't always negative. It wasn't even always necessarily a polemic.

[01:03:33] This is just what they did with texts and how ideas were diffused. And if we think that ideas weren't diffused, then we're not paying attention around us today. It's how communities work. So I will just leave that for you to consider.

[01:03:51] And hopefully you guys really enjoyed this episode. Hopefully I made you want to buy a book that maybe you don't really wanna buy, but you actually wanna read. So maybe check some libraries around or something like that. Go and find a used copy perhaps.

[01:04:09] I really think that a lot of this is important. I was fascinated because a lot of this stuff was things I didn't understand and ways of the text that I didn't think about because we're usually thinking about the text as a text instead of something that is much more dynamic than that and much more interrelated to the idea of memory and oral recitation.

[01:04:37] I will just leave it at that for today. Thank you guys for listening. Go ahead and share this episode with somebody who might also be interested. If you guys wanna come over into my biblical theology community, On This Rock, I will leave a link to that in the show notes. Would be very happy to see you over there. Right now we're talking about law and wisdom, so come join that conversation.

[01:05:02] Really appreciate all of the people in the community there, and for those of you who support me there, thank you. Thank you also to those of you who support me through Patreon or PayPal. You guys are absolutely awesome and I am so blessed by you. I really appreciate all of you, whether you are just listening, if you reach out and have a question or want to talk about something. I don't always have a whole lot of time to talk to everybody who messages me, but I do try. I do read everything unless things get hidden by spam folders and things like that, but I make an attempt and I really appreciate it when you guys reach out to me. And again, come talk to me over in my biblical theology community. Would love to have you there. But at any rate, that is it for this week and I wish you all a blessed week and we will see you later.