Written or Oral?

Does the OT show signs of being a product of long oral tradition? In his 2004 book Biblical Narrative and the Death of the Rhapsode (Indiana University Press), Robert S. Kawashima argues that it does not. He believes that the Bible manifests a very different narrative art from the epic tradition of both the ANE and ancient Greece, and sets out to explain the difference. He argues that the difference lies primarily in the fact that epic is an oral narrative art, while the Bible is (and was from the beginning, he argues) a written narrative: The difference of biblical narrative “resides in the simple fact that writing allows an author to edit, to rewrite, whereas speech exists instantaneously and irrevocably in the act of its utterance. The ability to manipulate language and, more generally, narrative form gives rise in written narratives to techniques foreign to the traditional, improvisational art of epic, techniques premised on the impulse to innovate.”

Kawashima offers a number of large supporting arguments for his conclusion, and I will summarize only two:

1) Biblical narrative’s treatment of time points to a writer rather than a bard. Building on the insights of Auerbach and others, Kawashima notes that Homeric epic (for example) flattens time, and brings everything to the surface. There is no “true simultaneity” depicted in Homeric epic; even when we KNOW that certain events must have taken place simultaneously, Homer depicts them as successive. Kawashima argues that this has to do with the fact that all times and events are being related to the present of the bard. Biblical narrative, by contrast, employs the “meanwhile” (or, the pluperfect) of true simultaneity, which points to a writer who is not sharing a “present” with his readers but is able to depict a variety of times from a position outside.

2) Kawashima argues that even when the Bible uses techniques found in epic, it flagrantly violates the conventions, out of all recognition. He focuses on the issue of “type scenes,” introduced from Homeric into biblical scholarship by Robert Alter, and particularly discusses various examples of the “annunciation type scene” in the OT. He points out, for instance, that the annunciation of Isaac’s birth in Genesis 18 is separated from the fulfillment of the promise in chapter 21 by the events of Sodom and Gomorrah. A type scene into which ANOTHER type scene intervenes (the destruction of a city) is not likely to arise in an oral narrative, given that one key purpose of the type scene (at least on Parry’s view) is to provide a “riff” that the bard can draw on when necessary.

Homeric type scenes are not identical to each other, but the variations function according to a generative grammar of their own. As Karashima puts it, Home “follows certain primary rules of composition in order to generate his type-scenes, variations and all. In this way he never leaves the familiar terrain of tradition. Biblical narrative, on the other hand, performs seconary operations, or ‘transformations,’ upon the convention’s underlying syntax or ‘deep structure.’ Its defamiliarizing art treats the type-scene’s norm as a mere point of departure.” Thus, “The exigencies of oral performance necessitated Homer’s economy of style, the formal purity of his type-scenes. To defamiliarize the tradition as the biblical writers did, conversely, is a more costly procedure. The pen, like the scalpel, can dissect and reassemble literary forms, but only through the lengthy procedures of writing and rewriting.” Biblical narrative art is closer to Virgil’s than to Homer’s: “Virgil displaces motifs, alters their function, changes their context, or deletes an expected motif, much like the ‘transformations’ in biblical narrative. Virgil, as an epic WRITER following in the wake of the tradition, practices an art of defamiliarization.”

Along the way, Kawashima offers a couple of other interesting points. He challenges, for instance, the notion that writing was widely unknown in ancient Israel. On the contrary, “the world of biblical narrative exhibits a thoroughgoing and . . . mundane familiarity with writing without parallel, moreover, in Homeric, Ugaritic, and Mesopotamian narrative traditions.” He cites Judges 8:14, where Gideon makes a young captive write the names of the leaders and elders of Succoth. (To this, one could add the repeated references to Moses writing portions of the law, even the “whole law” in Deuteronomy – see especially 31:24, but also 6:6-9; 17:18; 27:2-8; 29:20; note also the fact that Joshua is commanded to do all that is written in the book of the law, 1:8-9). He admits that the Bible does not give clear indications of the extent of literacy, however.

One final point: Why would the Hebrews have abandoned oral epic in favor of written narrative? Kawashima cites Shemaryahu Talmon, who writes, “The outstanding predominance in the Bible of straightforward prose narration fulfills the functions for which other literatures revert to the epic genre: heroic tales, historiography, even myth and cosmology. The phenomenon is too striking to be coincidental. It appears that the ancient Hebrew writers purposefully nurtured and developed prose narration to take the place of the epic genre which by its content was intimately bound up with the world of paganism and appears to have had a special standing in the polytheistic cults. The recitation of epics was tantamount to a reenactment of cosmic events in the manner of sympathetic magic. In the process of total rejection of the polytheistic religions and thier ritual expressions in the cult, epic songs and also the epic genre were purged from the literary repertoire of the Hebrew authors.”