Oral tradition in ancient Israel
By: Robert D. Miller II, SFO
Series: Biblical performance criticism series -- volume 4
Publisher: Cascade Books
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Eugene, Oregon
Language: eng
Number of pages: 154
ISBN-13: 9781610972710
Copyright date: 2011
Subjects: Criticism, interpretation; Form Criticism; Oral tradition; Folklore in the Bible; Bible
Description: "Providing a comprehensive study of "oral tradition" in Israel, this volume unpacks the nature of oral tradition, the form it would have taken in ancient Israel, and the remains of it in the narrative books of the Hebrew Bible. The author presents cases of oral/written interaction that provide the best ethnographic analogies for ancient Israel and insights from these suggest a model of transmission in oral-written societies valid for ancient Israel. Miller reconstructs what ancient Israelite oral literature would have been and considers criteria for identifying orally derived material in the narrative books of the Old Testament, marking several passages as highly probable oral derivations. Using ethnographic data and ancient Near Eastern examples, he proposes performance settings for this material. The epilogue treats the contentious topic of historicity and shows that orally derived texts are not more historically reliable than other texts in the Bible."--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 123-149) and index.
Table of contents: title: Oral formulaicism in Old Testament study; title: The bathos of the oral formulaic school; title: Models for biblical literature; title: Literacy and orality in preexilic Israel; title: What lies behind the written; title: Towards identifying the oral in the Old Testament; title: Epilogue : orality and historicism.