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November 19, 2007
Oral Tradition Is Not a Concept
I'm back for the Society of Biblical Literature meeting. Over the next few days, I will post a few brief thoughts on some of the papers and sessions.
On Saturday afternoon, I attended the "Hebrew Scriptures and Cognate Literature Section / Orality, Textuality, and Formation of the Hebrew Bible." The section focused on Karel van der Toorn's recent book, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (Harvard University Press, 2007). Jim Getz has a concise and useful summary of the whole session at Ketuvim. I agree with Jim's assessment, the book, "does a great service to biblical studies but has a few problems (mainly in regards to the composition of Jeremiah and Deuteronomy)." I might add that while van der Toorn would like the center of scribal activity in Judah to have been in the temple and the priesthood, he is somewhat equivocal and realizes that the palace could well have had a major role.
The Berkeley Assyriologist, Niek Veldhuis compared the work of the "tribe" of biblical scholars with that of the "tribe" of Assyriologists. In the course of his remarks, he made what some saw as a controversially statement, "Oral tradition is not a concept." He did not mean that there was (or is) no such thing as oral tradition. Of course there was. Some of it may even underlie Biblical and cuneiform texts. But the concept of oral tradition is not fruitful. How a proposed underlying oral tradition may have affected a given text is unknown and unknowable. All we have are texts. Some in the audience (and on the panel) rebelled at this idea. But I think it hard to dispute.
I end this post with a brief personal note. A couple of you may know that I left the conference without hearing any of the papers from the Monday afternoon Ugaritic Studies and Northwest Semitic Epigraphy Section. I was there only long enough to say hello to a few of the participants. If you know that I left, you may also know why I left and that it had nothing to do with a session to which I was looking forward. I could not get Shirley on the phone this morning and early afternoon at times I was sure she was home and I began to worry as to why. It turned out that this was a false alarm brought on by a technical failure in the phone system at home. Someday I may write a post on the advantages and disadvantages of voice over IP as well as a couple of the specific issues with our installation. The disadvantageous issue on this occasion involved a weakness in our in house phone wiring that our cat, Socrates, likely exploited. There is no one else to blame except Shirley who denies any part in it. Socrates declines to comment one way or the other. It appears that his "catting around" under a table in our study resulted in a phone system that seemed to a caller to be working but actually wasn't. The cat is still alive and very well but this particularly weakness in our system has been made cat proof. Shirley, who did not know there was a problem, was surprised to see me home six hours earlier than planned. She appeared to get over it rapidly.
Posted by Duane Smith at November 19, 2007 8:09 PM | Read more on Scribal Schools |
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Comments
I'm glad to hear that all was well on the home front.
Oh, and I also have some problems with van der Toorn's locus of scribal activity. However, I find those ideas provocative -- while some of his ideas concerning Deuteronomy are just plain problematic.
Posted by: Jim Getz at November 19, 2007 10:41 PM
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