The Lost World Series

Ancient Literary Culture and Biblical Authority

John H. Walton, Brent Sandy

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780830864980
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Studi biblici

Readers' Choice Awards Honorable MentionPreaching's Preacher's Guide to the Best Bible ReferenceFrom John H. Walton, author of the bestselling Lost World of Genesis One, and D. Brent Sandy, author of Plowshares and Pruning Hooks, comes a detailed look at the origins of scriptural authority in ancient oral cultures and how they inform our understanding of the Old and New Testaments today.Stemming from questions about scriptural inerrancy, inspiration and oral transmission of ideas, The Lost World of Scripture examines the process by which the Bible has come to be what it is today. From the reasons why specific words were used to convey certain ideas to how oral tradition impacted the transmission of biblical texts, the authors seek to uncover how these issues might affect our current doctrine on the authority of Scripture."In this book we are exploring ways God chose to reveal his word in light of discoveries about ancient literary culture, " write Walton and Sandy. "Our specific objective is to understand better how both the Old and New Testaments were spoken, written and passed on, especially with an eye to possible implications for the Bible?s inspiration and authority."The books in the Lost World Series follow the pattern set by Bible scholar John H. Walton, bringing a fresh, close reading of the Hebrew text and knowledge of ancient Near Eastern literature to an accessible discussion of the biblical topic at hand using a series of logic-based propositions.

Part 1

The Old Testament World of Composition and Communication

Proposition 1

Ancient Near Eastern Societies Were Hearing Dominant and Had Nothing Comparable to Authors and Books as We Know Them

Why is it that I can hear playing in a restaurant a song that I haven’t heard for thirty years and can still sing along with each word? It is likely that I have never seen the written-out words to those songs, but I often remember them meticulously. This is simply one illustration of the role hearing can play in passing on traditions.

Our modern Western society operates on the premise of literacy. It is not just that we value reading and writing enough to try to teach these skills to every child throughout their education; reading and writing are essential to even a basic level of participation in society. It is the rare person who cannot read and write. Western culture can therefore be described as a text-dominant culture. Nevertheless, many learn better by hearing than by reading. Text may have its advantages, but hearing should not be considered an inferior transmission mode. This is an important distinction because the value that our society has placed on literacy sometimes leads to the misperception that literacy and intelligence or sophistication go hand-in-hand. Sophisticated and productive participation in a society based on texts requires literacy, but not so in a hearing-dominant society.

Computers provide a helpful illustration. A high percentage of computer users are not competent to read computer software code, let alone write it. In that area we are illiterate, yet we can use a computer in intelligent and even sophisticated ways because our use of the computer does not require us to be programmers. In a similar fashion, a society that is hearing dominant has developed in such a way that participation does not require reading or writing, except by a small group of specially trained individuals who can serve the basic needs of society.

If we are to understand more fully the development of biblical literature and our view of its authority, we need to adjust our thinking about how information was disseminated and traditions transmitted in the ancient world. In the ancient world, it was the scribes who represented the specialist minority. Other members of a society might have been capable of learning to read and write, and in some periods and places undoubtedly did so at a very basic level,1 but there was no need for common people or even elites to become literate (just as there is no need for us to learn programming language) to function. Literacy involved an esoteric and arcane skill set, and its advantages were not significant enough to warrant the time to achieve it. Literacy is not necessarily absent in hearing-dominant societies; it is simply nonessential. It would therefore be inaccurate to think that hearing-dominant cultures are necessarily illiterate. This designation itself has become pejorative in our usage; we should better use “non-literate.” The operative contrast is not “orality versus literacy” but “hearing-dominant versus text-dominant.” William Schniedewind has pointed out that the latter is simply a difference in how people are equipped to process information.2

As an illustration consider the specialty of car mechanics. Many people understand automotive basics and could do basic tasks. Changing the oil is not rocket science, yet even those who can easily do so have it done for them because they don’t want to crawl under the car or bother with the mess or equipment. Others know more about cars and might do tune-ups on their own, but they cannot begin to cope with built-in computers and the problems they identify. Even some professional mechanics have to send customers to specialized dealers.

We can transfer this same sort of spectrum to writing and the scribal profession in the ancient world. Basic literacy was not out of the range of the common person, but various levels of professionals were used either for expedience or in situations when the required expertise exceeded basic skills.

The World of Hearing Dominance

The ancient world was consistently hearing dominant rather than text dominant. Information was disseminated orally. Traditions were passed on by word of mouth generation to generation. The ability to read or write was not essential to be a fully functioning member of society, and literacy was not part of the basic education process, formal or informal, so no one was disadvantaged if they could not read or write. Hearing is often a corporate exercise and therefore coincides with the significance of community in the ancient world. Reading and writing are more often individualistic exercises and coincide with the value of individual independence in modern Western society. People gather to hear; they go off on their own to read or write.

In a hearing-dominant society not only is information disseminated orally, but also authority operates differently than in a text-dominant society. Schniedewind appropriately observes, “Writing locates authority in a text and its reader instead of in a tradition and its community.”3 From our modern, text-dominant context, we often think of oral traditions as being unreliable because of their fluidity. In fact, however, written traditions can be just as fluid as oral ones. The fluidity depends on the demands of the context in which the tradition is being transmitted. As a modern illustration of the staying power of hearing, people in churches today who were raised on hymns recognize immediately when even a single word has been changed, whether for updating language or gender-inclusive inclinations. As I am writing this I am on the road speaking in various places, and therefore encountering a variety of worship experiences. In a chapel service yesterday we sang a hymn that I probably had not sung or heard in decades. In the fourth verse a line was changed and it immediately caught my attention. Our ears can be very demanding about the precise transmission of treasured traditions, and that would have been even more the case in a society in which oral transmission of tradition was the norm.

Many in text-dominant settings might sincerely believe that text transmission is more reliable and clearly superior. Why would any society capable of literacy settle for anything else? In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates weighs in on the issue: “You might think that [written words] spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing. And every word, when once it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it.”4

Furthermore, writing was perceived as having certain highly specific roles and qualities in the ancient world. An ideology of writing developed in the ancient Near East that saw writing as an appropriate means for communicating with deities. Magical incantations and rituals therefore took written form, though they were also performed orally. Schniedewind points out that the god Thoth in Egypt is both the god of scribes and the god of magic.5 Likewise, writing was employed as a means for the state to encode power and authority within society. “Public written monuments were not for reading, but were displays of royal power and authority.”6 Authority was therefore less vested in the written document than in the authoritative figure whose power was displayed in the monument. We will develop the significance of this in the next chapter.

For the current discussion it is important to acknowledge Schniedewind’s insightful conclusion: “Oral tradition and written texts also represent competing centers of authority. While orality and literacy may exist on a continuum, orality and textuality compete with each other as different modes of authority.”7 A good example would be a church that holds a formal written doctrinal statement, but has an additional oral tradition identifying which elements of the statement they take seriously and which they do not, as well as oral tradition about interpretations of the lines in the statement. Perhaps the oral tradition even includes additional beliefs. In this illustration the oral authority is competing with the textual authority. The nature of authority competition might also be understood in the context of discussions in modern higher education about the authority found in books versus the authority often granted by beginning students to open-source internet resources to which anyone without credentials might contribute. Another example would be how people pick up as authoritative what they hear on the History Channel rather than going to reliable history books written by qualified academics.

Why Then Documents?

In an ancient hearing-dominant society, texts are largely documents written for a much more limited number of reasons than in a text-dominant culture.

1. Documents were written for archives. At times there were family archives, but state or temple archives were more prevalent. Archives would house administrative documents, generally either of an economic or legal nature. Such documents were part of essential record keeping and would rarely be accessed. (Compare all of the miscellaneous documents you keep in your file cabinet.) Scribes for hire would serve the function of drawing up such documents, just as lawyers today draw up formal legal documents for notarization. Royal or temple archives might also hold the documents of state (e.g., decrees, treaties, royal correspondence).
2. Documents were written for libraries. Though these might sometimes overlap with archives or be housed together, we can refer to libraries as focused on creative literary works. Libraries may have had wider or more frequent access than archives, but we should not confuse them with the function of libraries today. They were not public, and most people would have no reason to access them nor would they have the wherewithal to do so (being non-literate).8 Common folks tended to rely on oral tradition rather than the documents that might preserve those traditions. Who would compile the libraries and why? One possibility is that such libraries reflect the wisdom enterprise of collecting. An alternative is that they represent an antiquarian interest in preservation of far-flung traditions. Some evidence even suggests that a great library like that of Ashurbanipal was compiled for apotropaic purposes. David Carr suggests that libraries were compiled for reference but would rarely be accessed.

The focus was on inscribing a culture’s most precious traditions on the insides of people. Within this context, copies of texts served as the solidified reference points for recitation and memorization of the tradition, demonstrations of mastery of the tradition, and gifts from the gods. But they were not for the uninitiated. Few of the literate would have progressed to the point where they would have been able or motivated to use such texts to access traditions they did not already know.9

Dominique Charpin reports that of the thousands of tablets found in the most famous of ancient libraries (Ashurbanipal, seventh century B.C.), about a quarter of the texts relate to divination, another 20 percent pertain to rituals and prayers, and about the same percentage are lexical lists. The literary texts number about forty.10

Regardless of the uncertainty of our information, at this stage it is important simply to note that document writing in the ancient world would have served different purposes than it does today. Even today, book collectors might have a wide range of motivations fueling their hobby. Furthermore, the scribes who wrote these documents were not exercising their creative literary skills—creativity was manifested at the oral level. The scribes were the menial experts, not the literary creators or the authorities (more on this next chapter).

1. Documents were often written as school texts. In the scribal curriculum, certain literary texts were copied by fledgling scribes trying to perfect their skills. Such texts are frequently unearthed and manifest the kinds of mistakes in copying that scribes, especially inexperienced ones, might make. This proliferation of particular documents does not reflect extensive circulation of them; they remained localized in the scribal school. While it may be true that the selection of these documents for the scribal curriculum reflects a desire to preserve important traditions, other motivations could also be possible.
2. Documents were written to be read aloud. When a decree was issued, a messenger would travel to the appropriate audience, be that king or commoner, to read it aloud. Even if the audience was capable of reading, it may have been considered more appropriate for the content to be heard (note Jer 36). There was no reading public, only public reading.
3. Documents were written as symbolic expressions of power. Many of the royal inscriptions were not expected to be read by the public, and sometimes were even buried in the ground or placed in inaccessible places. It was more important to see the document (even from afar) than it was to read it. More important than what it said was that it had been written. At times such documents indicate that the audience the king had in mind was either a future king or the gods.11

This very brief introduction to the contrast between hearing-dominant societies and text-dominant societies is significant for our understanding of ancient Israel and of how what has become our Bible took shape. When we first encounter Israel it is a hearing-dominant society, largely non-literate as most of the ancient world was (though served by a literary elite and characterized even early on by some capacity for literacy among the general population12). Over time through the Iron Age (monarchy period) Israelite society became increasingly literate, the role of texts expanded and literary production became more important. It remains quite controversial when that took place,13 but for our purposes we need not decide that because the fact is that oral dominance continued through the Greco-Roman period and to a large extent up until the invention of the moveable-type printing press. For our purposes, it is enough to proceed with an investigation of what it would look like for the process of literary production to transpire in a hearing-dominant society. Evidence that ancient Israel was hearing dominant is found in the common wording of the text itself where we find frequent references to the words being spoken and to people hearing.14 At the same time, we should not minimize or dismiss the statements in the Bible about written documents and the role that they played.15

If through most of the Old Testament period Israel was a hearing-­dominant society, we would not expect complex literary production in the early stages of formation of biblical texts, though at the same time we must admit that there is no direct evidence of oral composition of biblical texts, that is, no statements that allude explicitly to such a process. Susan Niditch, however, identifies numerous indicators that the written texts we now possess had oral precursors. Oral styles embedded in written works include repetition within a passage, use of formulas and formula patterns, and conventionalized patterns of content.16 These betray the document as a secondary medium.

As an illustration, I grew up playing table tennis with all of its strokes and techniques. When I took up tennis in my late teen years my first inclination was to use my table tennis techniques with the larger racket on the larger playing field. That I was inherently a table tennis player transplanted was evident to any tennis player. As another illustration, cooking pancake batter on a waffle iron still results in something that tastes like a pancake; similarly, preserving an oral tradition in a document will not obscure the characteristics of orality. Indicators suggest that we need to consider the likelihood that the earliest stages that led to the development of the canonical literary tradition began in a hearing-dominant society, characterized by oral dissemination and undergirded by documents that were preserved in archives or libraries. Nothing in the biblical text undermines this model, and everything we know from the ancient world supports it. This means that we have to think differently about “books” and “authors” in the ancient world, which leads us to the next section.

Authors and Books Versus Authorities, Scribes and Documents

Today when we think of the books of the Bible and their authors, our thoughts are constrained by cultural ideas. We live in a world with intellectual property rights connected to ideas that are copyrighted, published, marketed and distributed in a text-dominant society where people have personal libraries for which they purchase books that they read silently to themselves. None of these modern elements existed in the ancient world, yet we easily impose such a system on our understanding of the production of the books of the Bible. It would not be an overstatement to say that in the ancient world there were no authors and there were no books—at least not in anything like the form that we are familiar with today.17 Instead there were authorities, documents and scribes.18

Authorities and tradents. Authorities are the individuals and institutions that generate information. The foremost human authority was, of course, the king. His authority extended also to members of his administration who executed his authority. Other authority, often but not always independent, was found in the temple personnel. Local ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Old Testament World of Composition and Communication
• Part 2: The New Testament World of Composition and Communication
• Part 3: The Biblical World of Literary Genres
• Part 4: Concluding Affirmations on the Origin and Authority of Scripture
• Faithful Conclusions for Virtuous Readers
• Name and Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Notes
• About the Authors
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press