Oral World And Written Word

This book is an essential resource for understanding the question of the Bible's relationship to orality. Susan Niditch offers a strong argument for the continuity of the literature of the Israelites. She helps the modern reader look at the Bible as living words, breathing life into us daily, instead of seeing the text as a foregone artifact. Volumes in the Library of Ancient Israel draw on multiple disciplines--such as archaeology, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and literary criticism--to illuminate the everyday realities and social subtleties these ancient cultures experienced. This series employs sophisticated methods resulting in original contributions that depict the reality of the people behind the Hebrew Bible and interprets these insights for a wide variety of readers.

The concept of 'scripture' as written religious text is re-examined, considering orally distributed sacred writings.

This textbook focuses primarily on the content and structure of the Pentateuch. The process which produced the Pentateuch and the long record of its use within Judaism and Christianity are intricate and fascinating stories, but it is the final forms of these five books to which we have the most reliable access. Discussions of historical and theological issues are included when they serve to illustrate the content and structure of the text. After an opening chapter, which introduces the major issues in the study of the Pentateuch, including a summary of the history of scholarship, a full chapter engages each of the five books. Attention to literary shape, texture, and artistry are at the forefront of the discussion, while historical and theological discussions are included where they are most informative. The book also includes many lists of textual data in each chapter. Most of these provide a view of features, which serve to connect and draw together the diverse literature of the Pentateuch. They are intended to serve as starting points for active textual research in a classroom setting. The material in this book is classroom tested and was even developed during successive opportunities to teach courses in the Pentateuch. - Publisher.

Have Western exegetes turned an Eastern book into a Western one? Has our fondness for a fixed printed text capable of being analyzed with precision and exactitude blinded us to other hermeneutic possibilities? Does God require all people to be able to analyze grammar to interpret Scripture? Does God assume all people can interpret Scripture through oral means? The authors recognize the effects of centuries of literacy socialization that produced a blind spot in the Western Christian world--the neglect by most in the academies, agencies, and assemblies of the foundational and forceful role orality had on the biblical text and teaching. From the inspired spoken word of the prophets, including Jesus (pre-text), to the elite literate scribes who painstakingly hand-printed the sacred text, to post-text interpretation and teaching, the footprint of orality throughout the entire process is acutely visible to those having the oral-aural influenced eyes of the Mediterranean ancients. Could oral hermeneutics be the "mother of relational theology"?

This classic work explores the vast differences between oral and literate cultures offering a very clear account of the intellectual, literary and social effects of writing, print and electronic technology. In the course of his study, Walter J. Ong offers fascinating insights into oral genres across the globe and through time, and examines the rise of abstract philosophical and scientific thinking. He considers the impact of orality-literacy studies not only on literary criticism and theory but on our very understanding of what it is to be a human being, conscious of self and other. This is a book no reader, writer or speaker should be without.

Using socio-anthropological theory and archaeological evidence, Knight argues that while the laws in the Hebrew Bible tend to reflect the interests of those in power, the majority of ancient Israelites--located in villages--developed their own unwritten customary laws to regulate behavior and resolve legal conflicts in their own communities. This book includes numerous examples from village, city, and cult. --from publisher description

Written by respected researchers in their field, this book is about the skills beyond basic word recognition that are necessary for the processing and comprehension of spoken and written language. The major topics presented are as follows: language and text analysis; cognitive processing and comprehension; development of literacy; literacy and schooling; and, factors influencing listening and reading.

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.