Oral World and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature.

• Author: Van Seters, John
• Position: Review

By SUSAN NIDITCH. Library of Ancient Israel. Louisville, Ky.: WESTMINSTER/JOHN KNOX PRESS, 1996. Pp. xi + 170. $19.

This book, within a series on the social history of ancient Israel, touches on a very important subject having to do with the nature of the literature in the Hebrew Bible, and does so from two perspectives: it discusses the interrelationship of the predominantly oral world of ancient Israel with the rise of literacy during the time of the monarchies, modeling the approach on similar studies in classics and medieval studies, and it tries to identify degrees of orality, "the oral register," within the preserved written Hebrew Bible. Here the work is heavily dependent upon the methods developed by M. Parry and A. B. Lord.

After a brief criticism of the inadequacy of earlier treatments of oral tradition in the Bible, Niditch uses the Parry and Lord method to lay bare the "oral register in the biblical libretto," looking for repetition, formulaic language, and epithet not only in biblical poetry but also in Pentateuchal prose. These compositional techniques also contain "immanent referentiality" to large structures of meaning shared by speaker and audience. In particular she refers to a dominant Near Eastern traditional pattern in which a divine warrior vanquishes his foes and takes up abode in his temple. It is suggested that "aesthetic metonymy" brings this myth to mind by a mere reference to its recurrent formulae and epithets. This synchronic pattern is ubiquitous throughout the whole Hebrew Bible. Yet Niditch also finds some diachronic evaluation possible in the variations in orality, as in the case of the creation theme in which "the simplicity of style and story in Genesis 2-3," "the architectonic elegance of Genesis 1," and the "baroque eclecticism of Ezekiel 28," find their place in an oral-literate continuum.

In the middle chapters (three through six) Niditch addresses various questions relating to literacy in Iron-Age Israel, reviewing the evidence in a manner similar to that of Rosalind Thomas for ancient Greece and M. T. Clanchy for medieval Europe. She concludes that literacy in Israel was much more limited than many scholars have suggested and that the world in which the Bible came into being was predominantly oral. There are useful discussions on ancient archives and libraries, the limits of education and the logistics of reading and writing in antiquity, and the symbolic meaning of writing itself.

With this...