Holy Writ as Oral Lit: The Bible as Folklore / A Prelude to Biblical Folklore: Underdogs and Tricksters

While a folkloric culture may help explain the tolerance for variation, it does not negate that fact that texts were relied on in the compositional process. While Dundes counters that there is "written folklore," some of biblical literature has an explicitly textual hermenuetic (see Fishbane 1985, Levinson 1997). In my own book, Society and the Promise to David (Oxford, 1999), I pointed out changes in the types of variations within the Old Testament that reflected a growing textualization of Jewish society Indeed, such a textualization is underscored by the appearance in later biblical literature of phrases such as .as it is written" (see Josh 8:31; 1 Kings 2:3; 2 Kings 14:6, 23:21; Ezra 3:2, 6:18; Nehemiah 8:15; 2 Chronicles 23:18; 25:4; 35:26). The gospel of Matthew already recognizes the divergence of oral tradition in the sermon of the Mount when Jesus says, "you have heard that it has been said" (e.g., Matthew 5:38-39). Dundes does not recognize that this is a halakhic trope on Leviticus 19:18 ("Love your neighbor") and thus reflects the crystallization of the oral Torah (=Mishnah) as against the written Torah (=Pentateuch) in Jewish society. Tolerance for variation would decrease as the text became canon and society became more literate; this would eventually move later pious interpreters to harmonize the variations in biblical literature. They would see variation as contradiction rather than reflecting the richness of the oral traditions upon which biblical writers drew. In short, there are diachronic issues at play in biblical literature and its movement along the orality-literacy continuum. Dundes persuasively makes his case for the folkloristic origins of biblical literature, but sometimes overstates his case and makes some errors resulting both from overreaching and his background as a non-specialist in Near Eastern cultures. Moreover, this reviewer wanted to understand more of the explanatory power of folkloric analysis rather than seeing simply a generous sampling of variation in biblical literature.

Niditch's book is a reprint of a work published over a decade earlier. As a result, Niditch's work is actually included in the review of literature by Dundes and he gives Niditch high praise as the foremost biblical scholar utilizing folklore. While Dundes is dedicated to proving that the Bible is folklore, Niditch explores "the way in which story produces meaning at various levels" (ix). She assumes that biblical stories are folklore. She can make such an assumption because a long tradition of biblical scholarship has recognized oral traditions behind the biblical narrative. Unlike Dundes, Niditch is concerned to set biblical compositions with time and place, with the people and the culture for whom the stories were meaningful. The book begins with a review of the field of folklore for the non-specialist. In successive chapters she then applies folkloric theory to the Wife-Sister Stories, the Tales of Two Younger Sons, Jacob and Joseph, and Esther. By sharply delimiting her examination, Niditch avoids the trap of a pan-folkloric approach to the entire corpus of biblical literature. Niditch also compares traditional biblical methodologies with folklore theory, noting that form criticism, traditional history, and redaction criticism are often similar to folklore theory but are employed more narrowly. Folklore theory leads Niditch away from traditional biblical scholarship toward questions of sociological and historical setting. As a result, her analysis considers these biblical texts as part of value systems of a particular time and place.