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

Schniedewind, William M

Holy Writ as Oral Lit: The Bible as Folklore. By Alan Dundes. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999. Pp. viii + 131, acknowledgements, bibliography, index, about the author, $15.95 paper).

A Prelude to Biblical Folklore: Underdogs and Tricksters. By Susan Niditch. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. First edition published as Underdogs and Tricksters: A Prelude to Biblical Folkore. New Voices in Biblical Studies. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987. Pp. xx + 186, preface to the paperback edition, acknowledgements, introduction, abbreviations, notes, bibliography, general index, scripture index, $15.00 paper)

These two books represent efforts to apply folklore studies to biblical literature from a folklore specialist and a biblical scholar. They underscore the applicability of folklore theory and its power to give biblical texts social and historical settings.

From his perspective as a folklore scholar, Dundes roundly criticizes biblical scholars who consistently see the Bible as a written document or collection of documents. Writing in a popular style, he applies basic principles of folklore studies to the Bible. He emphasizes that variation is the hallmark of oral literature and catalogs the various types of variation in biblical literature. He points out, for instance, that the repetitions or doublets that form a pillar for the Documentary Hypothesis (that is, the theory that the Pentateuch is compiled through the editing of four documentary strands) could just as easily be explained as resulting from the folkloric origins of the biblical narratives. The book is mostly a compilation of variations in biblical stories with brief commentary.

It should not be surprising that Dundes oversimplifies biblical scholarship and the character of biblical texts themselves. Indeed, it is not the Bible as a whole that is folkloric, but particular books which fall into this genre. Certainly, the stories in Genesis as well as the Gospels easily fall into folkloric analysis. Yet, the annalistic narratives of Kings or the letters of Paul are less given to this type of analysis. Indeed, one thing that characterizes the development of the ancient Israeli and Old Testament literature is an increasing textualization of society. Obviously, different social contexts lend themselves to folkloric analysis to different degrees. So, for example, the presumably pastoral and agrarian context of early Israel was an ideal setting for the patriarchal tales. The urban setting of the late Judaean monarchy, however, witnessed an increasing textualization of society. There are obvious distinctions, for example, between the folkloristic tales of the prophets Elijah and Elijah incorporated into the Book of Kings (1 Kings 17, 2 Kings 9) and the annalistic accounts of the kings of Israel and Judah that frame the rest of Kings. These texts were sponsored by the royal court and composed by court scribes using palace and temple archives. Biblical scholars will be very uncomfortable with the way Dundes moves between Old Testament and New Testament examples in making his case. Although the Bible is actually a collection of books written down and edited over the course of more than 1000 years, he still weaves his argue ment from "the Bible" as a whole not reflecting that it derives from vastly disparate times and social contexts. Texts written down by royal scribes or temple priests are surely different from a folkloric perspective than those attributed to village fishermen. In this respect, Dundes falls into the trap that he himself criticizes, namely he relies on the final shape of the book (which relies on its canonical status) to level the diachronic and social distinctions.

Dundes creates oral and folkloric elements out of variation that is clearly textual or text critical for those who know Hebrew language and palaeography. He points, for instance, to the variation in names between Hiram and Huram (e.g., 2 Chronicles 9:10 and 1 Kings 10:11); however, this is a general problem caused by the confusion of the Hebrew letters yod and waw (transcribed as i and u). Such confusion is widespread and results from the similarity between these two letters in Hebrew manuscripts. In general, Dundes makes all text critical problems into examples for the folkloristic character of the Bible. Near Eastern parallels make it clear that some biblical literature derives from temple lists or palace annals. Comparisons with cuneiform examples would show evidence of some variation in such lists, but would hardly warrant a wholesale adoption of a folklore model for explaining variation in lists. Although some Near Eastern genealogical lists may have their roots in oral tradition (e.g., Genesis 10, the Sumerian King list, the Ugaritic king list), as Robert Wilson recognized, others are undoubtedly rooted in temple archives. Variation can result from textual transmission, not just oral recitation as Dundes seems to assume. In many cases, a textual hermeneutic is explicitly mentioned in the biblical text as, for example, when the books of Kings and Chronicles cite textual sources: "Are not the rest of the deeds of the king written in ..." (e.g., 1 Kings 11:41, 14:29, 15:7, 16:5; 2 Chronicles 9:29, 12:15, 25:26). In the case of Chronicles, it is quite evident that the author had a version of the book of Kings before him.

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.

As a biblical scholar, I found these two perspectives rather interesting. Dundes writes in his acknowledgements that his wife questioned him whether it wasn't pretty much known by all readers that the Bible is folklore. He answers with an exclamatory "No." At the same, Niditch can write her book assuming that the biblical narratives do have their origins in oral tradition and that this has explanatory power. Indeed, Dundes is correct that not all readers of the Bible recognize its folkloric origins, but most biblical scholars do. His critique at the end of his book is apparently directed at pious lay readers of the Bible who certainly do not recognize the oral heritage of biblical literature. And, even traditional biblical scholarship is sometimes tied to documentary models. Dundes's argument should help further the case for the oral origins of biblical literature and especially help convince the pious lay audience that before the Bible was Holy Writ, it was Oral Lit. Perhaps this will help alleviate some of the problems that modern readers see with variations in the Bible. Readers who want to see some of the explanatory power of folkloric analysis will enjoy reading Niditch's work which gives rich insight into the biblical authors, audiences, and society.

WILLIAM M. SCHNIEDEWIND

University of California, Los Angeles

Copyright California Folklore Society Summer 2000
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