Fact-Checking the Torah -- Olrik and archaeology agree

Oral narratives are stories transmitted by word of mouth for some time, possibly surviving until somebody records them.  Of all the oral narratives that could have been invented in ancient times, a relatively small number survive due to limitations of human memory and possibly also audience interest.  How do narratives originate?

In the interests of the culture that winds up transmitting them.  I cannot emphasize this point enough. A narrative not only will not survive if the culture has no interest in it, it also will not originate unless it expresses something crucial to the culture where it appears.

Olrik says that oral narratives always reflect a historical or cultural truth familiar to the narrator and audience.  The narratives originate close in time and place to the historical event or the inception of the cultural trait, and begin as more or less realistic accounts.  This is the analog of what William Dever and other archaeologists said about DH: it is false that an ancient culture retroactively invents its own history in writing, projecting events back before the culture had writing. The “Brutus” story of Britain’s origins originated in the minds of literate people who had read Roman history; it did not reflect what British oral narratives said of the origins of the Britons – about which the French Plantagenets had no clue and didn’t give a toss.

An oral narrative starts life as a reflection of the real world of the culture.  The analog of this process occurs within each narrative.  Among Olrik’s Epic Laws are the Law of Opening and the Law of Closing.  The Law of Opening says each narrative begins with words reflecting the real world.  The Law of Closing says each narrative ends with words reflecting the real world.

Examples of this exist in Torah.  Over and over, it repeats the phrase “and it is there to this day.”  This phrase comes up in Joshua as well.  This is the Law of Closing in some narratives of Torah.

Conversely, the Law of Opening is explicit in those Torah narratives that begin “this is the account of the generations of X,” X being some character well-known to the audience.

The feedback loop I tried to describe reinforces the fact that a narrative arises in and is transmitted within its own culture and records something about that culture.  As a microcosm of the culture, each listener in the audience is going to prefer listening to something about himself than something about others.  He will prefer things about his own community to things about other communities. Those are the narratives the audience asks for time and again.  The narratives that survive in a community or a culture will be the ones discussing that community or culture.

Conversely, when I said that a narrative comes to the end of its survival period, it should be obvious that this happens when the culture no longer considers that narrative as being “about itself.”  Nobody is left to whom the narrative matters, it decays and dies.

Somewhere in the course of this process, says Olrik, bits and pieces of the narrative may survive in other narratives as an opening that says “once upon a time where we stand now…” followed by a reference to an action that happened there and that was the subject of the forgotten narrative.  These “survivals” can include a proverb, or an action.  Olrik records a custom of bowing to a corner of an ancient structure as relating to a forgotten narrative about something that happened at that location.

And so a narrative need not simply describe a life, it has a life of its own, a birth, a maturation, and a death.

But what it doesn't have is universal appeal...

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