Fact-Checking the Torah -- Location location location 2

The converse of Olrik’s description of the oral narrative, vivid as a picture, has another facet in his studies. As narratives decline toward disappearance, the problems of human memory hasten this devolution.

The translators of Olrik’s work used “verbosity” to translate Olrik’s term for the pictorially vivid story. When it is going out of fashion, its vividness decays; the translators used the word “languishing” to describe a story losing its vividness as the story goes out of fashion.

This same disappearance of vividness also applies to individual features of the story. Olrik described two types of geographic information.

One is the horizon. It has several subdivisions. The location where the narrative first arises appears in it in detail. If the culture has contact with other locations, narratives describe them in decreasing detail with distance from the locale of the narrating culture. Olrik distinguishes four broad horizons all the way from “home” to – well, to “a galaxy far far away.”

Time affects the vividness of the horizon. Olrik specifically says that if a culture migrates while a narrative survives, then over time it is possible for the original horizon to dissolve out. A narrative with no horizon therefore can be among the oldest in the repertoire of a culture that has lived a long time in places other than where the narrative arose.

The other type of geographical information in a narrative is translated as “localization”. This is a specific locality attached to the story. Olrik says that at the time the narrative begins its history of transmission, a localization is probably visible to the audience. Localizations have two functions.

A localization at the beginning of a narrative marks an origin narrative. It tells about the inception of some tradition and the localization is where the tradition originated. The localization of Avraham’s circumcision near where he and Lot split up -- the cities of the plain –is one example in Torah. The vividness of the destruction of the cities of the plain forever fixed their names in the memory of the ancestors of the Jews, names that would not resurface until archaeology rediscovered Ebla, but which were still familiar when Amos and Hoshea used them as paradigms of total destruction. It is no accident, Olrik would say, that the cultural and historical events occur together in the narrative.

The other function of a localization, when it appears at the end of a story, is to make something otherwise incredible seem credible. This is the issue of “Lot’s wife” turning into a salt pillar.  This is the usage of the phrase “and you can see it to this very day” found a number of times in Joshua.

While there are plenty of locations and some horizons in Torah, we really get a bang for our buck out of Samaritan Pentateuch.