Fact-Checking the Torah -- oral narrative survival

Written material survives as long as the recording medium survives. An oral narrative may survive only during the lifetime of the original narrator, or it may survive a few of what I call hops, or it may survive for millennia. Why?

Because the types and quantity of recording media are large and more or less lasting. Survival of an oral narrative depends on human memory, which is proverbially fragile. A human lives at most 120 years so far; many die at half that age. And it is proverbial that the older a person gets, the more fragile the memory.

What survives a given narrator doesn’t depend completely on that narrator. It requires that somebody in the audience values the narrative so much as to pass it on when the previous narrator dies. A narrative might not survive its originator. If the audience doesn’t want to hear it, they’ll walk away when the narrator begins it. The audience may also take an active role in preserving a narrative by asking for it over and over.

That contributes to survival because it refreshes the story not only in the narrator’s mind but also in the audience’s mind, and may inspire somebody who wants to be the narrator for the next generation, to memorize that specific story.

This feedback loop is implicit in what Olrik says about survival of narratives, but he never studied narrator-audience feedback specifically. That work has yet to be done, but we see something like it even now, when kids ask their parents to read a particular book over and over until it becomes grimy and ragged. And after that, if not before, the child can often fill in what the grime has obscured, from memory.

This implies that the stories that do survive should copy how they were originally told, but Olrik says that never happens. The longer the narrative survives, the more it will change, for several reasons.

First, the narrator forgets details. If the audience doesn’t call out a correction, the narrator may use a related but different set of words for a character’s actions. 

Second, the narrator tries out her own ideas of how the story should work. This can include showing an increase of sympathy for a minor character – which can morph into an independent narrative about that character – or providing rational grounds for an otherwise non-rational situation or act.

Third, the narrator will realize that the audience is losing the thread because of words they don’t use any more, or that they use with a different meaning. The narrator will substitute “modern” words, or will use words that match the meaning of the narrative but differ from the words previously used.

This last point in no way equates to the language layering of DH. It is not the influence of one language on another. It’s the difference between what the audience knows and what the earlier narrators knew, such as calling a place both Sukkot and Pi-Tum. Preserving the older word in a narrative requires something else in the narrative that reinforces the older word. In the story of finding a wife for Yitschaq, we have the term mesheq. Nobody knows what it means any more, so in my book Narrating the Torah I don’t translate it. It might have been preserved because of its resemblance to mashqah, draw water so somebody can drink, an important part of the evidence that Rivqah was the girl the servant was looking for. But that was thousands of years ago and we don’t know the real reason for keeping mesheq in the story.

What we do know is the reason oral narratives arise.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights Reserved