Oral narratives exist because the people of a culture value an event, which may be the first observance of some cultural tradition. They pass around information about it by word of mouth, person to person, to others who value the same event because they are part of the same culture. Slowly a standard formula for passing this information develops. From one generation to the next the formula is repeated, specific both to the event and the culture. It changes due to the limitations of human memory, which also means that when the culture changes and the event is no longer valued, the narrative changes, decays, and ultimately vanishes.
Because oral narratives are about in-culture events or norms, narratives do not transmit to other cultures because those other cultures want to hear about themselves, not about strangers.
Olrik says that for two cultures to share a narrative, first there has to be a path for communication. The idea that Judeans of the 900s to 200s BCE and the Danes, living 7,000 miles away between the 200s BCE to the 1200s CE, had a direct connection contemporary with each culture, is improbable and so they must have developed independent sets of stories.
It would also be expected that they had different culturally-affected ways of expressing those stories. Their oral narratives could have similar fine-structure features if they share a story-telling tradition.
But it would have to be a tradition common to their roots in ancient times where their ancestors came from. That includes Africa a million years ago, as well as northeast Anatolia from Neanderthal times down to 5,000 BCE.
Second, there must be, not just communication, but long-term exposure during which the cultures merge to some extent so that both of them are “us”. The specifics of a narrative that mean something to one culture will be meaningless and unimportant to another culture. The audience in the second culture won’t pay much attention to the story, even if repeated accurately, unless it already has some of the same concepts. A story told in a bar by a traveling stranger from another country is a curiosity, not a driving influence for cultural change.
When cultures merge, their narratives change in ways fitting the new normal. This is the same process as the creolization that produces a new language like English out of its parents. The grammatical or phonetic “survivals” in the new language that indicate its parents have their analog in the survivals of merged cultural narratives. It’s easy, however, to fall into “false friends” situations like the ones I discussed with philology: motifs have limited importance in comparing narratives in the same way as individual words have limited importance in comparing languages.
This goes with my previous discussion of “The Song of Going Forth” relative to Hesiod’s Theogony. The claim that the one disseminated into the culture of the other requires long association in one location and some commonality in culture. What I think happened is that the Hittites came to Anatolia and, over some centuries, adopted a Hurrian Anatolian story as their own. During this same time period, Anatolian Semitic culture seeped into Mesopotamia and produced the Tiamat battle in Enuma Elish, and Anatolian Indo-European culture seeped west as the pre-Greeks migrated, carrying the bones of the story with them. All of the names changed as each culture adapted the story, except among the Hittites, and so did the relationships between the characters. Some of the actions changed. Enough remained that as soon as the “song” was discovered, its resemblance to other material was obvious.
Before claiming that anything in Torah derives from a foreign culture, it is necessary to identify what the source culture was, when and how long and closely it was in contact with the ancestors of the Jews, whether the contact was oral or only in writing (which will come up again in a couple of months), and then the claimed source material needs analysis to avoid a weak analogy or a “false friends” mistake. I’ll say much more on the analysis later.
On the other hand, the concept of "us" has important consequences.
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights Reserved
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