Fact-Checking the Torah -- vivid, action-packed

Back to Olrik’s definitions, standards, and principles.

Olrik realized that oral narratives cannot survive if they overly stress the narrators’ memories, and therefore they have to be expressed in ways easy to remember.  This is the basis of the Epic Laws and strictly delineates orally transmitted material from what originates in writing.

First, oral narratives at their fullest have a pictorial quality that isn’t necessary for written narratives.  Written narratives survive as long as the medium, and the tale can be put aside and returned to many times before the reader finishes with it.  An oral narrative stresses the audience’s attention, and the narrator’s voice, and has to be wound up before everybody falls asleep or the narrator gets a sore throat.

So it has to be brief and active, not long-winded and descriptive.  Oral narratives have to be told during the short time that the listeners can spare from subsistence activities and sleep.  The narratives involve behavior related to the culture, and thus record actions.  As the culture shaped the narrative to satisfy the audience, it imposed the audience’s expectations on the story.  A character in an oral narrative always acts in culture-specific ways, an example being Gd obeying due process after Adam and Chavvah disobey a negative commandment which has the death penalty attached to it.

This feature coordinates with SWLT Rule 1 which says that a culture shapes its language to service the culture, and shapes its behavior around the expressions it uses.  The Gan Eden story not only embodies the principle of due process, it teaches the audience that due process has an ancient history and applied in the ancient past just as it applies “now” when the story is being repeated.  The term mot yumat (and its variants) is the key to this commonality.  It is a narrative illustration of the stare decisis beloved of judges, apparently thousands of years ago as well as now. 

Olrik refers to the Fjoort of Africa holding meetings where traditional stories are told.  Abrahams extends this to say that the Fjoort tell these stories when the meetings seem to be dealing with court cases, and Abrahams couldn’t understand why. 

What neither one seems to have realized is that if such stories are long-standing survivals, they embody cultural values that bear on the court cases.  Thus a story-telling session is a way of teaching and reinforcing values to be used in deciding the court cases. 

So oral narratives are short, vivid, almost pictorial, and embody ideas critical to the culture, acted out by characters who, sometimes in superlative degree as with heroes, embody the features the culture finds important enough to transmit.  Since they have to be short, oral narratives have to get to the point quickly and avoid anything that doesn’t influence the plot.  Besides, these details take up memory and don’t necessarily interest the audience, so both narrator and audience cooperate either to stop telling them or to stop demanding them, or the details get shunted off into another story that may then take on a life of its own.

But over the passage of time...