Fact-Checking the Torah -- the Great Oral Divide

The fact that Torah has the same high-level features as Talmud, renowned for its oral origin, and the same fine-level structure as Olrik found in his studies and codified in the Epic Laws, strongly suggests that Torah had an oral origin instead of a written origin.

Why?

I hinted at it earlier. Oral tradition studies grew up at the end of the 19^th century CE with Olrik’s mentor, Grundtvig, and studies of ballads, preserved in great number and variety in Denmark. What Grundtvig discovered for ballads, Olrik also found in his study of Saxo Grammaticus compared to another broad and deep field, Danish oral narratives. (The work of the Grimm brothers before their time, was mostly dismissed and the tales they collected were classed as fairy tales, strictly entertainment and more suitable to children than adults.)

One result is that, over the millennia prior to Olrik’s work, nobody knew how to imitate oral narratives in the terms he used They might imitate the choice of words, such as copying proverbs into their work, but they could not reproduce the traditional attitudes. People who do not read much, even if they can read, relate differently to the history of their culture and to its activities, than do those who can read, and who read regularly for data gathering or formation of artistic taste.

The two groups can hardly communicate clearly. I saw this illustrated in the Beilis trial transcript. People who could not or did not read had only a hazy idea of the passage of time. When they gave depositions or testified in court, they remembered the timing of what happened as it related to church holidays. But some of those are moveable feasts, and in court it was important for the literate authorities to nail events to actual calendar dates. The prosecution spent hours trying to hammer illiterate witnesses into agreeing that certain things happened on certain dates. It never worked.

Olrik’s principles codify that the structure of oral material is almost diametrically opposed to the format or formulation of written material. He describes this difference as so well-defined and pervasive that it is hardly necessary to find a narrative still being transmitted orally, to distinguish its recorded version from something invented in writing. The difference between Norse tales and Hans Christian Anderson’s tales is not just the difference between pagan and Victorian cultures. It is the difference between non-writing and writing cultures.

Torah can be transmitted orally. Talmud can be transmitted orally. It occurs now, every day. I believe that both were recorded from people who could recite them, and not edited together from people’s personal notes, both because this is how Talmud was recorded, and because of the long millennia of Jewish culture preceding the first writing system for Hebrew.

The great oral divide has consequences for material flow between the two reservoirs.