Fact-Checking the Torah -- oral tradition or urban legend?

Now the kicker.  What’s the difference between an urban legend and an oral tradition?

You thought I’d never ask!

Olrik’s definition of oral narratives is that they come into being only because they express a cultural feature or relate a founding event of the culture which transmits them, giving its members an enjoyable, easily remembered representation of their own culture.

That’s not what an urban legend does.  An urban legend is made up by one culture about another. Then for credibility, it may acquire false attribution to a police, university, or professional organization.  It is easy to transmit in multiple hops, with attention-getting contents, but it is not produced or shaped by norms of the culture it purports to be about.  It is shaped by norms of the culture that made it up, which are different. 

The best example I can give is probably the urban legend that if you see an oncoming car flashing its lights at you, that’s a gang signal.  This story did not originate among gangs or gangstas. 

It doesn’t build on the audience’s knowledge; it takes advantage of their ignorance.  People flash their headlights at oncoming cars who have their headlights on bright when they shouldn’t or have their headlights off when they shouldn’t.  Flashing headlights are also a warning that the police have set up a speed trap in the direction the flasher is coming from. 

Urban legends do not embody norms by which the audience lives.  They are simply titillating to the people who pass them around.  The same thing is often true about gossip.

Torah as a saga, a form of oral narrative, is not an urban legend.  It’s about the law, history, and language of the people who transmitted it for millennia, using structures and grammar that reinforce each other and reflect its oral nature.

The urban legends on this blog formed in cultures which were ignorant of Torah’s precise text or cultural content. 

So if you have been asking yourself the above question for any length of time while reading this blog, you can stop now.  Oral narratives and urban legends are indeed two different things, with only oral transmission in common.  If that, since so many urban legends have spread only in email for their entire lives. 

And now, just to bring things full circle...