Hermeneutics
interpretation in the 21st Century
intersection of ancient storytelling and interpretation now
Storytelling and the Composition of Social Space
"It seems to me, my king, that the present time on earth, compared with that time of which we have no knowledge, is like when you are sitting at dinner with your ealdermen and thanes in winter-time, and the fire lit and your hall heated, and it's raining and snowing and hailing; and there arrives one sparrow from outside and flies swiftly through the hall, and entering through one door, leaving through the other. Now, while it's inside it is not touched by the winter's storm; but that's only a twinkling of an eye and the shortest space of time, and from a winter it immediately returns to a winter. So human life appears for a short interval: what went before it, and what comes after it, we don't know. Therefore, if this new teaching brings forth anything more certain, it is only fitting that we should go after it."
This story from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English provides a symbolic intersection for my thoughts. Many of us, especially the storytellers among us, are quite familiar with this moving comparison. I would like to make at the outset three points that, in turn, will preface the three sections of my reflections...
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The Intersection of Contemporary Biblical Storytelling with Storytelling in the World of Antiquity: Invitation to a Conversation Holly E. Hearon, Christian Theological Seminary
2004
I engage this conversation from the perspective of my own research: on reconstructing storytelling in the world of antiquity, on social memory, and on the impact of studies in orality on studies of the biblical text. I begin with the assumption that much of the biblical narrative was shaped by and likely arose within oral, storytelling circles. This seems to me to be self-evident. In a time and place where the number of people who could read and/or write is estimated to have been somewhere around 5%, the primary mode of discourse was unquestionably the spoken word. Further, studies of written remains suggest that texts which were written were intended to be read aloud.
As a result, stories were not confined to the written page but re-entered the free-flowing world of oral exchange as they were given voice by first one storyteller and then another. According to Vernon Robbins, there was, indeed, an expectation that oral stories would appear in written texts and written stories would be heard as oral texts. Since the ‘authority’ of biblical texts was established only over an extended period of time and certainly not before 100 CE, there is no reason to assume that written texts brought an end to the circulation of stories recorded in these same texts. Consequently, it is difficult, prior to the second century CE (and very likely later), to establish a clear distinction between “oral bible” and “written bible...”
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Alter's and Oral Biblical Storytelling
Robert Alter’s Art of Biblical Narrative is a classic in the literary study of biblical narrative. While Alter specifically addresses Hebrew narrative, indeed “classical” (pre-exilic) Hebrew narrative, I have found little difficulty in applying his methods and insights to biblical narratives written in Greek. And while Alter approaches his biblical texts as texts, in which literary art plays a crucial role, “determining in most cases the minute choice of words and reported details,” I have found his insights remarkably helpful in working up oral tellings of biblical stories.
How is it that a book with such firmly textual focus has become such a valuable resource for me in doing and teaching oral biblical storytelling? One possibility is that the features highlighted by Alter are not in fact unique to written artistry, but characteristic of oral narrative as well. Another possibility is that the book is helpful to me because verbatim biblical storytelling, as often practiced in NOBS, is still saturated with the ideology of written textuality. In this paper, I will revisit Alter from the standpoint of questions about the balance of oral and literary features in classical Hebrew narrative, and the same balance in our own “by heart” biblical storytelling...
