So, here’s a
question for you… How did the ancients in an oral society preserve in memory
biblical passages? You likely have heard that much of ancient Israel was an
oral society, and this claim seems to have been true. This did not mean, of
course, that no one could read or write, since human writing had been invented
about 3200 BC (the demarcation between the prehistoric and historic periods).
Still, in the first number of centuries after the development of cuneiform in
Mesopotamia and hieroglyphics in Egypt, reading and writing was largely under
the provenance of specialists, such as, scribes in the service of the local
king (who himself may not have been able to read or write). Royal monuments,
such as stela, were not so much for public consumption as they were for marking
out status, the mysterious marks on the stone an evidence of the power and
mystery of the king and his attendants. Widespread literacy in Israel seems to
have occurred in about the 8th century BC, when the writing prophets
began recording their sermons and collections of previous writings were made
(Pro. 25:1). The oracles of prior prophets, such as Elijah, Elisha and Micaiah,
are either significantly abbreviated or unavailable altogether. It was not
until the time of Hezekiah (again, in the 8th century) that a
document was actually copied multiple times and sent to outlying towns with a
royal communication (2 Chr. 30:1). To be sure, there are a handful of earlier
examples (e.g., Jg. 8:14), but these are more the exception than the norm.
Indeed, when a Torah scroll was discovered in the temple during Josiah’s reign,
it was read first by the royal secretary (2 Kg. 22:8, 10), presumably because
reading and writing was part of his skill base.
So, back to the basic question—how
did the ancients preserve in memory biblical passages? Hardly anyone had
private copies of the Hebrew scrolls, so the modern practice of having “quiet
time” with the Scriptures has no exact parallel in the ancient world. Further,
even for those who could read, the ancient texts did not yet have many of the
things to which we are accustomed. In the first place, Hebrew was a consonantal
text without vowels, so it was up to the reader to decipher what individual words
meant. Most Hebrew words have a trilateral root (i.e., three consonants), but
consider for a moment how you might define a similar root in English, the
trilateral consonants BRD. Does this mean “bride”, “broad”, “bird”, “bread”,
“breed” or “bored”, to name only a few possibilities. Context, of course,
loomed large, but occasionally a trilateral root might make sense in more than
one way. Here is where the oral tradition of pronunciation begins to develop.
Well before the time of Jesus, the synagogue readings of these ancient
consonantal texts had achieved a standardized tradition for vocalization, and
it was this standardized tradition that eventually gave way to what we now know
as vowel-pointing developed by Jews in the Middle Ages, those little dots and
dashes beneath, above and within the Hebrew consonants. To make matters more
difficult, there were no verse or chapter numbers in the ancient text, no
paragraphing, and in many texts, there was not even spaces between the words,
which introduces yet another complexity. How would you read in English the
sentence, “GODISNOWHERE”? God is nowhere? God is now here? Further, there were
no commas, periods, questions marks, and so forth. (To be sure, Hebrew has an
interrogative marker that indicates a sentence should be read as a question,
but it wasn’t always used.) Such conveniences would only come many centuries
later. The average Israelite who owned a farm in, say, one of the northern
clans was dependent for his knowledge of the law upon his three-annual visits
to the central shrine during the festivals of Passover, Weeks, and Succoth,
when the Torah texts would be read publicly, not to mention any other parts of
Scripture. His knowledge of these readings was entirely memory dependent!
There were, however, at least some
literary devices that lent themselves to memory aid, and they are resident in
many Old Testament texts. The most important and familiar is poetry. Poetry is
easier to remember than prose, if for no other reason, than it has rhythm,
rhyme, meter, and so forth. Hebrew poetry had all these features plus a feature
that scholars call parallelism, the rhyming of ideas, not merely sounds. The
most widely-used form of parallelism is the bi-colon in which the idea in the
first line is mirrored in the second line. Take, for example, these poetic
lines from Isaiah 1:4a (NIV):
Ah,
sinful nation,
A
people loaded with guilt
A
brood of evil-doers,
Children given to corruption.
One can
easily see how the idea in the second line mirrors the idea in the first line,
while the idea in the fourth line mirrors the idea in the third line. The words
“nation” and “people” match each other, while “sinful” and “guilt” also match.
The words “brood” and “children” match as do the words “evil-doers” and
“corruption”. These sorts of things were incredibly helpful as a memory aid,
and it is to the point that around a fifth of the Old Testament is written in
poetry.
A whole variety of such devices were
used, far beyond the scope of this short essay, but allow me to remark upon
two, one used in Hebrew poetry (acrostic) and the other used in both Hebrew
poetry and prose (chiasmus). Acrostics, which not only are known in ancient
Hebrew but also in Babylonian poetry, is a poem in which successive lines begin
with the letters of the alphabet in order. One of these is actually so-marked
in English Versions of the Bible, Psalm 119 (here, the poem is divided into 8
verse stanzas, and in each stanza the initial letter of each verse begins with the
Hebrew alphabetic letters in order). However, Psalm 119 by no means stands
alone. Several other psalms are also acrostics, such as, Psalm 9, 10, 25, 34,
37, 111, 112, and 145. Proverbs 31:10-31 is an acrostic as are the poems in
Lamentations 1, 2, 3 and 4. Nahum 1:2-8 is an acrostic, and there is even one
in the Apocrypha (Sirach 51:13-20), not to mention one in the Dead Sea Scrolls
(4QPsa and 4QPsf). Remembering an acrostic is much easier
when one knows that the first line begins with “A” (aleph). The second
line, therefore, must begin with “B” (beth), and so forth.
Chiasmus, another device, is a way
of structuring a piece of writing so that the first line matches the last line,
the second line matches the penultimate line, and so forth, eventually arriving
at the middle of the composition. Chiasms can be short or long, depending upon
the skill and intent of the author. There are literally dozens of them in
Hebrew poetry, such as, Psalm 7:16 (for which I will give my own translation in
the order of the Hebrew words so as to preserve the chiasmus):
Returns his trouble upon his [own] head,
and upon his [own] pate violence
descends.
Here, you
can see that the symmetry is A1, A2 // A2, A1.
The phrase “returns his trouble” at the beginning matches “violence descends”
at the end. The line “upon his [own] head” matches “upon his [own] pate”.
Often, this sort of structure is ignored by Bible translators, since it often
makes for awkward English, as you can see in my translation above. However, for
the ancient person dependent upon memory, such a device was helpful. In prose,
there are some rather elaborate chiasms, sometimes involving whole books (e.g.,
Ruth, the Song). Here is one generally recognized chiasmus in the story of the
binding of Isaac in Genesis 17:1-25:
A Abram’s age (17:1a)
B The LORD
appears to Abram (17:1b)
C God’s first speech (17:1c–2)
D Abram falls on his face (17:3)
E God’s second speech (emphasizing “names/ kings/nations”) (17:4–8)
X God’s third/most important speech (emphasizing
“the covenant”)
(17:9–14)
E’ God’s fourth speech (emphasizing “names/kings/
nations”) (17:15–16)
D’ Abraham falls on his face (17:17–18)
C’ God’s fifth speech (17:19–21)
B’ The LORD
goes up from Abram (17:22–23)
A’ Abraham’s age (17:24–25)
Here, you
can easily see how the various elements match each other in the larger
structure. Also important is to note that the middle of a chiastic
structure is most emphasized. In English, we tend to emphasize the end of
things, but a Hebrew chiasmus emphasizes the middle. If one can get through the
first half of a chiastic structure, the second half will fall naturally into
place because of the parallel ideas, and this, in turn, is an incredible memory
aid.
In
our contemporary world, we have a plethora of artificial memory aids, ranging
from print to digital records, but these were simply absent in the ancient
world. On the other hand, their memories were likely better than ours, since
they depended upon them so heavily. Such conditions certainly give one pause
when reading that Jesus “found the place where it was written” in the scroll of
Isaiah (Luke 4:17; cf. Isaiah 61:1-2). In a large scroll with consonants only,
no spacing between the words, no chapter or verse markers and no paragraphing—could
you or I find such a passage in a text the size of Isaiah under such
conditions?
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