The Oral World of the Old Testament (A Historical Preview)

This book brings the results of recent biblical scholarship on the origins of the Old Testament to Christians who want to deepen their knowledge of the Scriptures. The Old Testament comes from an oral society, where even as literacy was spreading, people preferred to engage with Scripture by hearing. Understanding how literacy in ancient Israel worked and how oral tradition works is essential for understanding the Old Testament. This book is both informative-going section by section through the Old Testament as oral tradition and exploring the process of composition of the biblical books-as well as methodological, unpacking how these insights ought to affect the ways in which believers read the Bible.

Dr. Robert D. Miller II, OFS, is a Secular Franciscan and Ordinary Professor of Old Testament at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He is also a Research Affiliate at the University of Pretoria and a Life Member of St. John's College, Cambridge. He has authored many books and articles on the Old Testament and serves the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops as Chair of the Board of Control for the New American Bible.

The past four decades have seen Christians worldwide become Bible readers. That is a fantastic development, as St. Jerome tells us "Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ." Pastors and others in ministry need to keep encouraging everyone to "Take up and read," as a vision told by St. Augustine. Nothing in this book should discourage you from that practice, even daily reading of the Scriptures. But in this book, I want to probe the ways in which reading is not enough, and for the Scriptures to become our lifeblood we need to hear them. This book is about the vocal, sonorous, melodious voice of the oral Bible-in particular, the Old Testament.

In this book, we will come to understand how the original recipients of the Old Testament books encountered the Word of God: out loud, aurally, heard. We will use the best tools of biblical scholarship to unpack the different ways and different venues ancient Israelites heard the Scriptures and shared the Scriptures, "performed" them, as it were. An initial chapter will introduce the concept of oral tradition, what we mean by that term and what it does not mean. That chapter will also give an overview of the oral performance typical of the ancient Near East (what we now call the Middle East). The following chapters will go through the Old Testament not book by book, but genre by genre, treating each of the different sorts of books we find there: narratives, laws, prophecy, poetry, philosophy, and apocalypses. Although each chapter will both examine how that genre fits into oral performance, as well as look at what difference knowing this makes for Christian readers of the Bible today, a final chapter is entirely devoted to the implications of "orality" for Christians and the Church in the modern world.

Support for the research of this book came in part from a Confraternity of Christian Doctrine/Catholic Biblical Association "Biblical Scholarship and Biblical Literacy Promotion Grant" that enabled me to undertake a scholar-in-residence at the Snorrastofa Cultural and Medieval Study Centre in Reykholt, Iceland. During that time, I was granted privileges at the University of Iceland; thanks to my longtime collaborator, Prof Terry Gunnell, whose foreword to J. M. Bedell, Hildur, Queen of the Elves: And Other Icelandic Legends (Northampton, Mass: Interlink Books, 2007) provided the model for my opening section.

**Contents and Sample Pages**