Not a Telephone Game: Oral Tradition and Memory - Episode 166

Carey Griffel: Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel, and today we are gonna talk about the difference between written transmission of a text and oral transmission. I'll be talking a little bit about a thing called the tablet hypothesis, but mostly we're gonna be focusing on human memory and specifically in the form of human memory that is passed along in a cultural way.

[00:00:44] And the question here isn't really whether Genesis came from oral tradition or written records, but primarily I'm gonna focus on the idea of whether communal memory can be reliable evidence. The science says that it often can. Now there are conditions and cautions we should have with that, but we'll save those for another time because today we're gonna just talk about the reliability of oral tradition and how often this is something that a society really does.

[00:01:18] I know that we like to call ourselves people of the book, but not everything that we believe, not everything that we think comes from the Bible. We have a whole bunch of other ideas and even though those things are written down in things like systematic theologies and all kinds of books and libraries, the fact of the matter is, most of us really don't draw upon all of that body of literature to know what we know today.

[00:01:47] So there are several really interesting angles to this question, but of course we're gonna start with the basis of looking at it from the perspective of Genesis and Scripture. But today we will be going beyond biblical studies to bring in a lot of information that we know. Now, first of all, I am not a psychologist. I'm not a scientist, and I don't promise that everything I mention today is gonna be top of the line, new research. Some of this is drawing upon older cognitive science work and psychology, and so I'm kind of synthesizing a whole lot of ideas. But I am drawing upon real studies. I am drawing upon real science, and this kind of work has been studied for quite a long time.

[00:02:35] Today I want you to think about the importance of memory, how memory works and its usefulness. This will be part of a series on evidence. As discerning students of the Bible, we wanna make sure we're drawing on solid information and that we're interpreting things in and outside the Bible with really good evidence.

[00:02:59] And often, we can't always land on a firm decision on whether we should think one thing or another thing, because sometimes there's several valid options. But of course a lot of people will take that and then they'll think, well, that just means we can go off into la la land and speculate, and all of that is just as valid as any other kind of interpretive option.

[00:03:22] But that's not really the case because often there is an idea that has stronger evidence than other ideas.

[00:03:31] Being open-minded, being critical thinkers does not mean that we should just take any old idea as being valid because hey, we can't know anyway. Look, just because we can't have a hundred percent certainty doesn't mean that we don't know anything or that anything goes. It is in fact quite possible to get very certain about some things, but only if you use the entire range of evidence and not just some of the pieces.

[00:04:05] And let's be honest, a lot of times, we like to only use some of the evidence because there are things that we prefer over other things coming from a personal angle. For instance, some people will put a lot of weight on the body of knowledge that they have been taught from their tradition or from their parents or from their pastor, or from a particular mentor.

[00:04:31] Now, that does not have to be a bad thing because we all do that. But some people will weigh those things far more than other things. Some people will put a lot of weight on scientific data or on physical evidence. Some people will put a lot of weight on personal experience. They can't imagine themselves being able to do something. So then that thing must be hard for everyone.

[00:04:58] We frequently struggle to weigh all of the evidence, scientific, linguistic, cultural, literary, personal, information from authorities. All of those things need to be weighed and counted as evidence. And we need to be aware that different types of evidence do have different strengths and different weaknesses, which is gonna matter to how we use that information and how we should prioritize it, as well.

[00:05:32] So today we're gonna look at the idea of written evidence, oral tradition, and memory. Of course, lately we have been talking about the idea of God blotting things out, and of the idea of a name that lasts. We contrasted lasting legacy from humans versus lasting legacy from God, because of course, God is gonna give us a truly lasting legacy versus what we can get from human legacies.

[00:06:01] But even so, I think it's important to really seat all of this in actual human capability. Not that God is restricted by our capability, but it does seem to me that God uses humanity to realize his purposes. The ultimate purpose is the Son coming down as a man to save us. So he took on our limitations. So it seems very important to understand human memory because our legacies get perpetuated in various ways through various human means.

[00:06:36] So even when God is keeping our name, that still gets real traction in human systems and human ways of working. Again, that's not to say that God is limited by that or that everything we do is going to be lasting. Surely that's not the case, but it does matter, and if we don't know anything about human memory and oral tradition and how those things actually work, then we will be left in the cold making predictions and assumptions that have nothing to do with reality, and we don't want that, do we?

[00:07:13] Now, of course, this conversation can easily get into the topic of the New Testament and its reliability and all of those apologetics angles there. And I'm really not gonna get into those kinds of things, although I do hope that this information will help you see how the New Testament can be reliable within boundaries. For instance, this is why it's important that we do have multiple reports. We have all of the different gospels that are recorded by different authors and give us unique perspectives. And all of that does play into some of this that we're gonna be talking about today, even though we will be going a slightly different direction with it eventually.

[00:07:58] Now there's two extremes that we're gonna be kind of pushing against today. The first extreme is the idea that oral tradition is kind of like a telephone game and therefore it's unreliable. Like one person talks to another person, talks to another person, and by the time you get down the end of the line, the first thing that was said is completely mangled or entirely lost because of that transmission from person to person.

[00:08:28] But that is a bad view of what oral transmission actually is. The second extreme we'll be pushing against is the idea that the written record functions exactly like a modern history textbook. Therefore, everything in it should be reliable.

[00:08:45] So I kind of want those two things in the back of your mind as we talk today, and I want you to have in mind the fact that both written records as well as oral tradition, they both form a kind of stability.

[00:08:59] Like I said, we kind of assume that Jews and Christians are people of the book. Therefore, we presume that all Christians and all Jews have always relied upon a written record, and that written record is super reliable through time. Now we do have a lot of evidence in our manuscripts that we can take a whole lot of confidence in the reliability of our Scripture.

[00:09:26] If you compare some of our later manuscripts with what we find in the Dead Sea Scrolls, it's really amazing the coherence that we have in those. But the text is not always how everything gets perpetuated through time.

[00:09:39] And I would suggest that it is incomplete to consider ourselves to be people of the book. We are people who are shaped by Scripture, but we live within structures where we communicate with each other and we teach each other. And that doesn't have to always be just from Scripture. That many of God's people have lived for long stretches of time in places where it is basically an oral world. So understanding Scripture and being biblically literate does not always require literacy.

[00:10:16] Now, that's not to say that we should not keep working on translating the Bible into all of the languages and things like that, but in reality, God's word is also spoken word and it's word that people hear. So we need to consider stories that are told, teachings that are memorized, communal recitation as well as liturgy and public reading, and all of those things also form boundaries that can help corral that oral tradition.

[00:10:49] If we assume that written equals reliable and oral equals fragile, we're already reading the ancient world through modern, print- centric culture.

[00:11:02] Reliability in the work of God has never depended on everyone owning a book or even having access to a book. And so communal memory and public knowledge , those are not small items.

[00:11:17] Part of our conversation today is going to be talking about how these things do stay stable through time. Not always perfectly. Again, we'll get into some problems with it later, but oral tradition really has core structures to it that enable that stability through time.

[00:11:38] Okay, so let's get into this tablet hypothesis. I've already talked quite a bit before about the structure of Genesis. And I'm not gonna go and rehash all of that, but I will remind you to go back to some of those episodes if you're unfamiliar. I've already talked about the todoth formula of Genesis. That is the Hebrew structure that underlies our English words, "these are the generations of." So if you read Genesis, and I think most of us have, you'll see that refrain through Genesis and it creates a new section. So there's a internal structure to it, right?

[00:12:18] But I've also talked about Duane Garrett's idea of describing Genesis as a series of ancestor -focused cycles, like they're literary units that have been formed in a certain way to be like an ancestor epic. I find that lens really helpful and it helps to explain the structure of Genesis. It helps explain why we have repetitive stories, and I think it shows that it preserves an identity history, a narrative world that is organized around family line, the promise of God, and making of that promise through generations.

[00:12:57] And I'm bringing all of that up because structure means something. So if Genesis has a particular shape, and we can see that, whether we're just looking at the toledoths, or we're looking at the ancestor epic cycle, then it really is fair to ask how we got that. How did that shape come to be? How was it preserved? How was it transmitted? How was it arranged like this? And how was it handed down?

[00:13:25] Now there's a few different ways people go through that, right? Some people think that it was just oral tradition. Some people think it was all written down from the beginning, and that's what we'll get into with this tablet hypothesis. Other people believe that Moses saw it all in a vision, and he wrote it all down.

[00:13:44] But if Moses wrote the whole thing, it's really strange that Genesis sounds and looks so different from the rest of the Torah. So a lot of people will think, well, he must have had sources that he drew upon, and what were those sources? And so here we have the Wiseman tablet hypothesis. This is probably something you have already heard about, although maybe you haven't.

[00:14:10] The context here is from P.J. Wiseman. Wiseman was working in a time when people were paying closer attention to ancient Near Eastern inscriptions and record keeping. This was early on in the 20th century, and he looked at Genesis and he said, hold on. This book might be showing us something about how it was put together.

[00:14:33] So his claim is that the toledoth formulas function like colophons. It's like the end of the tablet note. So in his reading, this is not a heading. It doesn't start something, but it ends the record. And this is something that I've talked about before. This is actually an ancient Near Eastern practice. Some tablets would have a little colophone at the end to say, this is the end of the tablet, or this is tablet number, whatever, and you can expect another one, or whatever else like that. This was a scribal way that some people in the ancient Near East would record things.

[00:15:15] So it seemed to Wiseman that this is what Genesis was doing. So for his view, Moses was compiling these inherited records into a single book, and makes a whole lot of sense for his context. He's not trying to force the text to fit something he's already thought of. He's seeing something in the text, seeing how it's similar to something in the ancient world, and putting those two things together.

[00:15:42] Most scholars don't accept this idea anymore, and they will take the toledoth readings as headings, not endings. But you'll still hear this very frequently where people will say, Moses was just putting together all of these tablets that he had already gotten from the patriarchs, right? That would explain quite a few things. It would explain why Genesis sounds different than Exodus, why it's structured differently, and this really feeds into this idea that we already have kind of natively, that we are people of the book. So that was the case even at the time of the writing of the Torah. For all of human history, literally all of human history. That is what we have in the Genesis text right here is these ancient records, these tablets from the past that were collected and preserved through time. Eventually Moses gets them and he compiles them into one document.

[00:16:43] Okay, so now I'm gonna contrast that with the idea of oral transmission. We can see how it would be really comfortable for us to just accept that we have writing from well before Moses, and even in my episode about the ancestor epic cycles, Duane Garrett will also suggest that Moses was drawing upon records. But he kinda sees it a lot differently. A lot of what Garrett is saying is that there are genealogies and a whole bunch of different types of documents that had to be put together into the narrative of Genesis.

[00:17:20] So this is not the same thing as the tablet hypothesis, where each patriarch had his own tablet, and each of those tablets had to be preserved through time to get to Moses. That's a lot of preservation, especially in a people who are not settled , and not saying that's not possible in the ancient world, but that would be a lot of management. ' Cause clay tablets aren't easy to transport and if you have a nomadic people who are wandering around a lot, it's really hard to see how these were preserved through time to that degree.

[00:17:57] But you know, who knows? God does amazing and great things to preserve his Word. So I'm not saying this is not possible, but again, the fact that the toledoths really function better as headings really doesn't help us with the idea of the tablet hypothesis.

[00:18:16] So this is why we're gonna talk about oral transmission, because if we do have some ancient ideas that are transmitted through time and those are included with some documentation of some sort, ancient documents that have been preserved, then later on we could get somebody coming along to compile the book of Genesis.

[00:18:39] And it could even be the case that we have Genesis 12 through 50 preserved in some sort of documentation. And Genesis one through 11 was new material during the exile. I know if you're a staunch Mosaic authorship person, then you don't like that idea.

[00:18:58] But keep in mind that when the New Testament is talking about the law of Moses, well it doesn't necessarily have to include Genesis. There could be a lot of different ways that Genesis comes about and it's just as scriptural as any other part of the Torah because it is done under the providence of God and all of these ideas, right?

[00:19:21] So there's nothing saying that Genesis has to come at a particular time or in a particular way. Once we get the completed Torah, then that is what we have going forward, right.

[00:19:35] So to kind of set that to the side for now, let's contrast that with the idea of oral transmission. Is it possible for the people to have preserved, in oral form, the stories of Genesis, with or without additional documentation? It doesn't really matter. We don't have to take away the idea of ancient tablets. It doesn't have to be an either or, okay.

[00:20:03] So first of all, let's do a little bit of defining here. What is oral tradition? Now when your modern, average western person hears "oral tradition," that might bring up images of like campfire stories where everybody's sitting around and it's informal and it's improvised and there can be danger here because it's just, you know, people telling stories and then the next night they tell stories and it might change a little bit and so on.

[00:20:34] But oral tradition in many real cultures through time is not just random storytelling. Oral tradition means that a community has agreed, either implicitly or explicitly, that certain content matters enough to be repeated. So this is socially- transmitted knowledge. It does not depend on an individual person. It is knowledge that is carried in people in a collective way, and it is passed on through repeated telling and teaching and performance. It's often delivered in predictable contexts. Family settings, ritual settings, communal gatherings, festivals. And in many cultures there are specialists. They are the custodians of the story. They're the people who learn the tradition with care, and they're recognized as the legitimate bearers of the story.

[00:21:36] So oral tradition does not mean uncontrolled. It means that the primary medium is people rather than paper or clay.

[00:21:48] Okay, so with that being said, let's talk about memory. What is memory? I think a lot of us have some really bad assumptions about what memory is. We tend to treat memory like a camera or an audio recorder where you hit record and that tape is stored and you can play it back later, but that's really not how memory works. It's not like a video recording that just automatically replays exactly the same way every time. It isn't a file that you retrieve unchanged.

[00:22:24] Memory is actually a reconstructive system. It's a system that rebuilds the past using cues, patterns, and meaning. When you reconstruct your memories, it's not like they're false memories necessarily, and it's not like it's lying to you. This is just the normal function of human recall. It is optimized for meaning, for survival, and for identity. So memory prioritizes what helps a person, and in this case a community, make sense of the world.

[00:23:02] It keeps a hold of what is significant. So it contains identity markers, causal logic, moral lessons, boundaries, and also promises. In other words, memory is often truer to meaning than to factual verbatim detail. And once you understand that, you can see why oral tradition can be stable because it preserves the structure and the meaning that a community has decided that it needs to remain itself.

[00:23:39] That is not to say that it cannot change through time. Again, we'll get to that later. But when you have a stable community and it has a reason for being, and it has stories that it tells because this is who they are, then it has an invested interest to keep those stable through time because you are teaching your children what you have learned yourself.

[00:24:04] Another point that we need to really dig into is the idea of reliable evidence. What is reliable evidence? The difficult thing that we might struggle with, is that reliable evidence is not like a camera recording.

[00:24:21] It is not identical to the past. It is not the case that it cannot change through time. If your standard for reliability is word for word, identical repetition across centuries, then yeah, probably oral tradition will disappoint you in that. But that standard isn't even how reliable memory works, and it's not what most ancient cultures were even trying to do because you have to think of the point, what is their purpose? What is their goal? This wasn't just, again, random storytelling around the campfire. So what is reliable?

[00:25:03] what I want you to consider is that reliability has a stable core. So reliable evidence, reliable oral tradition, means that there is stability in the places where it needs to have stability. So the core storyline, the whole spine of the narrative, the identity markers. So we've got things like names, lineages, locations, boundary features, key relationships. All of those are there. So we're not making up people here in the past, okay? We are preserving those names and those lines and the things that are important about those people.

[00:25:47] Then there is a causal logic. There are logical connections through the story. You can tell why this happened, what it means, and what it led to. It also has a structured sequence. There's a recognizable order of major events or scenes. Again, this isn't about making those up, it is about transmitting the past.

[00:26:12] Now, that just might not look like we want it to look in modern history, and again, we'll get to some of that later. But my point here is that reliability should never be construed as being like photographic evidence. Reliability is faithful preservation of the tradition's essential content.

[00:26:34] So evidence is data that we can weigh. Sometimes we weigh it a little bit more strongly because we have more evidence. Sometimes we might weigh it a little less because there is a bit of reason sometimes to say this or that other thing is not as strong as something else.

[00:26:55] The fact that we can't weigh everything the same does not make something unreliable. If that was the case, you couldn't even trust your own memories. You couldn't trust your own experience. You certainly couldn't trust your family history. So, however we're thinking about this has to work within actual human capability.

[00:27:16] Let's get into a little bit of the memory science here and why communal memory can be stable through time. One of the biggest things that we have going on with oral tradition is repetition that is done the right way in certain circumstances and with boundaries.

[00:27:35] So what we have going on when we have oral tradition and we have somebody telling the story, they are retrieving that ancient memory. Let's think of it in a different way. Most people think that learning happens by exposure. Like you read something again and again and again, and that's how you learn. But there is a massive body of cognitive research that shows that what actually strengthens memory is retrieval and connections when you have those retrievals.

[00:28:08] So instead of reading something again and again, or being told something again and again, your memory is actually strengthened when you recall it yourself, when you bring it back up out of your mind. Now, the problem with that is that when you do that, there might be some shifts in how you recall that, but when you do recall it, the things that you're gonna recall are things that are core and things that matter to you, that connect the you from the past to the you in the present. So in other words, the act of recalling isn't just something that you remembered. It's one of the main ways that you create durable memory. If you never remember the past, you're never gonna be able to remember it.

[00:28:58] So if you're studying for a test, for instance, and you wanna try to remember something, it helps a whole lot better to quiz yourself than it does to just reread the material. If you have to dredge it up from your memory, then you're gonna learn it. You're gonna remember it better than if you just keep getting exposed to it over and over and over.

[00:29:21] If you've ever had to teach something, you already know this. The first time you explain something, it might not go all that smoothly, but once you've explained it a dozen times, you can do it really cleanly. It's not because suddenly you've discovered new facts, but because your retrieval strengthened the pathways.

[00:29:42] Now translate all of that into a preprinting press world, or a world where everybody is not literate. If a community repeatedly tells the same identity- defining stories out loud in public with shared expectations, then that community is essentially doing retrieval practice as a way of life. So this is their memory being trained within the community actively.

[00:30:10] This is also why ritual matters because ritual retelling isn't just about religion. It's a tool. We might even call it memory technology. When a story is tied to a feast or a gathering or a rite of passage or some sort of formal communal reading, the memory is not dependent on one person's private recollection.

[00:30:36] And if they get it wrong, it's going to misalign with what's going on in the ritual, and everybody will know about it. So it becomes shared, repeated, and reinforced even when you are not the storyteller. This is kind of like grooves worn into a record. The more you do it and the more, things associated with it, like liturgy or sacrificial practices or things like that, the more this will be embedded within the community in a living way.

[00:31:09] This is also why calendar rhythms matter, because there's something called spaced repetition. Memories will hold better when you revisit them over time rather than just cramming them all at once.

[00:31:23] And this is where oral cultures have a massive advantage that we do not always appreciate. Calendar rhythms of festivals, recurring gatherings, seasonal rituals of any case will create that natural spacing. So the story comes back year after year, generation after generation, with built in reminders and cues.

[00:31:47] And so again, if your idea of oral tradition is just a story that's whispered down the line of people with no structure and no guardrails, then that's not gonna work. A lot of oral cultures are doing repeated spaced retrieval in public, and that is the one reason that oral tradition can be stable enough to count as evidence.

[00:32:10] If you don't have any of these guardrails and there's nothing to keep it stable, then you really ought to question what's going on, because somebody might come up to you and say, I have this oral tradition in my family that's lasted for generations. But if there's no stability guardrails, then you should probably wonder if that's actually true or if that's maybe just something their grandpa told them. Again, repetition, retrieval, and particularly spaced retrieval, is a really big deal. And this is, again, done communally. It's not done behind closed doors in secret. This is not a mystery religion. This is something that is public.

[00:32:56] Here's another way that oral tradition remains stable through time. This one is huge. Oral cultures don't just rely on raw memory. They build memory supports into the way that they speak. They create what you might call designed memory environments. So a cue is a prompt, something that triggers the next piece of recall.

[00:33:21] In modern terms, it's kinda like a bookmark or the chorus of a song or that really catchy line where your brain just knows what comes next. And so oral cultures will build in these prompts in their stories. They have stock lines, a lot of repetition, refrains, phrases that come back again and again. It's not because the story is boring or the storyteller's lazy, but because this repetition is a feature and it guides the memory. There's a predictable order. This happens, then this, and then this. And once you learn the sequence, the structure itself carries you forward. And if you miss a big segment, it will become very obvious.

[00:34:09] So we have pattern structures, parallel lines, balanced clauses, number patterns, lists, chiasms. These are all structures that the mind can hold onto. It's like building the story on a frame instead of trying to keep the pile of loose details from falling apart. And so there is a scaffolding and that is what you build so that the whole memory can stand. And if you're telling the story and you're missing a piece, people will notice. The patterns support the content.

[00:34:44] So this isn't about memorizing a thousand unconnected facts, but there is a whole shaped thing. These cues will reduce cognitive load, as well, because your brain has limited working memory. If you have to keep everything in your head at once, you will drop pieces. But if you have cues, the structure does part of that work for you. You're not holding onto the whole thing. You're just moving through the sequence.

[00:35:11] Cues also make the tradition harder to accidentally scramble or change because when you miss something, the pattern will pull you back. It will be noticeable. Even somebody who doesn't know the story will inherently start seeing the cadence of the story and they'll see something is missing. It's like the curbs on a road. You can drift a little bit, but it will keep you pointed back on track.

[00:35:37] Think about how many people can sing a song or a hymn that they learned as a kid even decades later when they haven't thought about it for ages. Why is that? Because there's melody, there's rhythm, and there's repetition, and those are all embedded into what you're recalling.

[00:35:56] Now another thing is that oral traditions will have various types of quality control. Again, this is not like mystery religion and the stories are being told in private. Oral tradition is public, shared, and socially supervised. The people you're telling already know the plot. They've heard it since they were children. So even though you have the custodians of the story, the audience is not passive. It becomes part of that stability structure.

[00:36:29] This does not mean that oral tradition can't drift when people start losing their traditions and they don't do the rituals right, or, you know, maybe they start including other elements from other cultures that they shouldn't be. You know, like those pesky Israelites who are worshiping Yahweh and Marduke, then oral tradition does drift. But that is why we have the prophets, they are bringing the people back into covenant relationship and saying, look, you guys are drifting and this is the control mechanism.

[00:37:03] So really the more public the story, the more backups and guardrails you have of it. So this redundancy and the people hearing it frequently, oral tradition will not work if you don't have that. Public performance multiplies the effect of what's going on, and it becomes self-reinforcing.

[00:37:25] I mean, think about how many churches today do not use a King James Version for reading their Bible anymore, but they'll still recite the Lord's Prayer in the King James because this is our cultural memory. This is also why older people will get a little bit perturbed when younger people start using language in weird ways because you are changing the tradition.

[00:37:51] Not all stories are remembered the same way. Some stories are for entertainment, others are for identity. Identity stories get treated differently. Every community has certain things that it can't afford to forget because if they do, they lose who they are. And those are the things that memory tends to grip tightly. So when we're talking about oral tradition, we have to ask, what kind of tradition is this? What role does it play?

[00:38:22] Here's some examples of identity defining content. The origins of a community. Where did we come from? How did we become, us? The boundaries of the community. Who belongs? Who doesn't? What makes us distinct from other people? The warnings in the community. What will destroy us if we do that? What do we tell our children so they don't die of our past mistakes? Community charters. What authorizes our way of life? What legitimizes our leaders, our land, or our practices? Community promises. What is the hope that keeps us going? What did we receive and what are we waiting for and actively living out?

[00:39:13] When a story carries your identity, it's not just interesting entertainment, it's core and necessary. It's the community's memory of who God is, who we are, and what our life means. So that is a lot of social pressure to get it right. And the tighter the identity tie-in is, the stronger the incentive there is to preserve it.

[00:39:40] If this is the story that explains your boundaries, your purpose, your God, your moral universe, then you're not gonna treat it casually. And even outside of religious contexts, humans treat sacred things differently. Sacred means set apart, right? Within the context of Scripture, it's attached to holiness and to God, but non-religious communities will also hold things sacred.

[00:40:08] And these identity traditions will become those set apart things that will get stabilized through repetition, through their role in the community, and they will be carefully handled because of that.

[00:40:20] Now let's think about Genesis in that light. Genesis is not just a collection of campfire tales. It is the origin. It is the boundary. It is the warning. It is the charter, it is the promise. Sometimes all of those things, at once, which means if we're thinking like humans, then it makes sense that Israel would preserve this material with seriousness.

[00:40:44] Okay, so again, we have the retrieval practice of memory. We have the fact that it is embedded with pattern and cues and certain structure and scaffolding. There is social quality control because it is public and there is that pressure of identity as a core to the community. These are like the bones of your community.

[00:41:10] There are a few things that kind of help this along as well. These are features that are common in oral culture. One of them is that the story is often compressed. You should expect to see compression in oral cultures. It's what you do when you take something really big and you boil it down into a form that can survive being carried in the human mind.

[00:41:35] You can press it into a shape that's repeatable. You're not gonna include extra details. You're gonna give the people exactly what they need to have for the story. What it looks like is things like Proverbs, little capsules of wisdom that are short, memorable, and repeatable. We have lists, again, names, places, boundaries, key points, all of these things you can recite and teach. We have genealogies, and those are about social identity, inheritance, legitimacy, tribal memory, and frankly, you're only going to include the people in the genealogy that matter.

[00:42:15] So this is why in Scripture we see genealogies being truncated because they serve a particular purpose that is not just giving a complete family tree. And instead of trying to preserve every little mundane detail, cultures will preserve the anchor moments and they will boil those down in really essential ways.

[00:42:38] And here's the simple logic for that. Fewer moving parts, fewer little bits and bobs means fewer opportunities for it to break down. If you try to preserve all of the information, you're gonna lose it all. But if you preserve the right core, with the names, the sequences, the boundary markers, the key events, then it can stay intact across time.

[00:43:02] Compression turns memory into something that's repeatable, teachable, and portable. It's kind of like how a good summary isn't less true, but it's structured truth.

[00:43:14] And once you start thinking about that, you can realize that a lot of ancient material that we modern readers treat as boring, like the lists, the genealogies, the repeated phrases, those are actually the very things that stabilize the tradition.

[00:43:31] Another really interesting point is the idea of chunking. This is one of the most basic things that cognitive science tells us about human memory. We do not remember best as a flat list of details. We remember best in chunks, units that belong together. So a chunk is a meaningful unit that your brain can hold as one thing.

[00:43:54] Instead of remembering 25 separate pieces, you can remember five grouped units. And once something becomes a chunk, it becomes easier to store, to recall, and to pass on. This kind of goes along with the compression, but if you need something that is a little bit longer, if you chunk it, then you don't have to compress it fully.

[00:44:18] So oral traditions often build content in layers. You're not trying to carry the whole thing at once in your brain. There's a structured set of units, so there's a basic hierarchy. There's a story episode. It fits within a cycle, and that fits within the grand narrative. This is one reason I really like the ancestor epic cycles.

[00:44:41] So an episode is a single memorable scene or event. It's a defining moment that can be told really shortly. A cycle is a set of episodes that is bound to a person, to a family line, to a place, or to a theme. It's like a cluster of scenes that belong together. Then you have the grand narrative, the larger story that connects all of the cycles together.

[00:45:06] And the whole tradition is a coherent storyline. And that supports the stability of the oral tradition because again, it gives you these pieces. If you know the cycle, you know what kind of episode belongs in it, you know the grand narrative. You know where the cycle fits inside of it.

[00:45:25] And this is why repeated telling works so very well, because you rehearse the same chunks in the same order and everyone becomes familiar with that. And that maps really well onto Genesis because Genesis is shaped in cycles.

[00:45:42] Now, here's a question. What about structure stability versus word stability? Now, we confuse the stability of individual words with the stability of the whole structure. If you demand that every word is the definition of reliable, and if you demand that every word is always the same every time, and that that's your definition of reliable, again, that's just not how human memory works.

[00:46:14] Now, we do have that happen quite often within chunks. We have phrases that are so common and so memorable that we do have the exact phrasing preserved through time in the same sentences, the same words. But much more often what we have is the same story skeleton. And individual people might tell it slightly differently, but the core is going to remain.

[00:46:41] I mean, think about how you tell a story from your childhood. If you were asked to tell it again next week, you will use some of the same words because you've said those many times, or even you've mentally said them many times, but you probably won't tell it exactly the same way, but it's still gonna be the same story. You're not making it up. It's just normal memory.

[00:47:06] And this is where we can insert the idea of the gospels and how they can vary a little bit differently. They can put the story together differently because each gospel writer has a different audience and they're writing for different purposes. They're taking the individual episodes or the individual chunks, and they're putting them in a new structure for their particular audience.

[00:47:30] and this is another feature of oral tradition. You can do that. They don't have to use the same words, but they are communicating the same message.

[00:47:40] Now, I've kind of talked about this already, but I do want to bring up the idea that a lot of what we have transmitted most of the time in an oral tradition, the transmission is happening in authorized contexts. There's particular rhythms of liturgy or worship or rites of passage or places that people gather together, and the setting really matters and it helps to stabilize the whole thing.

[00:48:08] The repetition becomes predictable for the audience. The audience is prepared. They know it's coming, they're familiar, and the retelling often has them living it out again. And the story is linked to the meaning of the community. As I said, the structure goes along really well with the hierarchy of the community. The fact that they have custodians of the story or specialists who are gonna tell the story.

[00:48:36] So there is an authority and an accountability that is already built into the community. And if the person telling the story is using the proper cues, they're using memory devices, then people will actually learn the story themselves, even though they aren't the custodian of the story.

[00:48:56] Now, does this mean that we cannot have any change? Nobody's improvising anything and that it's not dynamic and that they can't bring any new ideas in? Well, no, that's not what this means, and this is part of the difficulty, right?

[00:49:15] if your community is bringing in outsiders or adopting new ideas, then that is going to change your core story to some degree. That is a risk that your core story might change. It can shift and move along with the different ways that people shift and move in their community. But I think that for us today, in our modern world, we change and shift so much, especially in this global world we live in, where we are exposed to so many different people, so many new ideas that a lot of our core meaning and value is just eroded because of that.

[00:49:57] That is not how people used to live though, and I hear a lot today about people being tribal and that like that's a bad thing. Well, it is a bad thing when you make it into this us versus them thing.

[00:50:09] Tribalism is problematic when you're making other people your enemy, okay? But tribalism isn't always bad if what you're doing is creating a community that can form you and define you at least as long as your community is doing that in a healthy, good way. We can't say that for all communities, certainly.

[00:50:31] But even in a diverse, newly- emerging community, if there's nobody inside of it that is drawing people back from the edges and the extremes, then that community is not one that is probably going to last very long because it is inherent to a community to correct itself. If a community is not doing that, that community is just going to fall apart or fracture.

[00:50:57] So I think that is something we have really lost today. The idea of correction, and this is not just about boundary lines and calling people heretics. It is about the idea that if you do not have this core shared memory that is gonna last through time, your community will not last through time.

[00:51:19] One of the last points I wanna bring out is a little bit more philosophical, but it is grounded in what we know about human cognition. Memory is not optimized to act like a courtroom transcript. I think I've already made that pretty clear. Memory is optimized to help humans and communities live. And it's fascinating to me when you look at a community or a society because it actually acts like a individual human in some ways.

[00:51:50] And so we can make these comparisons with human psychology and social psychology because memory tends to preserve what a group needs to survive. Which are things like warnings, threats, memories of lessons learned the hard way.

[00:52:07] A group needs to cohere and have a shared identity with boundaries, and they need to know who they are. And to know how they're expected to act. What they're supposed to do, what matters, what their goals are. And if there's nothing that kind of limits that, then again, that community is not going to be a community for long.

[00:52:29] I think that's unfortunately why we have so much fracture within the church. We have basically lost the ability and the drive to correct each other. In a lot of ways, I think that's true.

[00:52:43] Now when a tradition is meaningful, when it explains the community's origins, when it anchors their morality, and it defines their identity, it becomes sticky. People naturally repeat it. They teach it to their children. They rehearse it in different ways, sometimes through the story, sometimes through a creed, sometimes simply by the way that they act, the way that they dress, the way that they behave, the way that they pray together, the kinds of food that they bring to the potluck. All of those things are part of this. It becomes part of the community's operating system.

[00:53:24] Now, I know today the modern western world, we hear that and we get suspicious. We're like, wait a second. If memory is shaped by meaning, doesn't that mean it's fake? Well, no, it doesn't mean it's fake. It tells you what it's for. Memory is selective and purposeful because humans are selective and purposeful. We have to be. Memory cannot preserve everything equally, but it can preserve the right things that remain stable. The spine of the story, the identity markers, the internal logic, the moral weight of it.

[00:54:04] One reason oral tradition can be stable is that it isn't just a story. It is not just an oral transmission of something. It is a designed memory environment that just works naturally with humans. Humans remember in chunks, we remember through repetition, we remember through cues, and communities remember through that shared rehearsal of the story.

[00:54:31] That's why you see patterned speech, repeated phrases, ritual retelling, and even the authorities that we have and the hierarchy in the community. It's not magical that these things do remain stable through time, and this is just how people work, because if you're not doing all of these things, then none of it's gonna last anyway. It won't be stable and we won't remember it.

[00:54:59] And again, these are things that scientists have studied and there are actual lived out techniques and all of these points that they have noticed in communities that actually last versus communities that are just a flash in the pan. If you're just a flash in the pan and you're not doing these things that form a stable community, then you're just not gonna last. You're not gonna be doing the things that are required for this to even work. But for those who do, then it will last through time.

[00:55:33] So we have cognitive scientists who study this. We have memory technicians who actually figure out how people learn and they give you study techniques and things like that. Like if you want to really embed something into your head in a way that is effective and that will be something that you can use, a lot of these things are gonna be part of that. If you need to study, if you need to teach, you will already know a lot of this stuff, even if you don't know it specifically. It's not like it's magic that an oral tradition can do oral tradition things.

[00:56:11] So now let's bring all of that back home to Genesis, and let's compare the idea of oral tradition with the idea of written transmission. Which one do you think is more stable? Which one do you think is more possible? And here's our question. Is it the case that we have to have a written record for these things to have been transmitted through time?

[00:56:36] The answer is no, we don't. These are just things that communities actually do. And these are ancient things that happen. Even Duane Garrett in his book, Rethinking Genesis, where I was talking about the idea of the ancestor epic cycles, even he's really being cautious and saying, well, okay, in regards to the genealogies, surely those are from documents, but they don't have to be, because let's just think about it for a minute.

[00:57:10] We know for a fact that the genealogies in Scripture are at least occasionally truncated. They're probably often truncated, I would argue. That means that these names have been transmitted through time because why would they make up a bunch of names? That's just simply not necessary because in the ancient past, they were very tribal and a tribe would be very concerned about preserving the memory of their family.

[00:57:39] So it's completely natural and normal for even a genealogy to be preserved through oral tradition. That would not be strange, especially when you have the idea of compression, of chunking, of authority. You know, in a tribe or in a family, you have a natural custodian because you have a patriarch of the family.

[00:58:03] They are very concerned with perpetuating the family through time. And so they were taught by their father, and his father was taught by his father and so on and so forth. so they have a reason to preserve these ideas and preserve these memories and these people in the genealogies because a genealogy is functionally the family's story. It is who they are, where they came from, the struggles that they went through to get from there to here. And all of that is very core to the meaning of the family. It's not preserved by accident. They have real reasons for wanting to preserve this information.

[00:58:42] So I'm not saying that we can't have written records from Genesis, but I am saying it's not strictly necessary. At some point, they got written down. And then it was easier to make sure that they weren't lost, especially when people did end up drifting and started worshiping other gods and things like that.

[00:59:03] At that point, you kind of do need something to bring you back to what you used to be, right? And we have that kind of story in the Old Testament. The tablets that were found. And actually that is a trope of the ancient world as well. And I'm not gonna put any kind of moral meaning to that. I'm just saying that there is an idea in the ancient world, you see this crop up in various types of stories, where some leader wants to make some reforms and they need to convince their people. Their people do not have memories of whatever this reform is. And so lo and behold, an ancient book is found. Oh, look at this ancient book that we found. Let's go back to that ancient book and reform our communal memory from that.

[00:59:51] Again, it's a trope. I'm not saying that the Bible is making up that this happened. But it is some evidence that in order to really have a strong core to your community, you have to have it embedded in something real, because if it's not, it's not gonna last. It's not gonna get perpetuated into the future and so on.

[01:00:14] Now, I would say that the ancient world isn't best described as either oral or written. At least, you know, once writing is actually formed and starts being a record for people. But generally speaking, there is an orality to a literacy spectrum, like most people kind of live orally. Even today, we're getting more and more embedded into the idea of video, right? A lot of people today watch way more video than they ever read.

[01:00:47] And there is kind of this crisis about that isn't there? Like there's a concern. A lot of people can't even sit down to read a classical novel. They don't have the capability anymore, and there is this concern that we're losing literacy. And fair enough, but it also is true that through most of human history, we have not been literate people for the most part. I am not trying to say that it's okay that we're losing our literacy because I don't think it is, but I think this is what we're drifting towards.

[01:01:21] We're drifting away from the cores that bring us together. And unfortunately today video is, it's not even long form. It's all this short content that is ruining people's attention spans and so on and so forth. But my point here is that writing doesn't have to be the opposite of oral tradition. Writing does form a stabilizing factor, but oral tradition can have its own stabilizing factors as I've explained today.

[01:01:53] So when we're talking about records in an ancient world, it's not always even written records. We could be talking about memory records.

[01:02:02] So it's certainly possible that we have written sources for Genesis, but it's also not historically weird to imagine that a lot of it, or even all of it came down in oral ways, especially the material like genealogies or the main stories that we have in Genesis. The record we have, and the evidence we have doesn't have to mean writing that gets transmitted word for word through time.

[01:02:33] If that's the only kind of evidence we're gonna draw upon, we're gonna be missing a lot of information. We're not gonna be looking at the whole amount of evidence that we have.

[01:02:43] Now, again, memory science doesn't tell us that oral tradition is perfect, but it does tell us that oral tradition doesn't have to be unreliable, and that it's really kind of naive to think that oral tradition is inherently unreliable because there is that inherent stability to it. As long as we have some of these things going on, then it's very, very possible that oral tradition can last a very long time. Even with new language, because as long as we have our stories preserved in the new language, that can still be perpetuated through time.

[01:03:22] So here's my main point here. It is absolutely intellectually responsible to treat communal memory as potential evidence. That is not self-validating proof. It is evidence that can and must be weighed. There can be things that will either make that stronger or make it more weak.

[01:03:45] But here's our honest look at what memory is, what oral tradition can do. And it will be important when you're looking at that to see what stabilizers are actually present and what kind of tradition is it? What kind of genre is it? What is the purpose? What does the society use it for and so on. So traditions, absolutely face pressures that do reshape them, that is just part of the process. We'll talk about that more next time.

[01:04:17] But while we're talking about all of this, I think it's important to note that Christians need to admit something else. We don't even approach the Bible in a raw state. We inherit a reading tradition that is shaped by the New Testament. That is why all of our systematic theology really draws far more on the New Testament than it ever does on the Old Testament, because we have been reshaped through our tradition, through our memory, through our experience.

[01:04:53] That's just the way it is. That is why for us, it is really quite difficult to get into that Old Testament context and read it for what it is. It's not unfair, and it's not even necessarily wrong. I'm not saying we shouldn't take a New Testament reading for Scripture in general because we should.

[01:05:14] But it makes it really hard to approach those ancient texts and ask, what does the book of Job actually mean by this? Because we so badly want to fit the Book of Job into our New Testament context. We can't just let it sit there being the Book of Job in the Old Testament, because that's not how we read things. That's not our cultural memory; that's not our memory lens. And so I do think we should be honest that the New Testament shapes how we instinctively read the Old Testament.

[01:05:50] Again, it doesn't have to be bad, but reading the Old Testament as Israel heard it takes intentional effort. And we often assume later categories and clarities that weren't available to them. I think it's fair to try and drop our lenses to pick up the Old Testament lenses because they are the people of God as well.

[01:06:16] So I think we need to distinguish between the Old Testament's meaning in its original setting and its meaning in light of Christ and the New Testament's retrospective illumination of it.

[01:06:28] And those two things are not opposites. And I really think that Old Testament meaning can help us see what the New Testament authors are doing.

[01:06:38] But I bring that up as another reminder that a record is not a modern history textbook and that to read it reliably doesn't even mean that we have to read it like the Old Testament readers. A faithful reading does include learning to notice our inherited lenses. They aren't wrong. It's not that we have to discard them, but being aware of them is going to help us read better.

[01:07:08] But at any rate, the question isn't whether we have oral tradition or written tradition. But it is whether communal memory can be reliable evidence. And I think that we can see that it can and often is, so don't dismiss oral tradition by default. But do ask what stabilizers are present. Ask questions like, is this identity- defining material or is it just entertainment? Is it performed publicly? Is it repeated? Are there authorized contexts? Are there custodians of the story? Do we see cues and patterns and scaffolding and lists and genealogies?

[01:07:53] And of course we don't have to have all of that stuff, but we should ask, do we have things that will produce stability that show that this really is ancient? ' Cause a lot of times when we go into ancient cultures and we hear their stories, a lot of people didn't have writing.

[01:08:12] So it is fair to ask, are their stories actually ancient or do they have a more recent formulation? That's gonna be an important question for some of our conversations later.

[01:08:26] So moving forward, if oral tradition can be evidence, then how do we evaluate it carefully rather than just saying, well, if somebody says this is an oral tradition, then obviously it is, and we accept it as truth. We have to be able to evaluate it carefully. And there are scientific ways to do that. We can avoid different traps where we just dismiss it outright or whether we just accept everything because they said so.

[01:08:55] So we will be talking about how traditions can and do shift, and how to stay cautious without becoming cynical in it. ' Cause our goal isn't to be suspicious. The goal is to be faithful and that includes understanding Scripture and just understanding people in the past. We want to be honest and we want to look at this in a discerning way.

[01:09:20] If you're wondering what I'm setting up here, well you'll see later, or maybe you already know if you're part of my biblical theology community because I have mentioned something there.

[01:09:33] But at any rate, I'm gonna go ahead and wrap this up for today. I hope you appreciated this episode. I hope you learned something here. I hope that this maybe actually makes you appreciate your family's past, your tradition's past, and the knowledge that you have inherited, because I think it is important to understand some of that as well. And unfortunately today for a lot of us, we've lost some of that.

[01:10:02] So I want you to think about memory. I want you to think about your family. I want you to think about your tradition and your ideas and how those things have shaped your family and how they've shaped you.

[01:10:15] But I will end it there and thank you guys for listening. Thank you guys for sharing the episodes. And I hope you look forward to more. A big shout out to all of my Patreon and PayPal supporters and all of the people on my biblical theology community. Really appreciate you guys. You guys are awesome, really . If you want to join my community and you're not a part of that yet, I will leave the link to that in my show notes. But that is it for this episode, and I wish you all a blessed week and we will see you later.