Holy Writ as Oral Lit: The Bible as Folklore

In the most recent of Dundes's three important contributions to the study of religion. It is our good fortune that this most eminent of American anthropologists and folklorists well known for his work on folklore theory and on subjects as diverse as German national charachter and American joke cycles, has now brought his scholarship to bear on religion. Dundes's work is already widely influential in the United States and deserves to be better known among British scholars of religion.... Holy Writ as Oral Lit offers insight into the Bible without diminishing it..... The fact of variation in the Bible is an important point, which Dundes documents abundantly. . . Dundes's emphasis on folklore analysis for understanding the biblical writings is salutary.....--Ronald S. Hendel It has long been recognized by professional biblicists that the Bible is full of duplications and that the Bible originally circulated orally. Folklorist Alan Dundes? original contribution, carried out with the spriteliness and verve for which he is celebrated, is to show how the duplications are not contingent but inherent in the nature of folklore, and thereby to show how the folkloristic nature of the Bible continues in even its written form. A wonderful book....--Robert Segal 'Holy writ as Oral Lit, ' a brief but illuminating excursus into the Bible.....--Johnathan Kirsch

This book helps us resolve some of the mysteries and contradictions that evolved during the Bible's pre-written legacy and that persist in the Great Book today. Most biblical scholars acknowledge that both the Old and New Testaments were orally transmitted for decades before appearing in written form. With great reverence for the Bible, Dundes offers a new and exciting way to understand its variant texts. He uses the analytical framework of folklore to unearth and contrast the multiple versions of nearly every major biblical event, including the creation of woman, the flood, the ten commandments (there were once as many as eleven or twelve), the names of the twelve tribes, the naming of the disciples, the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord's Prayer, and the words inscribed on the Cross, among many others.