Interesting Book by David Carr on Orality and Textuality

I just finished working through David Carr’s fairly new book, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (Oxford, 2008).  What an interesting and amazing study!  I’m struck by how frequently we take for granted what the textualization of thoughts and/or oral traditions really entails and what kind of mindset textualization requires or goals textualization presupposes.  Carr notes that writing in antiquity wasn’t simply about solidifying data into a physical product, but was rather about acculturation.  By writing down books, teachers were providing an aid for students to use as they internalized the traditions contained in the text in order to be shaped by those texts.  Thus the text of a book (be it biblical or otherwise) is handed down in order to shape the reader and enable them to preserve the traditions of the community by becoming versed in the textual standards of that culture (whether Hebrew, Hellenistic, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, etc.).

While one may not be convinced by Carr’s lodging of the Bible’s textualization late into the Hellenistic period, the methodological points he raises about what writing the Bible actually entails are something to which biblical scholars must begin to pay better attention.  What is more, Carr does a great job of showing just how profound it is that a text is meant to be internalized – written on the heart – so that the values and culture of a given community might be better propagated and carried on by future generations.  I’ll try to interact with the book more by posting some quotes but for now I’ll limit myself to heartily recommending this book to any and all interested in the formation of biblical literature and the history of its use in the communities that received it.

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Andrew

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