Book Note | Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on its Own Terms

Jacqueline Vayntrub, Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on its Own Terms (London: Routledge, 2019).

Jacqueline Vayntrub’s Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on its Own Terms is a deeply insightful account of a number of different issues in the study of biblical poetry, with particular attention to the role ideas about oral and traditional literature have played in studying biblical texts that have historically been identified as poetry. Her main mode of analysis is genealogical, offering, in her words, “an account of how a Great Divide framework continually shapes a scholarly understanding of biblical history” (Vayntrub, 11). Throughout, she particularly focuses on “mashal,” a type of biblical composition “conventionally translated as ‘proverbs,’” which Vayntrub defines more precisely “as a type of assertive statement that sorts the world and its actors into categories, articulates relationships between these categories, and particularizes these general statements in their performance context” (5, 13). The result is an engaging study that charts a course both narrow and deep. That is, Vayntrub’s focus on a particular genre as a test case gives readers plenty to sink their teeth into as far as specific examples are concerned, as far as illustrating the specific ramifications of her arguments is concerned, while also serving as the foundation for a series of crucial reflections on how outdated ideas endure in the study of biblical text, and what we should do about it.

This is a book with many moving parts working together to produce a coherent whole. I suspect that scholars of intellectual history will find the first three chapters, as well as the introduction, particularly fruitful. In a nutshell, these are the chapters in which Vayntrub traces the history of ideas about orality and poetry in biblical literature, beginning with the arch-Romantic Johann Gottfried Herder, and before him, Giambattista Vico. This genealogy, familiar to some in broad outline, receives an insightful treatment here, especially with respect to the “Great Divide” paradigm of oral literature. Here, as many are aware, the idea is that supposedly “national” literatures go through more or less the same stages anywhere in the world, beginning with oral traditions, and that these are, more or less always, an older, purer, and more revealing form of composition. A great deal of biblical scholarship, historically, has been motivated both implicitly and explicitly by the conviction that there are oral traditions behind more or less every important biblical narrative, and that recovering them from surviving texts is more valuable than studying the text themselves.

As Vayntrub notes, a crucial issue is that while the foundations of the Great Divide model have long since been discarded in and of themselves, something of it nevertheless continues to play a significant role in how many biblical scholars talk and think about biblical narratives—it is “a framework that remains at the heart of modern biblical scholarship” (19). Not surprisingly, this is especially true of so-called biblical poetry. Through the lingering effects of the approaches of the likes of Hermann Gunkel at the turn of the twentieth century, Umberto Cassuto and Frank Moore Cross in the middle, and others from outside of biblical studies such as Milman Parry and Albert Lord, something of the Great Divide has consistently but inappropriately reinvigorated not just how biblical scholars search for the oral roots of surviving materials but what they believe them to represent. And when I say inappropriately it is because of observations of the sort that Vayntrub makes, noting, for example, that “[a]t approximately the same time as Cross was working out [his] hypothesis… folklorists began to question the stability of an oral versus written dichotomy” (85). The fact that these (accurate) critiques have existed just as long as a Crossian approach to oral literature, and in certain respects far longer, apparently impaired the ongoing influence of this approach very little. By illustrating where ideas about the connection between the oral and the original came from in the first place, Vayntrub effectively demonstrates why they not only are no longer defensible, but should not have seemed so for some time.

A second valuable contribution of Beyond Orality is its insistence on building native models of biblical genres, rather than imposing external categories like “poetry” on them. That is, rather than assuming that contemporary ideas about what poetry is, as a genre, can help us understand biblical texts that look to us like poetry—or Romantic ideas about the place of poetry and oral literature in teleological models of literary development—we should start by studying what ancient Israelite and Judahite authors understood themselves to be doing. We should also refrain, as far as possible, from being influenced by longstanding ideas about categories like “oral literature” or “traditional literature,” that are supposedly universal, given how poorly these categories have fared the last few decades.

Thus, drawing on the work of Dan Ben-Amos, Ruth Finnegan, and others, Vayntrub makes a convincing case for constructing the category of “biblical poetry” solely from biblical texts themselves. When we do, she argues, we notice some startling things, most especially that “those texts we as readers tend to identify as poetry are consistently performed by speaking, and often by named characters” (217). In other words, while there are many other things to say about what “biblical poetry” is, a useful starting point is to think “of biblical poetry as speechmaking” or “as character speech” (217-218). In the conclusion of this study especially, Vayntrub points to a set of questions we can begin to ask, once we accept this clear and insightful conclusion, positioning her book to be the starting point for a number of fruitful inquiries.

Finally, for all its strengths as a work of theory, Vayntrub’s study of mashal, largely spanning chapters four through six, consistently offers a central example to demonstrate application. Chapter four concerns mashal in the famous speech of Balaam in Numbers 22-24, chapter five certain cases in Isaiah 14 and 1 Samuel 24, and chapter six, mashal in the book of Proverbs. In the last discussion, she additionally draws attention to an unusual phenomenon: that Proverbs is framed as “instructions” from Solomon, but not as a speech act. Together, these investigations serve as the source of many ramifications for one of the book’s main reflections: that the representation of oral speech in literary texts is worth analyzing as a phenomenon apart from questions about the literal oral origins of surviving texts—or, as she puts it, “[t]hrough analyzing poetry’s speech-performance frame…this study reconciles what previous scholarly frameworks depicted as incommensurable: the oral and the written” (15).

I will say that I suspect that this discussion of mashal will not make as much impact as other parts of the book. This is not because it fails to make its point, or to be useful and interesting, but because the book’s larger reflections are so useful, and of such broad interest. In context, the investigation of mashal serves as a useful object lesson, and, in a sense, puts the theory to work. It provides useful reflections for those interested in the genre and has broader implications for the study of biblical representations of speech. But the impact of this book is most likely to be felt in the larger discussion in which these examples are embedded.

Overall, then, Vayntrub’s study is a timely and incisive contribution to the study not just of biblical poetry, or of representations of oral speech in biblical literature, but of what many biblical traditions fundamentally are and reflect. It fits alongside an emerging set of efforts to rethink many of the key assumptions that shaped the study of biblical traditions throughout the twentieth century, and in many respects, still exert an outsized influence today. The author’s incisive account of the roots of contemporary approaches in early 19th century Romantic constructions of the history of traditions and her call to construct biblical genres, first and foremost, out of biblical texts, rather than applying external genres, will prove particularly fruitful going forward. There are many ideas about where and how certain biblical texts developed, and what role they played in society, that are based on ideas that have been widely rejected. By making that basis visible through this genealogical account of ideas about the oral, the traditional, and poetry, Vayntrub has done the field a service.

 Andrew Tobolowky is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the College of William and Mary.