Consumption of content is increasingly through audiobooks, podcasts, or YouTube videos—in other words, through oral tradition. We may thus be witnessing a technological revolution that not only takes us forward into a brave new world of communication, but also backward to the time of the Old Testament patriarchs.
A few years ago I was able to spend a few months’ sabbatical in Jerusalem, where I lodged with the Dominican friars at St Stephen Priory, the home of the famed École Biblique. I was doing the research for my little book The Secret of the Bethlehem Shepherds, and since the culture and history of Jewish shepherds is part of the broader Bedouin culture, the path of my research led me to a consideration of this fascinating, ancient culture of the Middle East.
The term Bedouin comes from the Arabic word “badawī” meaning “desert dweller.” The Bedouin is an umbrella term that includes the various nomadic tribes who have historically inhabited the desert regions of the Middle East and North Africa: present-day Arabian Peninsula, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, and parts of North Africa.
American scholar Clinton Bailey spent decades (from the 1950s to the 1980s) living in the desert with Bedouin communities, and his research is instrumental in understanding the ancient traditions transmitting the oral history, law, and culture of the Bedouin. As the Israelites were one nomadic tribe among many, Bailey’s research sheds light on the early transmission of the Old Testament sagas. In his Bedouin Culture in the Bible[1] Bailey chronicles details from contemporary Bedouin life that confirm the historicity of the Old Testament sagas of the patriarchs. One general example of this is the story of Abraham welcoming three guests in Genesis 18. Bailey observes that the Genesis story parallels Bedouin customs of his day perfectly.
The Bedouin not only have a high regard of hospitality, but it is considered a sacred duty, and afterward a bond or covenant of friendship exists between the host and he guest. Other details abound, down to behavior at wells, types of materials for covering tents, care of flocks, and—most interestingly—the manner of passing on oral traditions.
Bailey observes that the oral tradition was passed on in three ways: first, anecdotes—simple storytelling, which is flexible and not necessarily factually reliable; second, “controlled formal” oral tradition. This is the use of memorized material: law codes, genealogies, migration routes, poetry, and proverbs; of course, any reader of the Old Testament will find the text replete with this type of content. The third type of oral transmission of the tradition was through “informal controlled” oral tradition. In this form, a story is not recounted word for word. There is leeway for characterization, dialogue, and some elaboration, but the tribal elders will correct the narrator if he departs from the essential facts, characters and themes.
Bailey’s research aid us not only in reading the Old Testament, but also the New. When we read the historical sections of the Scriptures, we can see the poetry, proverbs, law codes, aphorisms, narrative pericopes, hymns, and creedal statements which have clearly been memorized and recorded. We can also discern the parts of the stories where there has been, perhaps, permissible elaboration, addition of detail, dialogue, and characterization. While oral tradition (for those used to the concrete reliability of the written word) seems unreliable and transitory, we can see instead that the different forms of oral tradition in antiquity were dependable modes of transmission. Bailey therefore summarizes: “For a people without writing, the Bedouin have remembered their history, laws, and values with astonishing accuracy and consistency. Their oral tradition is not a fading relic but a living system, continuously validated through use and performance.”[2]
The title of this essay links radio drama to the Old Testament, and it does so because my own writing is increasingly in the genre of drama. One of the projects is writing audio drama scripts for The Merry Beggars, the entertainment arm of Relevant Radio. The Merry Beggars produces The Saints podcast, a weekly series of five fifteen-minute episodes, each series dramatizing the lives of the saints. The podcasts are free to download and make for exciting listening—audio drama having the extra advantage of still engaging the audience’s imagination, something screen drama obliterates.
How does it connect with Bailey and the Bedouin? It seems to me that audio drama is— mutatis mutandi—the oral tradition of our day. In some cases when writing the script we will resort to direct quotations from the writings of the saints or from Scripture. While we research the stories thoroughly, we also allow ourselves the dramatic license to elaborate somewhat, compress time and space, add believable minor characters, and remove extraneous characters or events. Our team of writers, script editors, story analysts, theologians, and Bible scholars serve as the “elders of the tribe,” who ensure we do not stray too far from the known history. Our task is to tell the story of each saint in five fifteen-minute dramatic episodes. Each episode needs an exciting cliffhanger and a tight script to fit the time allowed and prescribed number of actors. The challenge is to find the story in the history, not to cram the history into the story.
Oral tradition, as Bailey notes, is a living, dynamic form of passing on the history, culture, and faith. While we in the developed world value the written word and treasure our libraries, it is worth observing that fewer and fewer people take the time to read, research, and curl up with a good book. Consumption of content is increasingly through audiobooks, podcasts, or YouTube videos—in other words, through oral tradition. The technology that enables this new, global sharing of information may just revolutionize education, communication, politics, and power in a way that the invention of moveable type did five hundred years ago. If so, we may be witnessing a technological revolution that not only takes us forward into a brave new world of communication, but also backward to the time of the Old Testament patriarchs.
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Notes:
[1] Bailey, Clinton. Bedouin Culture in the Bible. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018.
[2] Clinton Bailey, Bedouin Culture in the Bible (Yale University Press, 2018), p. 7.
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