Hear Ye the Word of the Lord: What We Miss If We Only Read the Bible

To all those who have been empowered to speak on God’s behalf—

who faithfully heard, understood, remembered, lived,

and passed on the divinely spoken words—without you

the words of the Lord would have returned void.

Contents

Foreword by John H. Walton

Part One

Setting the Stage

Proposition 1

Oral Culture Can Be a Lost World

Proposition 2

God Reached Across Great Distances—So Must We

Proposition 3

Divine Revelation Was Intended for Hearers

Proposition 4

Research Provides Important Insights into Ancient Oral Culture

Proposition 5

The Goal Is to Include Their Hearing in Our Reading

Part Two

God and His Agents of Oral Communication

Proposition 6

Scripture Presents God as the Ultimate Oral Communicator

Proposition 7

God Spoke Divine Truth to and Through Moses

Proposition 8

God Spoke Divine Truth to and Through the Prophets

Proposition 9

God Spoke Divine Truth to and Through Jesus

Proposition 10

Jesus Empowered His Followers to Proclaim the Gospel as He Did

Proposition 11

Jesus’ Followers Faithfully Remembered and Communicated the Oral Gospel

Part Three

Implications of Oral Scripture

Proposition 12

Stories Were Performed and Heard in Ancient Oral Culture

Proposition 13

We Can Become Better Hearers and Speakers of Scripture

Proposition 14

We Can Restore Oral Scripture to Its Rightful Place

Part Four

Experiments in Oral Interpretation

Proposition 15

Hearing Is More Than Reading: Understanding Scripture Holistically

Proposition 16

Hearing Is More Than Reading: Imagining Creation and Incarnation

Proposition 17

Hearing Is More Than Reading: Experiencing Jesus’ Return to Nazareth

Proposition 18

Hearing Is More Than Reading: Rethinking the Vine and the Branches

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

General Index

Scripture Index

Praise for Hear Ye the Word of the Lord

About the Author

Also by D. Brent Sandy

More Titles from InterVarsity Press

Foreword

John H. Walton

INTERPRETING THE BIBLE well requires more than being spiritually sensitive to the truths of God. If we want to receive the message of God, we need to be on the same wavelength with it—like tuning into the right frequency on a radio. In today’s world we have experienced a major shift in education from the person-to-person modality to the growing trend for remote platforms. And we have learned that the medium matters. We have recognized the challenges and benefits of this new form of communication in education. As Brent Sandy explains in this book, our current paradigm shift, perhaps even designated a quantum leap, is not the first in the history of communication. We have long recognized that the Bible was written for us, but not to us, and therefore requires us to make efforts to bridge the cultural gap between ourselves as readers and the writers of the ancient world. In this book, we become aware of yet another gap that we must recognize and factor into our reading: we must bridge the modality gap between the written word and the oral word.

The significance of this gap can be realized the moment we note that the default form of communication in the biblical world was oral, whereas the form to which we attach authority is written. We speak of inspired texts. We often study the Bible with an assumption that its books are the result of someone sitting down with blank parchment and scrawling out inspired thoughts. Perhaps a few of the books of the Bible could have come about in such a way, but generally the books of the Bible are the end result of a long process in which the written form, the book, is the last step rather than the first. As Sandy points out, Authors were fewer than the speakers. And the hearers were more than the readers.

Brent Sandy is an informed and capable guide as he leads us through the maze of implications that emerge from the basic reality that he unpacks. That is, the fact that most communication in the biblical world was oral makes a difference in how we read Scripture. We need such expert guidance to help us make necessary adjustments in our interpretation. After taking us on a grand tour revealing the essential orality of Scripture’s origins, he contends that we need to give more attention to the oral interpretation of Scripture. He then explains what that can look like. In the process we learn more about the importance of community as groups hear the word of God. Relationships mattered more; body language, inflection, and intonation supply the emotional setting; context provided guides to relevance that drew meaning into the minds of the hearers. Community hearing was experiential.

For example, though many today benefit from reading some of the famous sermons of Martin Luther King Jr., someone who was there, hearing them preached, could reflect further on the power of the moment, the electricity in the air, the sense that together, the audience was stirred in ways that can never be repeated even when people today might listen to a recording. This is the sort of visceral response that is reported by those who encountered Jesus on the road to Emmaus: Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us? (Lk 24:32). As Sandy makes us aware, an oral performance is an event, while a literary text is an artifact. Participation in an oral performance can be transformative in ways that reading a text can never achieve.

While Sandy does not discount the importance of rigorous and robust exegesis, he coaxes us to see a bigger picture—one that will allow us to seek to be transformed by Scripture as we find our place in an audience of hearers who experience the text, not just analyze it or excerpt from it. May we all become better interpreters by seeking to be better hearers.

Proposition 1

Oral Culture Can Be a Lost World

We were never born to read.

MARYANNE WOLF

IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT WORDS. In place of babies’ first words, endless gurgling. In place of people conversing, a few hand signals. In place of broadcasts and podcasts, silence. Actually, according to Genesis 1, in place of us, a blank canvas—a world without form, and void (Gen 1:2). We wonder, would even God be the same without words (Jn 1:1)?

The reality is, words are part and parcel of who we are. But what if words are only oral? Nothing inscribed on rock, potsherds, or page. Imagine trying to get along in today’s world without reading and writing—and texting!

The French have a common expression, Je n’ai qu’une parole, which literally translated is I have only one word. It’s not that they know only one word. The point is the same as when we say in English, I give you my word. Or we can also say, I’ll take your word for it. In either case, the spoken word is enough, writing unnecessary. (Note that different words can convey the same idea, and they can point to a function beyond what appears on the surface.) ¹

Jesus declared that yes or no is all that’s needed in certain situations (Mt 5:37). More than that, he considered the words he spoke—inspired by no less than the Father himself, and backed by his actions—to be adequate for the most important exchange of information of all time: his own divine revelation (Jn 8:28; 12:50).

For most of us, that doesn’t compute. If we didn’t have the truth in written form, especially the words of Jesus, which we can scrutinize, memorize, plaster on the wall—we’d feel slighted, shortchanged, even unsure about what the revelation was all about. After all, aren’t reading and writing an obvious advancement over the oral alternative?

But not so fast. Plato (fourth century BC) and other ancient philosophers questioned the value of written words in place of oral ones, especially for communicating important ideas. Socrates (fifth century BC) and the Stoic philosopher Epictetus (second century AD) are examples of Greco-Roman philosophers who wrote nothing when they surely could have. We only know about their philosophies through what their students recorded. Why? Because they considered teaching via written words inadequate.

In what ways? We won’t understand all the reasoning, since most of us are deeply immersed in the culture of reading and writing. But for them, personal interaction and give-and-take with students was essential for communicating profound concepts. And since reading skills and backgrounds varied, teachers could not count on the ideas expressed in writing to be adequately understood by all readers. Even more, if students had written versions of a philosopher’s thinking, they might not read carefully and think through the concepts sufficiently, missing important parts. Students might also neglect the necessary step of applying philosophy to their life situations, something philosophers could better encourage in face-to-face discussions. ²

Nonetheless, some philosophers did write (Aristotle and Epictetus) and sought to recreate in written form ways they would orally lead students into deep discussions. The result was the dialogue and symposium forms of philosophical essays. Plato is a case in point. All but two of his twenty-seven writings were dialogues. The essays featured dramatic argumentation with hypothetical participants discussing philosophical issues. ³

For examples of an oral preference in more recent times, we could explore numerous cultures around the world. ⁴ In the case of early Americans in our country, To native people, oral speech was more trustworthy than written words. . . . Writing could not make language more truthful or promises more binding. ⁵

Or as reported by one of my former students ministering in Cameroon:

During something like a boundary dispute, though the traditional council of the village has long since begun writing court verdicts in a log, often they will still bring all the concerned parties and any available elders out to the site of the dispute, regardless that the issue had previously been settled and recorded. Then, on location, a heated discussion will commence, concluding in a consensus which becomes the verdict. Quite interesting considering boundary disputes in America are settled by data in filing cabinets at city hall. ⁶

For an example of the preference for oral accounts of what Jesus said and did, note what an early Christian said a century after the time of Jesus, even though by then there were written accounts of Jesus and his disciples’ lives. Papias preferred hearing over reading: I do not believe that things out of books are as beneficial to me as things from a living and enduring voice. ⁷

In other words, literacy isn’t the panacea of perfect communication; never was, never will be, certainly not across all time, in all situations, for everyone. Humanity from the beginning was a society of social interaction with orality as the bedrock of interpersonal relations; thus textuality was unnecessary. (Orality refers to anything pertaining to spoken communication; textuality refers to written communication.) It was a collectivist culture in which speaking and hearing were the norm. The human brain was prewired for it; children growing up today still catch on fast. As research demonstrates, we were never born to read. ⁸

Reading and writing, on the other hand, took centuries to develop . . . and takes years to acquire; some of us are still learning the art of writing. The brain actually had to rewire itself for the advanced technology. More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness. ⁹ But once it did, it’s difficult to retrace the steps back into oral ways of thinking. The Western paradigm of textuality—the default setting—stands in the way. ¹⁰ Most of us are very comfortable in our textual skin and the culture of individualism. ¹¹ We write alone, we read alone—typically.

ADJUSTING THE DEFAULT SETTING

It comes down to this. What we do with words—whether oral, written, printed, or digital—affects how we use our faculties, how we relate to people, how we spend our time, and most important, how we think. ¹² The cultures of hearing and reading are not the same; there can be different ways of being and doing, calling on distinct functions of our brains. Which means, to understand Scripture correctly, it’s essential to recognize how reading differs from hearing.

The farther apart, then, the worlds of hearing and reading are, the less those in one world will understand the other. And particularly, the less they will understand the communications of the other. In antiquity, the most literate cultures remained committed to the spoken word to a degree which appears to our more visually organized sensibilities somewhat incredible or even perverse. ¹³

This brings us to the challenge we face in this book. Not orality versus literacy, as if one is better than the other; but there are differences. Not hearing versus reading; there is room for both. Not that oral and written communication are opposites—as if there’s a great divide; there is interface between them. ¹⁴ But being twenty-first century readers born and groomed in modern textual culture, can we sufficiently understand the meaning of documents originating in ancient oral culture simply by reading them?

More specifically, for biblical interpreters, if the culture was predominantly oral in which the supreme revelation of all time was birthed, formed, and transmitted—and it was—and if oral culture left an indelible mark on written Scripture, including its words, forms, and structures—and it did—and if its authors were writing on the assumption that people would hear what they wrote—and they were—what might that mean for how we read and interpret the Bible in colleges and seminaries, churches and Sunday school classes, and everywhere in between?

It can be a catch-22, seeking to understand a text—which was designed to be heard—without hearing it. Shouldn’t we learn as much as possible about oral culture lest we misinterpret Scripture out of blindness to the very nature of Scripture? Isn’t it our moral responsibility to do so?

It can be a catch-22,

seeking to understand a text—

which was designed to be heard—

without hearing it.

To be sure, the most important issue is not how God revealed, but what. The storehouse of eternal truths, whether preserved orally or in written form, is what matters most. But the how can influence the ways in which the what was presented and is properly understood. The medium and the message are inseparable. ¹⁵

CLARIFICATIONS

Now you may have doubts about some of what has been stated so far. Maybe you’re not ready to rethink ways you have always understood the Bible. If so, no worries. Keep reading. What we’ve said up to this point is a preview of more to come and a simplified version of what’s ahead. Hopefully, if you stay the course all the way to the end, you’ll agree with the conclusions. Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know.

There is something that needs to be set straight straightaway. The Bible in our hands certainly appears to be a fully textual product. The books were written; they were collected into a canon of sixty-six books; the Bible was printed; we can read it. What else do we need to know?

Well, divine revelation did eventually take on the form of textuality, but it wasn’t that way at the outset. The initial culture into which God spoke was functionally oral. In those days, people knew of written documents, but only a limited number could read, and fewer still could write. As will become clearer as we proceed, it was a text-possible-yet-hearing-prevalent society. ¹⁶

The verses of Scripture quoted throughout this book are present for a reason. Readers may feel free to skip everything else, but don’t ignore the word of the Lord. God has spoken and it’s up to us to hear and heed him, otherwise—as in the days of the prophet Isaiah—he may judge us with deafness and blindness:

Keep on hearing; but may you not understand;

keep on seeing; but may you not perceive.

Make the heart of these people hard—

their ears closed,

and their eyes shut. (Is 6:9-10) ¹⁷

So here’s the strategy for this book: (1) to explore what the Bible itself reveals about the culture in which it was formed, with textuality under the influence of orality; (2) to reckon with the oral impact on the composition and transmission of Scripture; (3) to learn from recent research about ancient oral culture; (4) to investigate the Gospels as testing ground for the impact of oral culture on divine revelation; and (5) to rethink our reading of Scripture so we can come closer to hearing it as the original audiences did.

The underlying question is, Is it time for a paradigm shift in the interpretation of Scripture? Are we missing something if we only read it? Is there a dynamic in hearing Scripture that’s less present in reading it?

Sounds like we have our hands full. Actually, we’ll be skipping some topics that are clearly pertinent. It would be useful to know how the brain functions differently when hearing and reading and what that means for different ways of thinking. But we’ll leave that up to brain scientists. ¹⁸

It would be helpful to live in an oral culture somewhere in the world in order to experience that unique way of life ourselves. But we’ll have to depend on second-hand insights from people who have been immersed in oral cultures, as well as from social scientists who study such cultures. ¹⁹

Clearly, we will not solve all the issues raised in this book. They are above my paygrade, and it will require a village to sort them all out and construct a way forward. But failing to engage carefully with the evidence for biblical orality—or worse, mindlessly ignoring the evidence—could be like someone who plays tennis well thinking they can play the game of baseball with the same rules and objectives. A baseball coach might say to the tennis player, Don’t try to put spin on the ball; do your best to hit it straight, preferably through the gap, and as far as possible.

Likewise, a cultural intelligence coach might say to a textual interpreter, Don’t try to understand a statement simply as words printed on a page; do your best to understand it as it was originally heard.

But first things first.

Proposition 2

God Reached Across

Great Distances—So Must We

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

WALT WHITMAN

THE BIBLE. LITERARY MASTERPIECE, theological tour de force, consummate authority. Inspired truth from beyond the stars for those who can only look up to the stars. It’s one of a kind.

The Bible is also our kind. It’s God-talk in human-talk. After all, how else could God speak to us? With human forms the only option, accommodation was necessary. Otherwise we would never understand the most important communiqué of all time. When you have something significant to say and you want to make sure people get it, the message needs to be presented at a level listeners can relate to. Every act of communication requires accommodation that will tailor the communication to the needs and circumstances of the audience. ¹

God’s ministry of translating his lofty concepts into down-to-earth terms and forms stands out as the ultimate act of bridge-building. From his mind to ours is a very long span. Even as the heavens are far above the earth, so my ways are far above yours, and my thoughts above your thoughts (Is 55:9).

God chose a unique period in time, people group, messengers, and genres to accomplish his revelatory purposes. ² And thus he built a unique bridge to people immersed in oral culture with their own ways of communicating, hearing, and understanding.

The most unique of the unique was God becoming incarnate: God the Father embodied himself in the Son, the personified Word, and the Holy Spirit continues to build a bridge between God and his people by guiding them into all truth (Jn 16:8-14). It is a trinitarian ministry of revelatory communication and transformation. ³

Unfortunately, many fail to realize that we need to span a great distance as well. People today need to understand the people then. Two thousand years and more is a long way from the original days of biblical revelation to our own. It’s thousands of miles, with millions of people of diverse cultures traversing the bridge, and untold changes occurring across the centuries.

There are two spans: from God to the original

hearers, and from us back to the original hearers.

Both spans are necessary to complete the