Torah on the heart : Literary Jewish textuality within its ancient Near Eastern context

This essay examines evidence for the interplay of memory recall and written technology in ancient Israel and surrounding cultures.1 The focus is on recovering the processes by which ancient Israelite authors wrote and revised long-duration texts of the sort found in the Hebrew Bible. Thus, this essay does not address the process by which display, administrative, or other types of texts were written, however important those genres were. Instead, the primary emphasis is on what we can learn from other cultures, epigraphy, manuscripts, and references within the Hebrew Bible itself about the context in which such texts transmitted over long periods of time were composed and revised, texts that might be broadly described as literary-theological in emphasis (such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, Ptah-Hotep, Homer, the Bible--with "theology" used in its very broadest sense).Issue title: Oral Tradition in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam