cohesion and theflexibility of the schemata. Scripts consist of elementary
actions: the guest enters the restaurant; the waiter brings the check. Many of
the elementary actions are formed by the interactions of the characters (such
as the guest and the waiters). Some actions require other actions to take place
prior to them as they rely on their result (one has to order before one pays).
However, these constraints still allow for muchflexibility, as long as the
preconditions of some action are fulfilled by the preceding actions. For
example, in some restaurants, you will pay before eating your meal; in other
restaurants, you will pay after eating your meal but certainly before you leave.
Thus scripts allow for different configurations of elementary actions, rather
than providing rigid to-do lists. Variation in biblical narratives that is not
easily accounted for in the framework of form-critical analysis can be derived
from script theory.
Let us now return to the example of divine commissioning. In a mono-
graphic treatment of the subject (Czachesz, 2007a), I examined commission
narratives in ancient literature and created a model inspired by script theory.
The model consists of the possible interactions of a limited number of actors,
roughly equivalent to the elementary actions of script theory.^6 The stories
can include many actions, such as an epiphany, the hero’s conflict with an
antagonist, religious conversion, or the protest of the hero against the mission.
The occurrence of particular motifs in a narrative is, however, not random.
There are only certain motifs that can start a narrative (such as persecution or
harm by one of the characters) and every commission story always includes
the assignment of a mission to the protagonist. Most motifs necessarily evoke
some previous or subsequent motifs: for example, persecution or harm is
always followed by the defeat of the antagonist and can be preceded by the
commissioning of the antagonist by a negative power (such as Satan). Note
that antecedents and consequences imply further antecedents and conse-
quences. We can also observe that necessary or possible antecedents and
consequences do not always immediately precede or succeed the given
motif. Further, sometimes two different requirements are satisfied by the
same motif. Taking into consideration all of the possible connections, a large
number of complex webs of motifs arises, each defining a different instanti-
ation of the model of divine commissioning. Note that the script of commis-
sion has predictive power: it can reveal possible forms of commissioning that
are not included in the samples, from which the model was built.^7
(^6) Elementary actions in Schank and Abelson’s original model (Schank & Abelson, 1977) are
very simple, such as transferring an object to a new location. Although the script model of
commissioning narratives could be built of such basic elements, for the purposes of this chapter
we are using larger building blocks. Note that our example of the restaurant script was also based
on relatively complex actions.
(^7) A computer model can easily derive all possible action sequences, see (Czachesz & Lisdorf,
2013, pp. 81–3).
Memory and Transmission 73