Q.
170
There are many stories recorded throughout
scripture in which only one or two people were
around. If so, did they write down their own
stories? If not, how do we know that what is
written is what happened?
Marcia Ford
A.
The answer to both questions can be summed up in two words:
oral tradition. In Judaism, and by extension, Christianity, this takes
two forms—the truth conveyed from God to an individual (such as
Moses and the Ten Commandments) and God’s truth conveyed from one per-
son to another. In some cases, the person who received the truth from God is
the same person who wrote it down; in other cases, the writer received God’s
truth from someone else.
That may sound suspect, especially to twenty-fi rst-century ears condi-
tioned to have greater confi dence in written documentation than in verbal
communication. But that wasn’t, and isn’t, the norm for much of the Jewish
community. Verbal communication played a vital role among faithful Jews
who believed that oral tradition carried more weight than the written word.
The Ten Commandments are an example of written documentation, but how
to keep the Ten Commandments would be a matter of oral tradition—and of
great importance.
Israelites took great care to pass down information accurately from one
generation to the next. Through their leaders, God had made it clear to the
Israelites that they were to communicate his message precisely. In the same
way, once his words had been recorded in written form, the scribes who cop-
ied them made sure their copies were exact representations of the original.Christian Piatt
A.
It’s hard when news travels around the world almost as imme-
diately as it happens to remember that much of what took place
as recorded in scripture happened before very much was written
down. Aside from a lack of writing implements and papyrus to write on, few
people in the culture knew how to write. So most stories traveled the good
old-fashioned way—by word of mouth.
Some of the biblical stories may have been passed along from person
to person, family to family, and generation to generation for hundreds of