LITERARY BORROWING AND THE BIBLE 01.

CULTURAL REPERTOIRE. This is the total collection of story ideas and pieces in a culture. Things like characters, poems, songs, themes, core story lines, etc…

LITERARY BORROWING IN BIBLICAL LITERATURE.

When we compare the literature of the Bible with ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Canaanite texts, some uniform cultural conceptions of divinity, cosmology, and behavioral expectation emerge. The scribes who compiled the Bible were influenced heavily by the literature of surrounding peoples. Within the Hebrew Bible, different kinds of literary borrowing can be demonstrated, which changes the way we understand biblical literature as a whole.

Literary borrowing happens when new stories are absorbed from neighboring cultures and are integrated into the receiving culture’s collection of story elements and cultural behaviors. We can call the shared bundle of a people group’s stories and literary elements a cultural repertoire. A cultural repertoire contains all of the stories, poems, motifs, themes, and stock characters known by a people. Whenever a new literary element is absorbed into a culture’s repertoire, it can be made to fit the receiving culture’s own literary productions. 

A CINDERELLA STORY.

Think of how Walt Disney has borrowed countless literary elements, characters, and entire stories from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. A story like Cinderella was absorbed by Walt Disney from a German collection of fairy tales compiled by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Except it was gruesome. Princesses were losing their feet kind of gruesome. And so Disney changed the tales significantly to fit his target audience of American children. Disney borrowed the story, but he did not use it in exactly the same way. He cleaned it up to fit a new culture. 

In a similar way, Biblical editors sometimes absorbed literary material from other cultures, but then put the borrowed material to work in a variety of ways. So they took a story like the farmer killing the herdsmen which was known across the ancient Near East, and they put it to work to tell how sin spread from the first man and woman to their children and then to the entire human world. First the story was absorbed, but then it was imbued with a new meaning.

Let’s do one more. Long before the biblical writers wrote the story of David fighting Goliath, Nestor slew his own giant. The writers of the book of Samuel borrowed the story of a young boy slaying a giant and used it to show that David had a destiny as the rightful king over Saul and that Yahweh was with him over and against the Philistine gods. First the story was borrowed, then it was put to work.

CULTURE IS ALWAYS IN FLUX.

In this way, a cultural repository is a porous container. Themes, motifs, and full stories move in and out of a cultural repertoire, and are used to serve different functions over time. This means that while cultural phenomena appear stable, cultures do not have a permanently fixed cultural repertoire. Rather, the collection of stories and ideas of a people slowly changes over time as a population encounters new stories and as old stories lose relevance. 

At the same time, the fluidity of cultural repertoires is not to suggest that a culture has no permanence. Some stories or conceptions, which become fixed in literary, religious, or cultural tradition, can endure within a people’s collective memory for thousands of years. The literature of the Bible in the collective memory of the West shows that some narratives become anchored. We know the story of the underdog who defeats a laughably stronger opponent. We know they story of the strong man who has one hidden weakness that will be his downfall. However, this is an “apparent stability,” which still shifts slowly. A culture’s shared collection of narratives, and how they are interpreted by the people in that society, are ultimately in flux.

Perhaps we can better understand the way a cultural repertoire is stable, yet changing over time, by considering the human body. Our cells replace themselves completely replace themselves every seven or eight years, according to many scientists. All of the pieces that make us up change over time. Yet at the same time, we are consistent, material beings. And while there is an “apparent stability” to our physical image, over the course of a full life a human body will change a great deal as it grows and slowly breaks down.  

Once we understand that people’s shared literary collection is stable, but also slowly changing as it encounters new literary material, we can discuss how cultural repertoires absorb new stories. More on that soon…