Oral tradition and biblical scholarship

I have argued that Israelite literature includes many oral "registers" reflecting various tastes, functions, and milieus. The most formulaic may be the latest in date, for an ongoing oral tradition of some kind is a constant in every culture. Similarly, scholars are increasingly sophisticated about the nature of "oral" and "written" and about the meaning and nature of literacy in traditional or ancient cultures.Not

Oral register in the biblical libretto : towards a biblical poetic

With the publication of A. B. Lord's The Singer of Tales in 1960, students of the ancient literatures of the Hebrew Bible, like their colleagues in Old English, medieval French, and Old Icelandic, were intrigued with the possibility that the corpus they studied reflected the work of composers in an oral tradition. Biblicists began to think in terms of bards who composed their literature extemporaneously without the aid of writing through the fresh manipulation of traditional patterns in language and content. Continuing and refining the work of his teacher Milman Parry, Albert Lord had suggested that such an oral compositional process lay behind the elegant and complex epics in classical Greek that are attributed to Homer.Not

Wisdom and Folly in the city: exploring urban contexts in the book of Proverbs

AbstractProverbs 1–9 is often said to have a city background that contrasts with the agricultural imagery dominant in the maxims sections. However, this is an oversimplification. There are also maxims in the main Proverbs collection that concern the city, and the city background revealed within Proverbs 1–9 links up with the portrayal of the ‘capable wife’ in Proverbs 31:10–33. Having established the presence of city references throughout Proverbs, this article explores how the portrayal of Woman Wisdom and Woman Folly in particular gives fascinating insight into the heart of happenings in the Israelite city

Social anxiety in pre-adolescent children: what do we know about maintenance?

The cognitive theory of social anxiety disorder (SAD) is one of the most widely accepted accounts of the maintenance of the disorder in adults, yet it remains unknown if, or to what extent, the same cognitive and behavioral maintenance mechanisms that occur in adult SAD also apply to SAD among pre-adolescent children. In contrast to the adult literature, current models of SAD in children mostly account for etiology and maintenance processes are given limited attention. Consequently, their clinical utility for the treatment of SAD in children may be limited. This narrative review, first, critically examines the different theoretical conceptualizations of the maintenance of social anxiety in the child and adult literature and illustrates how these have resulted in different treatment approaches and clinical understanding. Second, it reviews the available evidence relating to hypotheses about the maintenance of SAD in children as derived from adult cognitive and etiological models. Third, it highlights the need to attend directly to child specific maintenance mechanisms in SAD, to draw on cognitive theory, and to account for the influence of childhood-specific contextual (e.g. family and school-based interactions) and developmental factors on children's social experiences