The force of oral transmission--its accuracy and integrity--is perhaps best demonstrated by comparing texts which have been transmitted in written form and orally transmitted texts, both sorts of transmission covering some fairly extensive period of time. One might expect that oral transmission would be far less effective, and that texts transmitted orally would contain many more errors, changes, deletions, accretions, and all manner of other divergences from the original form. Judah Goldin, however, describes the "baskets full of books," the "living texts" represented by the living men who both orally transmitted and constituted, in their own persons, effective "oral publication" of Hebrew sacred material. He adds that "to us it no doubt seems that an oral text would be less trustworthy than a written one. This was not necessarily the case with the ancients" --and he cites the very plain passage in Plato's Phaedrus which argues that writing, as opposed to oral transmission, tends to decrease rather than to increase understanding (Goldin 1955:24, n.). It must be understood, of course, not only that the ancients were accustomed both to transmitting texts orally and to acquiring texts from others via oral transmission, but also that such transmission is a very different thing from what we think of, today, as memorization. Memorization, that is, is understood by us as an essentially word-forword affair. Oral transmission, on the other hand, plainly works with larger blocks of material, using thematic and a variety of traditionally derived patternings to aid retention. Goldin notes that in Jewish tradition "no written text, particularly if it is meant as a guide for conduct, can in and of itself be complete; it must have some form of oral commentary associated with it."--Page 11
