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
