Sacred Books - Textual Redaction
It is not possible to understand a literary work, or the traditions incorporated within it, without scrupulously attending to the issue of authorial context and the mnemonic battle over what to remember and what to forget. The rigid line between fact or fiction in religious literature, which modern readers often wish to draw, cannot be consistently justified. In studying old Oriental religious narratives it is necessary to realize that the teaching was regarded as more essential than the method of predenting it. Texts which may be quite useless for historical investigation may be apprcciatcd for the light they throw upon forms of thought. Historical criticism does not touch the reality of the ideas, which may be more worthy of study than the apparent facts they clothe.
Philip Davies in his widely cited book, Scribes and Schools: The Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures, stresses the importance of scribal schools for understanding the origins of a scriptural canon. Davies argues that canonical process needs a large scribal class with a monopoly on writing.
A redactor is an editor who shapes a received text for a purpose, that may or may not be in harmony with that of the author. The purpose of some redactions may be simply to make explicit what the redactor regarded as the underlying theological meaning. The editors thus saw themseves as simply making plain what may have considered unclear. Redaction criticism is the study of the theological perspective of a text evident in its collection, arrangement, editing and modification of sources. A redactor’s editorial activity is easiest to discern when there are several parallel versions of the same story, as with four gospels of the Christian New Testament.
The tendency to reshape history for the edification of later generations was no novelty when Chronicles was first compiled (about 4th century BC), Pragmatic historiography is exemplified in the earliest continuous sources (viz. of the " Deuteronomic" writers, i.e. allied to Deuteronomy, especially the secondary portions); and there are many relatively early narratives in which the details have been modified, and the heroes of the past are the mouthpiece for the thought of a later writer or of his age. Numerous instructive examples of the active tendency to develop tradition may be observed in the relationship between Genesis and the "Book of Jubilees,"or in the embellishments of Old Testament history in the Antiquities of Josephus, or in the widening gaps in the diverse traditions of the famous figures of the Old Testament (Adam, Noah, Enoch, Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, Ezra, &c), as they appear in noncanonical writings. In such cases as these one can readily perceive the different forms which the same material elements have assumed, and one may distinguish the unreliable accretions which are clearly later and secondary.
Accordingly, when there are narratives which cannot be tested in this manner, should they show all the internal marks of didactic expansion and date from an age much later than the times with which they deal, their immediate value will not necessarily lie in the details which appear to be of historical interest, but in their contribution to later forms of tradition and phases of thought. Such texts tend to include moralizing history, whether called narrative or romance, attached to names and events. It is obviously exemplified whenever there are unmistakable signs of untrustworthy amplification and of some explicit religious or ethical aim coloring the narrative.
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