Responding to most of this I think I'm going to save for a future post.
On your last point,
I would be shocked, though, if the Hebrews did not have an oral poetry tradition before they became more widely literate, since just about everybody does. I've never given much thought to whether parts of the Bible (besides the Psalms and the Song of Solomon) might be poetry/have poetic elements.
They most certainly did. And this is why I believe the Psalms and other poetic parts to be the oldest sections of the entire biblical corpus (granted these ancient sources were redacted and reshuffled in order to fit the Torah's theology). Much study has been done comparing some of the biblical psalms to ancient Canaanite hymns, namely the Baal Cycle, that we have record of from the Bronze Age city state of Ugarit. The later Phoenician and Israelite cultures would have likely preserved their own versions of these ancient hymns orally. Song of Songs has close affinity to ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian love poetry.
Years back I performed some redaction experiments trying to revert parts of the bible back into a polytheistic context, and it's really not very hard to do once you know where to look and what to edit. In my opinion, if it can go one way, it can certainly go back the other way.
no subject
On your last point,
I would be shocked, though, if the Hebrews did not have an oral poetry tradition before they became more widely literate, since just about everybody does. I've never given much thought to whether parts of the Bible (besides the Psalms and the Song of Solomon) might be poetry/have poetic elements.
They most certainly did. And this is why I believe the Psalms and other poetic parts to be the oldest sections of the entire biblical corpus (granted these ancient sources were redacted and reshuffled in order to fit the Torah's theology). Much study has been done comparing some of the biblical psalms to ancient Canaanite hymns, namely the Baal Cycle, that we have record of from the Bronze Age city state of Ugarit. The later Phoenician and Israelite cultures would have likely preserved their own versions of these ancient hymns orally. Song of Songs has close affinity to ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian love poetry.
Years back I performed some redaction experiments trying to revert parts of the bible back into a polytheistic context, and it's really not very hard to do once you know where to look and what to edit. In my opinion, if it can go one way, it can certainly go back the other way.