Scribal Memory and Word Selection

Text Criticism of the Hebrew Bible

(SBL Press, 2023)

by Raymond F. Person, Jr.

A Review by Werner Kelber

15 June 2024

From the review:

In the most general sense, this book is about scribal practices reflected in texts that were leading up to and culminating in the Masoretic consolidation of the Hebrew Bible. More explicitly, it examines the work of scribes who were engaged in rewriting previously existing ancient Jewish manuscripts, undertaking “one of the most literate tasks in the ancient world: Vorlage-based copying” (299). When ancient scribes were copying manuscripts, what were the compositional, cognitive, and linguistic processes they were involved in? It stands to reason, therefore, that Person’s study concerns itself with compositional practices rather than recitational activities, and with the reproduction of manuscripts more than their transmission to hearers. In sum, the objective of this monograph is to reexamine rudimentary aspects of the ancient Jewish copying culture and, in considering the ramifications, to explore “what a new model for historical criticism might look like” (ix).

Download the full review by clicking here. Or:

Cultural Memory, Biblical Studies, and Jan Assmann (1938-2024)

by Werner Kelber

Download a PDF of this article here

Cultural memory has not been adequately appreciated in Anglo-American biblical scholarship, including Biblical Performance Criticism. The death of Jan Assman on February 19, 2024 offers an opportunity to focus renewed attention to his work on cultural memoryand to the usefulness of the conceptfor the interpretation of biblical texts.

Media Ethics: Human Ecology in a Connected World

Reflections by Werner H. Kelber

Media Ecology Association Conference

University of Toronto

June 27- 30, 2019

In June 2019, Werner Kelber was honored with the 2019 Walter J. Ong award. You can read his keynote speech here. He also graciously shared his reflections on the conference itself, and what it suggests about the broader, international study of media ecology.

An Excerpt:

The majority of active participants represented departments of communication (and media studies), among them people who were media theorists, culture critics, some working in film and journalism, foreign correspondents, students of popular culture, intelligence technology and digital design, of digital policy and cybersecurity, web designers and developers, digital consultants for computer science and corporations, poets and attorneys, etc., etc.

 Download Kelber's full reflections here.

The Forgotten Compass

Marcel Jousse and the Exploration of the Oral World

Edited by Werner H. Kelber and Bruce K. Chilton

(Cascade, 2022)

As form criticism arose, the French anthropologist Marcel Jousse developed a hermeneutical paradigm, global in scope and prescient in its vision but opposed to the philological paradigm of biblical studies. While the philological methodology came to define modernity's biblical hermeneutics, Jousse's rhythmically energized paradigm was marginalized and largely forgotten. Although Jousse has left relatively few traces in writing, many of his more than one thousand lectures, delivered at four different academic institutions in Paris between 1931 and 1957, have been edited and translated into English by Edgard Sienaert. The Forgotten Compass surveys Jousse's views on biblical tradition and scholarship, documenting the relevance of his paradigm for current biblical studies. What distinguishes Jousse's paradigm is that it is firmly established within the orbit of ancient communications and deeply rooted in Jewish tradition. The Forgotten Compass challenges readers to come to appreciate the print Bible's lack of fluency in the very sensibilities privileged by Jousse's paradigm and to raise consciousness about the multivocal, multisensory culture in which the biblical traditions emerged and from which they drew their initial nourishment.

Three books were published recently in the Biblical Performance Criticism series. See the whole series here