Читать книгу A Contemporary Introduction to the Bible - Colleen M. Conway - Страница 53

Because a tribal society like early Israel did not produce extended literary texts, the Bible does not contain many traditions from this early period. Instead, the Bible, even parts that talk of Israel’s early history, is a corpus of texts written down centuries later, long after the conclusion of the tribal period. Nevertheless, these ancient villages had their own oral traditions, passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation. These traditions, constantly evolving to fit the hopes and fears of the performers and their audiences, expressed the deepest values of their community. The following sections of this chapter discuss three sets of biblical texts that are good candidates for providing a view, however blurry and indistinct, of distinctive elements of early Israel’s theology and traditions.